In this opening chapter, I introduce the book and define the term governance, as used in this book. Throughout this chapter, I will emphasize attitudes and practices as part of a governance process that goes beyond simply filling out a document template. As we progress through this chapter and the rest of the book, I highlight places where I have seen companies benefit from certain processes, and where they have faced challenges. From there, I provide a roadmap of the book by introducing each of the parts and chapters that follow.

This overview introductory chapter frames the book for you and helps set your expectations on how this book unfolds. It also provides you with highlights to help you decide which chapters you might want to jump to right away, if you have a particular problem that you currently face and need to solve.

After reading this chapter, you will know how to:

• Explain why governance goes beyond documentation
• Describe how governance consists of actions, behaviors, and commitments
• Identify who this book is for and how it is organized
• Define governance and decide how much is enough
• Decide where you should start with your governance process
• List new governance-related features in SharePoint 2013

Reclaiming Governance

Governance feels like one of those words that people overuse to the point where it no longer means anything meaningful. It is something marketing departments got a hold of without knowing much about SharePoint, and they put the term to work to support sales of services. Governance became a popular topic at conferences, in blogs, and with customers in general. It became so popular that calling anything “governance” seems to make it easier to sell services, positioning the concept as almost a catchall phrase on which to blame problems or challenges. This diluting of the term governance created the idea that somehow with some governance planning services all of one’s problems would simply disappear.

In this book, we are going to reclaim the term: I look at what governance means and what value it brings, what is involved to adopt and embrace governance, and I identify some key areas to govern. Our focus together will be exploring the idea of governance, in all its glory, from the practical to the mythical. I explore what it means when you need to solve a governance problem.

This book explores governance from an action-focus perspective, meaning I share tools and ideas of things you can start doing to make a difference in your SharePoint operations. One outcome you will notice from this book’s action-focus is a lack of attention given to governance documents, and this is by design: I want to share actual practices I employ on the frontlines when I am out in the field. As a result, I left out content geared toward a more documentation or theoretical focus, because other books are available that cover those topics well. This book is all about practical things you can put in practice.

Let’s expand SharePoint governance from a simple exercise that delivers a document, a cookie cutter “Governance Plan” that sits on a shelf and falls short of all the magic it once promised. Instead, I look at the behaviors you need to adopt, the decision processes, and the people you need involved. Yes, part of governance is documenting, and I look at a wealth of information in this book that you can use to support your documentation initiatives. Yet the majority of governance addresses actual practices used day-to-day on the ground, and this is the primary focus of our exploration into SharePoint governance. Whether you incorporate these practices into your documentation is an option I will leave entirely up to you.

TechNet includes some excellent articles and guides on producing governance related documents and other governance materials, all of which are fantastic resources and do not need to be repeated here. At places in this book, I will refer to this material or other sources of additional online resources, but my primary focus is sharing my governance experiences, and not to provide a systematic process for creating governance documentation. These experiences consist of guiding my customers in the field to apply and use these governance concepts, and I am excited to share with you both the good and the bad of what worked and what did not.

The scope of this book captures the practicality of governance, and it can complement another book or website that focuses more on theoretical concepts. This is also not a SharePoint technical how-to guide or a product feature manual. For the most part, this book discusses SharePoint features and functionality in terms that are more abstract and mostly just as they relate to governing a SharePoint service in operations to provide value to the business.

I have had very diverse experiences related to SharePoint governance: first as a developer building applications within and on top of the SharePoint platform, going back to SharePoint 2001; then as an administrator responsible for a global multi-farm deployment; and then as a consultant advising a broad range of customers, from governments to large corporate enterprises. I have worked as an independent, inside an IT organization, and for Microsoft directly engaging and helping our customers realize their potential with SharePoint. I have had internal exposure within Microsoft to the product team that develops SharePoint, and I have been involved with several escalations where customers have needed help getting their environment back under control. I have also collaborated with a variety of consulting service delivery firms to assist delivering SharePoint solutions to customers. All these valuable perspectives have given me firsthand experiences solving some interesting governance challenges in different situations, with different priorities, while considering the needs of a variety of different stakeholders.

In the chapters that follow, I share my experience with SharePoint governance: things that have been successful and approaches where I faced challenges, things I have seen customers do well and areas I have seen customers struggle. I have generalized the most common concepts, but one thing I have learned is that no two governance strategies are alike, and this is because no two organizations are alike in their culture and objectives. This for me is why simply downloading a governance template off the Internet or following a systematic process can prove problematic. Most of what makes governance sparkle and shine for me is the process itself; and if the secret is in the process sauce, unfortunately that means to be effective and grasp its value you cannot take shortcuts.

