No I am not going to break into song about chicks, cows and horses. But this song came to mind as I thought about the SharePoint environments that are created across an organization. Do you sometimes wonder how the sites just keep growing? Is it the excitement during the project design or training phase? Or, perhaps it was the CEO’s email announcing that your company is moving to online collaboration for everything? While this a great signal in strong user adoption, you want to create a culture of guidance and guardrails to ensure your ability to manage and maintain the “farm.”
There are many reasons why people will want a site. Not just a shared site but a site of their own. Communication and collaboration are most likely the top two reasons but also a site creates a forum for centralized posting of documents, information, contacts, pictures, blogs, wikis, videos, etc. SharePoint sites provide the ability to store content and documents with attributes that can be sorted, searched and exported.
Whether you are the SharePoint Director, Manager, Administrator, Infrastructure Lead, Business Owner, etc. each one of you has a responsibility to contribute, be informed and lead the effort towards a Governance Plan. Every company, culture and environment is different but I firmly believe that all need at least some level of guidelines, policies and structure. Below are some suggested key questions and assumptions to get you started in the world of Governance focused on SharePoint Site Creation:
|
Governance Area |
Key Questions |
Governance Assumption |
|
Strategy and Vision |
What is the need for the site? How does this site support the approved strategy? |
Every site has an appointed site owner and a purpose linked to the company strategy. |
|
Strategy and Vision |
How will you measure the value of the site? |
Each site owner can articulate the value of creating the requested site. |
|
Communication |
How will this site be communicated? |
A communication process for new sites and notification of existing sites should be defined. |
|
Roles and Responsibilities |
Who is the Site Owner? Have they been trained? |
A site requester is able to provide the name of the site owner. Ensure this person has been trained before access and rights are granted. |
|
Sustainment |
How will the site be sustained once it is live? 30, 60 90 days? |
A sustainment plan for each site is documented and approved prior to a move to production. |
|
Master Layouts & Design |
Which site template will you use? Will you require modifications to the existing template? Additional web parts? |
Site Templates will be created for each type of site. Ie. Home, Function, Department, Team, Project, Customers, Vendors, My Site. |
|
Master Layouts & Design |
Does your content follow the font guidelines? · Fonts, Color, Size (ie. Arial-Black-2 for Normal Text, Ariel-Blue-2 for Links, Titles are Bolded) |
Font Style, Size and Color are defined for each site template, collection, etc. |
|
Content |
Do you have content for the site? · Announcements – Vision, Mission, Daily Updates, Opinion, Fact, Newsworthy · Pictures & Videos- Cartoons? Professional Only? Action? A day in the life? · Document Libraries – SharePoint vs. File Shares vs. Email Attachments · Lists – Calendars, Contacts, etc. · Surveys, Wikis, Blogs |
Focus on the type of content, creation of the content and validation should be completed. |
|
Content |
What is the frequency of the content refresh for each section of the site? |
Start simple. A monthly update works well vs. weekly. 7 Days go by very quickly. Quarterly works well for more static content, ie. Goals and Objectives. |
|
Security |
Is the site Public or Private? If private, do you have a list of approved visitors, contributors or members? |
Security is tightly managed and linked to roles and responsibilities as well as training. Securing content across the site is primary as well as adding a confidentiality statement as part of the master page layout. |
The above matrix 1st breaks down the questions by governance area. It is important to understand the link to each major governance focus. In my experience, these questions can be utilized for the requirements gathering to create a site. I have chosen some of the key questions to demonstrate that it does not take many to ensure your sites are consistent, valuable and most important increase user adoption. Your goal in walking through these questions is to strike a balance that allows users to experience the tremendous functionality and flexibility of SharePoint while at the same time not selling the farm to fulfill every request for a new site.
So, where are you in the SharePoint Governance Evolution? Just getting started? Already in production and know you need to do something? If you have a governance plan started, expand it or if you don’t, get started small and grow. One thought is that IT organizations need to carefully balance their needs to maintain the environment with the needs of the organization to be nimble.
If well executed, the SharePoint sites will be valuable, well maintained and the utilization of SharePoint predictable and standardized whereby unleashing the power of the technology without the pain of a breakaway technology growing within your Data Center or SharePoint Farm.
If you would like to talk, share your ideas or learn more, please email me at kruth@pointbridge.com.
