What Is the Importance of SharePoint Governance?
SharePoint governance is inevitable for successful SharePoint deployment, however, it is often undermined and skipped by a large number of SharePoint adopters. We, being SharePoint mavens of the industry for many years now, strongly recommend having a well-crafted and clear SharePoint governance plan, so that once your SharePoint solution is successfully deployed, it remains useful, organized, beneficial and valued in the long-run.
Check Out How Important Is SharePoint Governance for You?
What Does SharePoint Governance Means?
According to Microsoft, SharePoint governance is all about having a defined set of policies, procedures, processes, roles and responsibilities, that manages, oversee and controls how the IT team and all the business divisions utilizes SharePoint together to achieve the predefined organizational goals. Since, every organization has its individual set of objectives, goals, and certain motives behind SharePoint adoption; therefore, their approach to SharePoint governance planning may also vary.
When it comes to SharePoint, its design, development and deployment can be managed by few people, however the whole project is implemented for entire business/organization and all the staff utilize it. But, in most cases, unfortunately large number of these members are not even aware of its consumption and benefits. Here, the most important questions arise i.e. If your employees are unaware of it, then why have you implemented it? Who is going to optimally utilize it? If they don’t know how to use it, then how will they achieve objective associated with it? How it can be organized, maintained, valued and used to the fullest for the business?
The answer to all these question is a ‘Good SharePoint Governance Plan’. Designing, developing and deploying a SharePoint solution is not enough, because the real success lies within educating and enabling your staff to use it efficiently. Having a thoughtful, well-crafted and well-aligned SharePoint governance plan can help your SharePoint solution to stay correct, updated, cost-effective, useful and valued for long-term.
What Should Be Included in SharePoint Governance Plan?
Your SharePoint governance plan must address the following points;
- All the reasons that drives SharePoint implementation within the organization.
- How your staff will be using SharePoint solution?
- Who will be responsible for issues, content and changes etc. that will arise within the solution?
- A detailed user guide including Do’s and Don’ts is created and communicated.
- How any update will be effective communicated?
- How the content will be structured?
- Who will be controlling permissions?
- How starters and leavers of the SharePoint systems will be controlled?
- Is every user comfortable and satisfied with using the SharePoint solution?
- How correct application of permissions will be ensured?
- Who needs training?
- Who will train users?
How to Ensure Persistence in SharePoint Governance Throughout?
Trust us when we say we know SharePoint inside-out; like the way you know your business inside-out. We have vast experience of working with hundreds of diverse clients, in finding out the best solutions that meet their specific business needs in the most innovative way possible, while using or manipulating SharePoint to optimally benefit them. As a principal rule, we always ensure having a well-thought governance plan with each of our SharePoint implementation, and consistently ensure its successful integration throughput the projects at each of the following stages;
1. Workshops & Scoping
The foremost thing that is simply unavoidable is that every reason which drives your SharePoint implementation is clearly communicated to the staff; whether it is about fulfilling a particular functional need, to benefit business or to attain a certain functionality level. Workshops and Scoping helps identifying the reason at the very early of a SharePoint project so that everyone using the solutions have a clear and unanimous view about the system.
2. Creative Branding
We strongly advocate the idea of branding and designing of intranets and extranets – just like the websites. Without having a visually appealing system design and user experience – staff engagement and user adoption of the system will not sustain in long-run. Whereas, branding elements of business website will allow your staff having a more intuitive experience. Adding elements of a business website will encourage easy navigation while providing more enjoyable experience. This will also lead to reduce training and guidance cost.
3. Training
Effective training is crucial for optimal usage of your SharePoint solution. We provide comprehensive training to ensure the users of our solutions are fully aware of the system, its benefits, outcomes etc. Training is even more important when you have got custom development and integrations done. We recommend our clients to only get their ‘super-users’ get trained professionally and then they can go on training the rest of the staff. This provides few users with the complete knowledge that they can pass on to the rest of the users internally. This is the best way to gain flexibility and independence while reducing costs at the same time.
4. Strategy & Guidance
Where training will make your users understand ‘what to do’ and ‘how to do’, they will also be needing a 24/7 access to a detailed user guide and training documentation for reference, in case they forget anything, or also when any updates is communicated. The best place for strategy and guidance to ensure constant learning is the ‘Homepage’ within the SharePoint. It is the best option, especially when you want to provide live information about using the system. This means that your IT department won’t be receiving constant ‘how-to’ queries. We have SharePoint experts who can help you developing these documents, or they can also create one for you in a very short time. We provide strategy and guides in form of documents, videos, PowerPoint presentations or any other education method that suits you.
5. Ongoing Support
Last, but not the least is to provide dedicated, ongoing SharePoint support, especially when you only got few users trained. With constant professional support, your business will get benefitted by sharing governance with other partners, while having a point-of-contact in terms of problems and solutions, knowing the fact that a team of experts is available at the backend. And, trust us, it is very important to have a peace of mind with a SharePoint solution.