Who This Book Is For

Practical SharePoint 2013 Governance is for SharePoint consultants, administrators, architects, analysts, and anyone else looking for actual hands-on governance guidance. It is an excellent choice for people who like action-focused concepts or who want to go beyond documentation and theory. This book is a fantastic choice for anyone looking for agile ideas to put into practice without necessarily embarking on a lengthy governance exercise upfront.

Ultimately, this book is for anyone who contributes to provide SharePoint to an organization and who is interested in learning how others have found success in their SharePoint operations. Whether you have felt some pain already and need some guidance on correcting the sins of your SharePoint past, are just beginning your SharePoint journey and are looking to be pointed in the right direction, or are somewhere in between, this book is for you.

My hope is that through this introduction I manage to convince you that governance includes opportunities beyond documenting a governance plan, and I hope to motivate you to experiment with some of those opportunities found in the concepts presented throughout this book. Whether you work in the Information Technology department of your organization and want to champion SharePoint governance for your team, or you are a consultant looking for resources to help you better guide your customers, this book has a wealth of valuable information that can set up you and your SharePoint service for success.

I wrote this book in a conversational manner and did my best to design it so the content is quick to read and easy to digest. My goal as I planned and wrote this book was to keep it accessible and direct, so that ideally it comes across as if we are having a conversation together, perhaps over coffee or a “SharePint” on a patio. Throughout the conversation, I will share examples of where I have faced challenges similar to yours and what I did to address them. This book is especially for you if you want a governance conversation where you can pick my brain for action-focused ideas.

How This Book Is Organized

Part I of this book consists of the chapter you are now reading. It focuses on defining SharePoint governance in the manner that I will use the term throughout the rest of the book. Primarily, governance sets expectations for how a service runs, what the service provides, and how the service may expand. Using governance to define the service in this way clarifies who is responsible for what, what people and system resources are required, and what features and functionality the SharePoint service offers.

Part II focuses on the service description, and it includes chapters on defining a service and service tiers, determining features and functionality, establishing roles and responsibilities, shaping readiness and end-user training, and measuring and reporting on service metrics. A SharePoint deployment can typically spark enthusiastic adoption, generating more and more demand from the business, growing the deployment into new functional areas, and gathering new opportunities for increased efficiencies. Your governance solution will substantiate and support your prospective success if you make decisions on where to go after you launch and how to respond to key scenarios.

Part III of this book focuses on expanding the service, and it includes chapters on creating a roadmap, promoting a feedback process, managing the demand funnel, scaling the farm, and preparing for upgrades. Organizations tend to have the highest satisfaction levels when they customize their SharePoint environments with custom developed functionality and visual interface elements. This satisfaction depends on those customizations enhancing an environment, rather than having them frustrate users by functioning incorrectly or poorly.

Part IV of this book focuses on customizing the service, and it includes chapters on committing sponsorship and ownership of customizations, facilitating user customizations at the site level, designing development standards and testing processes, framing information architecture and user interface design standards, and coordinating code promotion and release processes.

The Rapid Concepts Appendix at the end of the book provides a quick reference synopsis for some of the main concepts that each chapter covers. I follow each chapter’s synopsis with an action checklist of decisions to make, practices to adopt, or other actions and next steps to take based on the chapter’s topics. My hope is that you find this appendix useful as both a refresher on the concepts and as guidance on what action items to take. I grouped them together in a single appendix at the end of the book to make it easier for you to reference and work through.

I include several areas of governance for you to consider and I include them in this book because they all feel important to me based on my own experience with SharePoint, but they may not all fit your particular situation for whatever reason. For each concept, I have tried to include enough of a description on it and its purpose to equip you with enough background knowledge to make informed decisions on the topic’s relevance for you. I organized each chapter to build on or complement concepts in other chapters, yet I contained each chapter independently enough so they do not depend on other chapters, accommodating those readers who want to skip sections that do not apply to their situation or are not yet a priority for them. My goal is to make this book easy and convenient for you to read, either cover-to-cover or to jump around to reference any section you need.

