When designing SharePoint
governance always remember, the first step on the major journey is the
longest one...
1. Get
Support: One of
the things that we learned about SharePoint implementation is that it is not
just IT that needs to define how the technology will be used; you need to work
with the business.
Get support from your Human Resources department, introduce and get their buy-in on SharePoint. Ask them some guidance about the policy and guidelines that you need to put in place for My Sites and the social computing capabilities of SharePoint. Using My Site just like face book users can publish their interest, skills; just like tweeter they can share their current activities. You can put policy such as employees can only upload their professional good looking photo on their profile page and not photos of their dog or favorite celebrity.
If you have training department or a person responsible for training involved them as well. These are the people who can help educate the employees about the best practices and policies that they need to know in using the new solution.
Corporate Communications: Ask their help about branding, usually these are the group who will help you define or design the look and feel of your intranet site. Ask their recommendations about style guide and what are the policies that need to be defined when using the intranet site that will affect the look of the site.If you have knowledge manager in your organization, involved them as well and don’t forget to include your information workers these are the employees that doesn’t need to have a title in the company but one that will use and adopt the new solution. They are mostly the one who knows the pain of the workers within your organization.
By involving different groups within your organization, you can make sure that you can design a governance plan that will fit the companies need.
2. Define Goals and Objectives: After you identify your support group and you already get their buy-in about the new solution, you are now ready to frame some decisions. Setting your goals and objectives is really the first steps towards crafting the governance plan.
Get support from your Human Resources department, introduce and get their buy-in on SharePoint. Ask them some guidance about the policy and guidelines that you need to put in place for My Sites and the social computing capabilities of SharePoint. Using My Site just like face book users can publish their interest, skills; just like tweeter they can share their current activities. You can put policy such as employees can only upload their professional good looking photo on their profile page and not photos of their dog or favorite celebrity.
If you have training department or a person responsible for training involved them as well. These are the people who can help educate the employees about the best practices and policies that they need to know in using the new solution.
Corporate Communications: Ask their help about branding, usually these are the group who will help you define or design the look and feel of your intranet site. Ask their recommendations about style guide and what are the policies that need to be defined when using the intranet site that will affect the look of the site.If you have knowledge manager in your organization, involved them as well and don’t forget to include your information workers these are the employees that doesn’t need to have a title in the company but one that will use and adopt the new solution. They are mostly the one who knows the pain of the workers within your organization.
By involving different groups within your organization, you can make sure that you can design a governance plan that will fit the companies need.
2. Define Goals and Objectives: After you identify your support group and you already get their buy-in about the new solution, you are now ready to frame some decisions. Setting your goals and objectives is really the first steps towards crafting the governance plan.
Defining objectives is hard work
but make sure that in designing your SharePoint governance plan that you align
your objective to the overall objective of your company like improve employee’s
productivity to increase revenue, improving customer relationship for more
sales.
- Some of sample goals that you can incorporate with your governance are to improve employees learning and efficiency and then you can make it into more tangible objectives such as provide better site navigation, document search and people search. How many of us here spend a lot of time searching for documents or find the number of the person from the HR department, or needing to re-create a document because we accidentally deleted it.
- Improve information sharing between employees and external partners, objectives such as create a project sites that provide platform for collaboration and by using it your internal employees don’t need to send e-mail attachments to customers to share information which you can run the risk of having the wrong attachment or attaching the wrong version of the document.
- Provide better content management for the organization, objectives such as leveraging the enterprise content management feature of SharePoint to support the entire lifecycle of the document. Which by the way if you want to know more about the key features of SharePoint enterprise content management, I have a session this afternoon that talks about the key features that you need to know and the document management planning process.
Setting up your goals and
objectives provide a sense of purpose who have to implement your strategy for
SharePoint and it will be your basis for planning.
3. Identify Processes: Such as how users will request a new site, do you need to build a site request form on your intranet site where users could go and fill out a form and capture some information like what types of sites do they need, do they a team site or a publishing site? who will be the users of the site once it’s built, who will be the site sponsor that needs to approve this site, who will be the site stewards that will manage the day-to-day operation of the site. Before, they even request a site do they need training such as SharePoint 101 that will show them some of the basics about SharePoint like how to create a document library, how to tag the content with the right metadata, How to manage the security groups of the site. Are you going to use the out of the box approval workflow to create the entire process for the site request and once the site is built, do you need to do a site turn over training where you will do at least an hour training with the site steward to make sure that he knows your governance, what are the best practices in using the site. Keep in mind though that your governance plan might have 30 pages of document and you cannot expect all of your users to read all of them. Try to create a some sort flyers or a one page guide and best practices where site stewards can post it on their wall so it will be a lot easier for them to digest.
