Lessons Learned: "Why Are We Implementing SharePoint?"

We know of one company that was in a position of implementing SharePoint Server 2007 without clear articulation of the business and technology requirements that had been mapped to the features of SharePoint Server 2007. In other words, there was no project charter and no written agreement between the technology and business stakeholders on the problems that a SharePoint Server 2007 implementation was supposed to resolve. In fact, most of the business stakeholders were unaware that SharePoint Server 2007 was even being implemented. It wasn’t that there was disagreement concerning the implementation of SharePoint Server 2007. It was more that they had not taken the time to establish a well-articulated agreement about how and why SharePoint Server 2007 was being implemented. Because of this, they experienced several negative, unforeseen effects due to not having clearly articulated requirements that had been agreed upon at the highest levels of the organization.

One of the negative results was reflected in the use of the developer’s time. As users began to use SharePoint Server 2007, they started requesting customizations. Like a good soldier, the developer accommodated these requests. But the CIO didn’t have a clear vision for the use of SharePoint Server 2007 in the company’s overall service structure, so she didn’t voice her disapproval of the developer’s work in providing these customizations. She did, however, admit that she should not have allowed these customizations because they represented a growth of the product in a direction that she had not envisioned.

Second, because the SharePoint team didn’t have a clear project charter from which to work, it was unable to articulate why the users should use SharePoint Server 2007 and the business goals for which SharePoint Server 2007 would not be used. In other words, because the team couldn’t define the specific business goals their SharePoint Server 2007 implementation was supposed to support, it was unable to refuse user requests for divergent, sometimes conflicting, uses of SharePoint Server 2007. In addition, the team took on management tasks within collaboration spaces that should have been rightly left to the site collection owners and site administrators. Because team members didn’t understand the distributed administrative architecture (including the distributed security administrative architecture), they found themselves spending precious time performing user permission assignment requests and creating lists and sites that could have easily been accomplished by the users themselves.

Third, SharePoint team members had not performed any governance work in conjunction with their SharePoint Server 2007 implementation, so when they tried to decide the answers to thorny questions—such as who the data owners would be, who would manage sites and site collections, or who had the power to make these decisions—the discussions usually deteriorated into circular, no-win conversations. Team members weren’t fighting with one another, but were fighting with a vacuum: They were trying to determine governance issues with little direction on the goals and purposes of their SharePoint Server 2007 implementation and even less direct authority to make these decisions. Their governance effort was stuck before they even started.

Finally, this team’s emerging vision was increasingly different than the CIO’s vision for SharePoint Server 2007. The CIO wanted a platform in which to implement several core business processes and had been assured by Microsoft sales that SharePoint Server 2007 could perform what she needed. In fact, SharePoint Server 2007 fell short on one key requirement: the ability to group documents into a single set and treat that set as a single unit for approval and workflow purposes. In addition, the CIO had not been informed about the planning and governance tasks that would be required to complete a successful implementation, so the CIO moved forward with the deployment in good faith.

When the team began to learn more about SharePoint Server 2007, how it works, its architecture, and its possibilities, the team’s vision increasingly expanded beyond the CIO’s vision. Because of the good rapport that existed between the team members and the CIO, the members found themselves "managing up" by helping the CIO to understand the additional benefits that SharePoint Server 2007 brought to their organization. However, because the CIO had not been able to garner enough of a coalition of other C-level individuals (including the CEO) and in the absence of additional funds for an expanded implementation, the CIO was forced to deny the team’s requests. While the team members accepted her decision, they felt that they had been placed in a no-win situation in which their ideas were not accepted, they were not empowered to move forward with a successful implementation, and they were not given the direction they needed to know which actions and decisions might be considered going too far by the CIO. At the time of this writing, the team still feels positive about the SharePoint Server 2007 implementation, and the relationships between team members and the CIO are solid, but there is a residual tension and frustration that, if not managed properly, could grow to be a political and emotional mess for everyone involved.

Bill English, Microsoft MVP, Mindsharp