Each chapter has key points at the beginning to frame the focus of the chapter and the main ideas it covers. Some chapters include a “Consultant Comrade” section that discusses some tips specific to consultants and service delivery firms. This is where I share some ideas on SharePoint governance consulting. Chapters also contain an “Inside Story: Notes from the Field” section where I narrate one of my own experiences providing governance consulting for a customer in the field, sharing an example of either a positive or problematic experience that associates with the particular chapter’s governance topic and theme.

In some of the chapters, I have invited some of my peers to weigh in on the topic and share their perspectives on a set of general governance questions. In these “Guest Q&A” sections, I selected fellow experts who have diverse experiences to add other voices and share some of their tips. I kept the questions the same for each guest, yet their answers vary quite a bit and this helps to contribute some great ideas for you to think about from different governance perspectives.

What Is Governance?

Before we jump into all these aspects of governance, let’s return to the idea itself, and our reclaiming of the term. What is governance? I have already noted how governance is not simply a document you can spend a couple of weeks filling in the blanks, like pressing an easy button on some template you have downloaded and expect to be a magic bullet. In my experience, I have found these types of templates in common use provide a sort of catharsis, a false sense of accomplishment, because they generate a lot of activity but often focus excessively on the task of completing the document itself. They are certainly easier to sell because they fit into a tidy little package, but from the countless customers I have observed, this approach and simplistic view of governance is largely ineffective.

How can we better define governance in the face of it becoming an exploding catchall phrase? For our purposes in this book, governance is a set of actions, behaviors, and commitments that relate to a SharePoint service, and it contributes to a set of established intentional operational processes and procedures, roles and responsibilities, and decision-making protocols.

I used these big abstract categories of actions, behaviors, and commitments to stress that it is something to adopt and do more than just being something to document and file. An action is the first initiative or a response to an opportunity. A behavior is a set of practices that becomes a habit. A commitment is a dedication that evolves into a purpose. Your attitude around these three is a way of thinking that matures into values and eventually becomes second nature. The good habits I illustrate in Figure 1-1 and describe throughout this book can nurture the right environment for success when put into practice with regular action.

“Actions speak louder than words,” as the saying goes. In that spirit, actions are the first thing in my governance trinity. I like to think of this as responding to an opportunity that presents itself or taking the initiative to get on top of something that would otherwise begin to unravel or cause you grief down the road. Actions can be things like reaching out to power users and offering guidance to help them maximize their experience using SharePoint while also steering them toward the optimum usage for SharePoint. Actions sometimes are the hardest part, because they often involve the first step toward something, and those first steps can feel like the most work if they are the ones without momentum.

Behaviors consist of actions, but I broke it out so we can think of them more as those routine actions already in practice. Where an action might involve investigating something out of the ordinary, like in conducting a root-cause analysis, behaviors incorporate the more common activities with a regular schedule. These can be things such as your operational procedures, like patching maintenance windows or your site creation process. They can be the way you treat SharePoint, like if you have resources dedicated to managing the SharePoint service or if your responsibilities primarily lie elsewhere but you also need to keep SharePoint available on a best-effort basis.

Commitments encompass your attitude and dedication toward your SharePoint service. Is your SharePoint service a high priority that you are committed to or a low priority that you will get to when you have time? Depending on your circumstances, individual situation, and goals of your organization, either may be valid. Commitments relate to your discipline in taking action and maintaining your behaviors. You also make commitments to your customers: your commitment to offer a service at a certain service level that they can depend on.

You should notice that I have not tied governance concepts in this book to any specific framework or process. My goal is to lay out these concepts based in a generic enough way so you can adopt them as-is, or adapt them to fit with whatever framework you use. My focus is specific to SharePoint with considerations to govern your SharePoint environment by sharing my experience managing SharePoint and consulting with a variety of customers in the field.

How Much Governance Is Enough?

Effectiveness in SharePoint governance increases the further you go in the process. By this I mean it is an additive process, where I find the more my clients put the concepts from this book in practice, the greater the effectiveness they find with their governance outcomes. That does not mean you have to accept everything in this or any other governance book with vigilance, because every governance need is unique. So, take what fits your situation or what you feel your organization would be open to adopting. A greater adoption of concepts and techniques with a greater commitment all leads to greater success in your SharePoint deployment, but the reality is that this ideal comes at a cost, a trade-off constrained by the time and budget required to put these ideas into practice.