4. Define Policies: Keep in mind that when designing your governance there’s no one size fit all. You need to determine the rules and policies to your “Information Architecture” and in SharePoint your information architecture is comprise of your Wireframe and Site Map, your Search and Navigation: Some questions that you need to ask when designing a SharePoint sites are, how are the users going to navigate to the site? How will search be configured and optimized? Do you need to design your corporate intranet site where part of your global navigation is tabs for users to click on to get to different departments within the organization? Is all of the content will be searchable or do you need to restrict some content to not appear on search. Don’t forget to take advantage of the enterprise search features like best bets, people search and how you set-up search scope and search for external content.
3. Identify Processes: Such as how users will request a new site, do you need to build a site request form on your intranet site where users could go and fill out a form and capture some information like what types of sites do they need, do they a team site or a publishing site? who will be the users of the site once it’s built, who will be the site sponsor that needs to approve this site, who will be the site stewards that will manage the day-to-day operation of the site. Before, they even request a site do they need training such as SharePoint 101 that will show them some of the basics about SharePoint like how to create a document library, how to tag the content with the right metadata, How to manage the security groups of the site. Are you going to use the out of the box approval workflow to create the entire process for the site request and once the site is built, do you need to do a site turn over training where you will do at least an hour training with the site steward to make sure that he knows your governance, what are the best practices in using the site. Keep in mind though that your governance plan might have 30 pages of document and you cannot expect all of your users to read all of them. Try to create a some sort flyers or a one page guide and best practices where site stewards can post it on their wall so it will be a lot easier for them to digest.
4. Define Policies: Keep in mind that when designing your governance there’s no one size fit all. You need to determine the rules and policies to your “Information Architecture” and in SharePoint your information architecture is comprise of your Wireframe and Site Map, your Search and Navigation: Some questions that you need to ask when designing a SharePoint sites are, how are the users going to navigate to the site? How will search be configured and optimized? Do you need to design your corporate intranet site where part of your global navigation is tabs for users to click on to get to different departments within the organization? Is all of the content will be searchable or do you need to restrict some content to not appear on search. Don’t forget to take advantage of the enterprise search features like best bets, people search and how you set-up search scope and search for external content.
Next is the Managed Metadata
and Content Types: SharePoint 2010 now has the ability to managed your
company’s taxonomy so all of the site within your farm can share metadata. So
you definitely need to set rules and train the people who will be managing the
site on how to tag content, you also need to identify who will be managing the
enterprise metadata. Content Types: what are for the document content type that
you need to enable on your document library, by default Microsoft is enabled
but do you also want to enable excel spreadsheet because for finance department
this is the type of the document that they always use. Are you going to
use the content type hub which is a new feature in 2010 where you can store all
of your company’s content types and update it there and it will automatically
be push to the other sites within your farm.
Part of your application
management governance is the governance of the customization policy, sand box
solutions, branding and life cycle management. With this you just need to
define policy such as nobody can use SharePoint Designer without the proper
training, everybody will use the out of the box feature and if customization
let’s say a third party web part needs to be deployed on the site it needs to
be approved and tested by SharePoint developers. Set a policy for your branding
specially for your company’s intranet publishing site where everybody in the
company can see, make sure that the owner and contributor to this site knows
what are the best practices, make the style guide and acceptable changes
visible to them.
Different
Types of Site Require Different Governance Policies:
My Sites: It is permanent site once you decided to enable
this in your organization; it can have employee’s personal information. Set
some policy about how they can use the site such as post an appropriate profile
picture, no picture of your dos allowed. Put some guidelines such as when
filling out your skills, put some relevant information about your job this will
make employees skills search relevant and people can easily find who the
subject matter experts in the company are. With My Site, employees can also
blog, put some policies surrounding the use of it such as they can only blog about
job related stuff and not about the company’s politics or personal opinion
about sensitive topic like religion. But make sure to balance the need for a
robust oversight and restricting the use of this social computing too much
because social networking can be a big factor to the success of your solution.
Projects
and Workspaces: This are
short live collaboration site, they should have an expiration date. Put a
policy on how long this site should live, how are you going to archive the
information here once the project is over or how it is being disposed. How do
you determine the security groups it could be a policy in your organization
that all of the SharePoint site that is being created that everybody in the
company should have at least read access for better information sharing but
what are the exceptions? What type of project site should be restricted so only
employees that are part of the project will have access to the site?
Group and
Team Sites: It is
permanent; it is being use by a team to manage knowledge within the groups and
it for information sharing.
Some of the policy that you will
put in place here will probably overlap on some of the other types of sites
within your organization such as your divisional or department site and
corporate site.