There could be other reasons holding you and your organization back from fully embracing the ideas in this book. One big reason you cannot implement many of the ideas we discuss here is that your organization’s culture and maturity level is not at a mature enough point. Constraints like this are common ones I have repeatedly experienced firsthand working within an organization and as a consultant working with clients. Another challenge is that you might simply lack the authority to implement many of the processes. I have been there too, and throughout this book, I will share some techniques for building support and buy-in to introduce and evolve these ideas in challenging situations where I could not simply mandate them.

A key message I want you to take away is that each of the governance concepts that follow can have an impact. Although implementing more of them certainly has a greater effect, I also have the mantra that every little bit helps. Look for those low-hanging fruit types of opportunities that you can adopt first; look for those areas you can take an initiative and make a start. This can make that first step easier and can help you build momentum as you get started. There is often no quick fix, and it would be difficult and overwhelming to attempt to adopt everything at once. Nevertheless, I still encourage you to make a start that will slowly cumulate into something significant and rewarding, creating a snowball effect to build your governance momentum.

I like to think less about the scope of governance and more about governance being along a continuum. I typically do not look at a customer’s SharePoint situation and package up all the governance pieces they need. For me I usually want to decide what we need to address first, and build momentum from there. Even if we do want to go after everything, there still has to be an order. Something has to come first, and I usually start with the most pressing or what will produce the biggest bang and quickest impact. So rather than thinking about how much governance you need, think about where you want to start.

Where Should You Start?

The best place to start is often to define what your SharePoint service entails. In that description, you are also defining what it does not do. This description gives the service focus, explicitly making it intentional, rather than reactionary. A description like this sets the key foundation for any other governance initiative to depend on and enhance. This has been a crucial component for me, and the foundation on which I use to build all other governance work and initiatives. For that reason, I have arranged it to be at the start of Part II in this book and the very first thing we tackle as we begin our journey into SharePoint governance.

I am not going to flatter myself into thinking I have captured everything about governance and that this is an exhaustive guide. Indeed, there are many great thinkers on the subject with valuable works published. Let me encourage you to explore some of those ideas and perspectives, many of which I reference throughout this book, and you should use them to take the ideas in this book even further than I imagined. My ideas and concepts complement the extensive array of governance resources, both SharePoint related or otherwise. This book just focuses on what I have seen work well specifically for SharePoint governance with my customers, providing some hands-on practical observations for you to consider and try out.

You will notice that throughout this book I keep referring to your SharePoint deployment as the SharePoint service you offer. This is meaningful to me because it creates the right mindset that we deploy SharePoint to fulfill some need, to provide some service to those who use it. If you term your SharePoint deployment in this way, you will find that it also focuses attention toward articulating the value this service provides. Your interest to articulate value may have even motivated you to reach for a book on SharePoint governance in the first place, and you will find several tips throughout this book on how to elaborate on the value SharePoint provides.

Pace yourself: governance can mean a lot of changing actions, behaviors, and commitments. Organizations tend to be slow to adopt changes of this nature because they can affect the core culture of an organization. People can still resist change for a number of other reasons, no matter how possible the changes may seem or how much the changes may benefit people over the long-term. Some people may grow frustrated when they go from being comfortable doing something to feeling unfamiliar with a new process, and as a result, they may appear to resist the changes. On top of that, people only have so much capacity and tolerance for change, so it would be unrealistic to expect your team to rush through this book and transform into a festival of governance as quickly as a travelling carnival sets up tents and concessions when they come to town.

The good news is that people absolutely do embrace change and they can be quite enthusiastic about it. Some examples confirming this are the widespread number of touch screen devices and the ubiquitous nature of social media embedded in people’s lives – both of which were largely uncommon for the masses even just a decade or so ago. Change can be good, and some of the changes you may require for the governance ideas and concepts in this book can be for the better as well. Stay open to the possibilities and know that if you position it from the perspective of how your users will benefit, they will be less likely to resist the change you want to introduce. Everyone typically likes things that benefit him or her. The tools in this book will help you navigate this change, whether users resist or embrace it.

Organizations tend to adopt governance into their culture the most when there is executive buy-in and support. These companies establish strong, long-term sponsorship at the top, setting the stage that governance is important and a priority for the organization. In fact, companies can often correlate the degree of commitment and involvement from an executive sponsor with the degree of commitment and acceptance from the rest of the organization. An organization will find this is the best-case scenario, and one that gives SharePoint governance some weight.

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes governance is just not in an organization’s culture, and by extension, executive sponsorship for governance might not be either. The tools in this book can still help, even in these cases. Actually, I have found this scenario is surprisingly common in SharePoint projects where I have tried to introduce SharePoint governance. Let me assure you that if your situation falls into this category, you can still make improvements. I expect many readers to share facing this struggle, as I frequently do myself, particularly given the topic and focus of the book. This book provides several ideas and strategies for actions, behaviors, and commitments you can use to get started with governance, no matter how formal or informal of a solution you require or are capable of adopting for your SharePoint governance.

Personally, I like to think of governance as a level or a sign of maturity. This metaphor resonates because maturity signals growth and a process of evolving over time. It signals experience and wisdom; it signals the passage of time. Maturity does not just happen, it is not something that is just decided, and it does not come from documentation, a couple of meetings, or a workshop. No, maturity is a process, a continuum that is the culmination of life lessons, evolving and learning from the past, and expanding with additional perspectives and new views of the world. It is ever evolving, maturing as the feedback loop cycles and our capabilities grow stronger.

Governance is like that: it grows and evolves over time. Each step sets you up to build on and enhance the service down the road. Your only challenge is to find those first few steps and implement them in some way. In the chapters to come, I share many ideas for you to consider and think about how you can use them to get started with your own SharePoint governance. However, if you still cannot decide, often the best place to start is at the beginning: start with defining your SharePoint service.

Governance and SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 adds exciting new capabilities and it enhances some existing features that aid in achieving different governance objectives, making this a very exciting release for governance needs. I would pick eDiscovery as one new capability in SharePoint 2013 that provides rich governance features, because it provides the infrastructure for managing and governing content from individual items to entire site collections. SharePoint 2013 eDiscovery adds sophistication from a records management and information management perspective, and these enhanced capabilities add maturity to SharePoint itself as an enterprise content management system.

Using eDiscovery in SharePoint 2013, we can govern content retention and other types of policies, globally and across farms. We can also govern legal and regulatory requirements, as well as track and report on our compliance. Site owners or policies can set sites to a closed state instead of simply deleting them, enabling governance strategies to address retiring and archiving content in a gradual process in between a content state that is moving from online to offline.

Apps for SharePoint and the SharePoint Marketplace enable scenarios such as allowing users to purchase and provision their own functionality without modifying or affecting the underlying farm. An organization can also offer an internal catalog of Apps for SharePoint that users can consume and utilize on their site, enabling a centralized catalog and a single access point to provide custom applications and functionality across the organization. This simplifies the process of deploying and managing custom solutions, both for the IT department providing the solutions and for the end-users adding the solution to their site.

SharePoint 2013 enhances the self-service site creation feature so that it can now gather more information about things such as how long the site is active and other useful information about the site. You can also customize this process to add additional logic to help govern and manage sites over time. You can use the feature for either site collections or new webs within a site collection, which is a very useful feature particularly for applying policies for either the site collection or individual webs within the site collection.

Site access requests is another long-standing SharePoint feature that SharePoint 2013 has enhanced. These enhancements to the site request process make permission management and request management more straightforward for ordinary users, and this helps make governing access control more straightforward as a result. For one thing, there is an audit trail of permission request activity, so you can trace who granted what permission and when. Another feature useful for governance is the Request Management page, as shown in Figure 1-2, where outstanding access requests and a history of requests are visible for site administrators from the site administration page, rather than in the inbox of a few individuals. Requests also have a place for comments, so site administrators can ask questions to the requesters to understand why they need the permissions they are requesting. This all works toward helping to reduce the number of unnecessary and excessive permissions granted to users, permissions granted simply because in the past the permissions or requests were not clear enough to be understood by the site administrator.

Some subtle changes to how you manage branding in SharePoint 2013 can also help to simplify how you govern branding customizations. For one, you can create a branding package by setting up your interface elements, styles, images, and the like, all on a live SharePoint team site and then export them as a branding package. You can then share this branding package with other sites. SharePoint 2013 bases branding on HTML 5 standards, which means your graphic designers will face less of a barrier to entry when it comes to customizing the look and feel of a SharePoint site. More importantly for us considering governance, this also means that you or your site designers can more easily customize user interface elements on sites in a standard and consistent way, and this will help to make maintenance easier to manage.