5. Define
Roles and Responsibilities:
Who are the people that needs to be involved to make sure that the strategy for
your new solution will not fail and the organization will embrace the new
solution without too much resistance. Let’s first define who should be in your
governance board: You need to put a task-forced charged of supporting the new
solution, you need to get the buy-ins of this people. Governance strategy
beings at the top and flows downwards meaning the executives in your company
should be the number one part of the governance.
Get your executive stakeholders
involved, although usually even if executives stakeholders usually understand
the need for good governance if they don’t understand the value of the new
solution which is SharePoint and why it needs to be governed they might think
that added governance is just added bureaucracy and too much paper work so
before you involved them , the same is true for the other governance board
member is to get their buy-in to the new solution this will help you too to
make sure that user adoption afterwards will not like a mountain that you need
to move. Because, if the management supports it, people under them usually
follows. Your executive stakeholder will define the goals of the overall
governance committee, he will provide it with authority and will periodically
evaluate the success of implemented solution and how the policy that has been
put in place greatly contribute to this success.
Financial
Stakeholders: These
are the officers in your governance committee who will be responsible that the
rules and processes in your governance plan increase the return of the
investment in SharePoint. He will probably ask for metrics to be captured on
how productive and how much employees time is save to perform a specific task
after replacing some of the manual processes and automate it with SharePoint
workflows.
IT
Leaders: They must help develop the
support that needs to be offered for the end users such as calling Help Desk
and making sure that held desk has the right skills to answer questions about
SharePoint. They will also help on identifying SharePoint features that can
help improve company’s business processes.
Business
Division Leaders:
They will represents the teams that do the primary work of the site and help
drive common best practices and policy that has been defined on the
governance plan and communicate it to their team. They will also work with
Information Architects or Taxonomists to identify organization taxonomy.
Division leaders can be the Director of your marketing department and corporate
communications.
Information
Architect or Taxonomists: Members
of these groups should have extensive experience in planning and designing
information systems and taxonomies and should be familiar with the information
in your organization. They’re the ones who will develop plans and support site
architecture and navigation.
Compliance
Officers: Governance includes making sure
that an enterprise meets its regulatory and legal requirements and manages its corporate
knowledge. This can be the lawyer of your company if you have one.
Development
Leaders: This can be your SharePoint
developers who should help determine which customization tools are approved,
how to verify code security in case you have custom solutions that needs to be
deployed.
Information
Workers: This are the members of your
organization who do the day-to-day work and can help ensure that SharePoint
services and information architecture meet their needs.
Trainers: These are your instructional experts who know
SharePoint and your SharePoint governance and will be responsible for
developing a training plan and conducting training and education to your end
users.
For every site or site
collections you should have a Site Sponsor:
They will help ensure that the content of the site is properly collected, reviewed, published, and manage over time. Usually this will be the approvers of the site, they don’t necessarily need to know SharePoint but they have should have a pretty good knowledge about the business.
They will help ensure that the content of the site is properly collected, reviewed, published, and manage over time. Usually this will be the approvers of the site, they don’t necessarily need to know SharePoint but they have should have a pretty good knowledge about the business.
Site
Steward: Manages the site day-to-day by
executing the functions required to ensure that the content on the site or page
is accurate and relevant.
Site
Designer: They are usually the one who
create and configure the site requested. They should know the site design best
practice that’s been defined on your governance plan.
Users such as the members of the
site or your site’s visitor who use the solution to access and share
information, they should have knowledge about best practices on uploading
content on the site, metadata tagging and other best practices defined on your
governance.
6.
Develop an Education Strategy:
Adoption
is one of your keys to success!
- Develop a comprehensive training plan; train the users on how to use the new solution. Try to create different kinds of training since users has different learning styles where you can incorporate the policy and best practices that you put on your governance plan.
- Build your own SharePoint user group or power users, these are probably the early adopters of the new solution because they see the value right away. Through them you can communicate to the users who resist following the policy or guidelines that you put in place
- Communicate regularly, sometimes users easily forget. Adopting the new solution, the new policy can take some getting used for some of them.
7.
Document the Governance Plan:
- It gives you a tangible reference
- It will serves as your guide to make clear and timely decisions
8. Have
an Ongoing Plan:
- Governance committee should regularly of course this will be depending on the needs of your organization. They need to evaluate the governance plan if the governance plan that they approved 6 months ago is still valid and meet the companies need.
- Keep your governance plan visible, it should be a living, breathing document.
Bringing
it All Together!
- When it comes to designing your governance plan, one size does not fit all.
- SharePoint governance should match your company’s need
- Key-decision make is a big part of your governance
- Governance must be visible
- Your governance plan must be flexible and adaptable
Part I: Overview
Presentation: Governance: The What and Who for SharePoint 2010Governance ResourcesSharePoint Server 2010 Governance Model
SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning
Implementing Governance on SharePoint 2010