Continuous crawling in the SharePoint 2013 search engine means the content index continuously stays fresh. Therefore, for those content sources that you enable continuous crawling on, they will no longer require negotiating the freshness of the index with the business users, because it will be fresh in practically real-time. This simplifies scheduling and coordinating the search service. There are performance implications, and in some cases, you may still have to plan an incremental crawl frequency, but otherwise the simplification continuous crawling offers will be nice. For those other cases, you do still have incremental crawling available, perhaps for network file shares or archival media that does not change frequently and does not need a fresh index available in the enterprise search engine.

SharePoint 2013 introduces Managed Navigation, a feature where the site navigation is associated with a term set in the Managed Metadata Service. Now a portal’s navigation can easily be managed and stay consistent across many site collections. Using the built-in structure-based navigation was one of the most common objections against implementing an information architecture that consisted of multiple site collections, but now that SharePoint 2013 offers both a structure and metadata driven navigation there is less resistance against going with the more scalable multiple site collection design.

Office 2013 now sets the default file saving location for enterprise users to be their SharePoint 2013 MySite. Although the save file dialog box offered MySites as a location option for several previous versions of Microsoft Office, it was never the default. This change to have the default location as a user’s MySite personal documents library is significant because it helps move you a giant leap closer to a centralized content storage. From a governance perspective, having content stored centrally provides you with more opportunity to manage and govern the content, such as when your users store it within their MySites rather than on their desktops. SharePoint 2013 also makes managing and sharing content on a user’s MySite easier as well with an improved user experience. MySites only have a single personal document library in SharePoint 2013, so users no longer have to negotiate between the personal and public document libraries the same as they did in previous versions. Now users can use their personal document library to store documents that only they have access to, and documents they share with other users. The library also makes it easy for them to copy the document to other SharePoint locations to collaborate with workgroups in existing sites.

SharePoint 2013 also extends health checks from the farm health checks previous versions of SharePoint made available through Central Administration. They are now also available in site collections to run a health check that validates the site against defined rules. As Figure 1-3 illustrates, there are several categories the health check runs rules against and inspects, including a list of customized system files, missing galleries that a site typically depends on, and references to templates or language packs that are missing. The site collection health check results page displays the results of the health check, providing a visual report on areas that may need attention to alert site collection administrators to what may cause them trouble in the future when they upgrade their site or Apps within the site.

This is not an exhaustive list of what is available in all the new features in SharePoint 2013. I just wanted to offer a quick overview of some of the new features in SharePoint 2013 that contribute to an environment’s overall governance capability. I discuss some of these and others as they come up and apply to sections throughout the rest of the book. For now, I just wanted to whet your appetite for some of the new possibilities SharePoint 2013 offers, and some of the existing feature improvements to the user experience that guide users in a manner that has a positive effect on governance.

Consultant Comrade

Periodically throughout this book, I want to share tips that are specific for consultants based on my own experience as a consultant working for other firms and in my own consulting practice. I will use the “Consultant Comrade” section to speak consultant-to-consultant and share any insights or experience I have based on a chapter’s topic.

As a consultant, I can see how the idea of SharePoint governance can be a difficult topic on which to advise customers. Governance is a big and complex topic, one that can involve a lot of change and possibly will not show any results right away. On the other hand, governance is a hot buzzword that generates a lot of demand for services to solve. I find it natural for a services firm to engage with a document template to fill out over a series of meetings – a prescriptive document is easier to sell, and certainly easier to contract and track as a deliverable. Nevertheless, I have not seen this approach all on its own actually solve the governance problem for the customer.

So how can a services firm sell and contract a governance engagement? I find the answer to this embodies changing the emphasis from using the verbiage of a governance model contained within a document deliverable, and instead shift the focus to governance activities. Take a series of actions, maybe some taken from this book, and use these in your consulting agenda of governance activities you will help the customer address. Frame yourself or your consultants as a governance advisor or mentor, an advisor who engages to lead and facilitate your customers through governance activities that fit your customer’s specific situation.

Governance is a process: adopting, evolving, and maturing over time. As a consultant engaged with a customer as a SharePoint governance advisor, my job is really to guide my customer through a process by providing them with things to consider. Essentially, I lead my customers through a progression of what I like to think of as guided discovery activities. I cannot do the growing for them, maturity does not work that way, but sometimes I can provide answers or direction that steers them in the right direction. Largely the topics I give my customers to consider are the same ideas I have laid out in this book, alongside with any other advice and experiences that may be useful to help you save time and point you in the right direction.

I like to relate typical governance planning consulting engagements to the story Benito Cereno by Herman Melville. In the story, Captain Delano encounters Captain Cereno’s ship, finding the crew and slaves onboard desperate for supplies after a storm has torn their ship apart. Delano helps by providing supplies and men, leaving him feeling quite content with himself for assisting a fellow sailor. As the story unfolds, (spoiler alert) it turns out that Cereno’s real problem is the mutiny on his ship and threat to his life, a mutiny Delano is completely oblivious to despite all the warning signs. While Delano believes he is helping by following the sailor’s convention, and he feels pleased for doing so, he is not making any difference on the ship because he is not looking for the real problem to solve. Like Delano, if a SharePoint consultant only focuses on surface-level conventions, they may feel satisfied with a governance plan document they deliver to a customer, and yet not have any effect resolving the customer’s real problems and underling issues.

Inside Story: Notes from the Field

Five or six years ago, I was consulting with a government customer – a modest sized government organization with about 40k users or so. My engagement there was to help them establish a governance model and to document a governance plan that would leave them with something they could carry on, build on, and that would set them up for success with SharePoint throughout their organization.

We worked tirelessly for a few weeks in back-to-back meetings, debating options, making decision, and building a gold standard for SharePoint governance plans. At the end, I captured it all in a few documents that included a strategic-focused governance plan and a tactical-focused technical operations guide. We closed out the engagement feeling as if we had accomplished a lot in such a short period, and indeed, we had.

Like any other consultant, eventually it was time for me to wrap up and let my customer carry on without me. This felt okay, because they had all the tools they needed: they made key decisions, their overall direction was clear, and we captured all the details in the governance documents I delivered. I felt quite pleased with our progress and the value I delivered, designing and delivering a new governance model in just a few weeks.

It felt so successful in fact that I often used them as my example to other customers when describing what is possible with the right commitment and sponsorship. I had this prescriptive solution, one that involved a series of workshops and planning sessions, followed by documenting the outcomes in governance documentation. If they were prepared to make decisions and set priorities, I could guide them through the process, and they too would be set up for success. What was not to like?

Imagine my surprise when a year or so later I dialed in to a conference call with my original government customer to discuss governance solutions. To be honest, I was actually a little speechless when they finished describing the challenges they experienced, challenges obviously related to governance. Of course, my first question was around how we had already solved all these problems. Yes, undeniably, they confirmed everything we covered and neatly documented in the governance plan that has since sat lifeless in those original documents, left largely untouched since I had disengaged.

So much for creating a “living document” or for delivering a governance plan they would run with. Frankly, I have seen this scenario repeated frequently with different customers and a variety of consultants. Consultants who deliver valuable governance plans, but ones the customers never act on. Consultants who are very capable and possess the right expertise to produce excellent plans, yet even still, the initiatives fizzle after those consultants roll off their engagement and the customer files the delivered document. Customers who believe they have addressed governance with a plan, yet things are still not running smoothly for them and they do not know why.

The experience has left me fine-tuning governance ideas and reflecting on how to deliver a lasting governance solution in an engagement model that is repeatable, and just as important, able capture the engagement in a service delivery contract. One thing is for sure: the solution certainly goes beyond simply documenting a governance plan. This makes it difficult because documenting a governance plan tends to be the key deliverable consulting firms tend to build contracts around. Yet, it is possible, an effective solution comes out of actions, and you can do those tactical things to drive change and have an actual impact.

Wrapping Up

In this chapter, I discussed how SharePoint governance goes beyond documentation and includes actions that drive change and have an impact on a SharePoint service. I also looked at how the focus of this book will be to cover those actions. I also provided an overview of some of the new features in SharePoint 2013 that support governance. Finally, I noted that this book is for you if you work with SharePoint and have an interest in learning more about my SharePoint governance approach based on actual experiences with customers in the field.

As we move into our SharePoint governance journey, the first stop is to define SharePoint as a service offered to the business. In the next chapter, the first governance action we will take will involve determining the boundary for what the SharePoint environment provides and what it does not. I look at the need for explicitly defining the service offered to operate in an intentional manner rather than constantly responding to crises in a reactionary way. In the discussion, I will also provide considerations to guide an initiative to establish different SharePoint service levels that target different organizational needs. Finally, I will discuss some techniques and tips for designing and implementing a chargeback-funding model for your SharePoint service.