Develop Governance Planning Documents

The governance team's purpose is to set standards and policies and communicate them to the rest of the organization. To do this, some documentation will be necessary. In this section, we will describe common features and layouts for this documentation. Of course, the needs of your organization will require variations to the document set described here. This discussion should be viewed only as a starting point.

Common Document Features

Before getting into the details of the documents, let's look at some best practices.

• Revisions: Each document should include a revision history that allows readers to know what parts of the document have been updated from one version to the next. This alleviates the need to reread the entire document each time a version is released.
• Publishing: Each document should be posted in a known location on a regular basis. This allows the documents to be found quickly and easily when needed.
• Feedback: Each document should explicitly request feedback and explain how to provide feedback to the author. This can be an online form, e-mail address, and so forth. These are living documents designed to help readers, not encumber them.
• Sign-offs: Documents should be published only after they are officially approved by the governance team. This is not to say that drafts should not be circulated. They definitely should! But users must be able to find the official documents when needed.

The purpose of these documents is not to get in the way of productivity. They are meant to be read and understood to help everyone in the organization get the most out of the governance process and the portal. Never fill these documents with boilerplate text that adds no value for the reader. Try to make these documents long on detail and short on description. Lists, tables, and figures can often be used to provide the same, or better, understanding of a topic than large amounts of text. These documents should be as long as they need to be, but no longer.

The Governance Plan

The most important document created by the governance team will be the governance plan. This plan will document the decisions made by the governance team in a way that allows them to be easily referenced and used by the team and others affected by those decisions.

Here is one possible outline for a governance plan:

• Governance Overview
  • Vision & Mission
  • Scope
  • Key Objectives
  • Guiding Principles
• Roles and Responsibilities
  • Role Definitions
  • Role Assignments
  • Responsibility (RACI) Matrices
• Content Policies and Standards
  • Site Structure
  • Security Policies
  • User Interface Standards
  • Metadata Management
  • Content Management
• Technical Policies and Standards
  • Monitoring Requirements
  • Uptime and Performance Goals
  • Outage Planning Procedures
  • Support Requirements and Schedules
• Customization Policies and Standards
  • Site Provisioning
  • Themes
  • Content Management
  • Information Management Policies
  • Sandboxed solutions
• General Procedures
  • How to …
  • How to …
  • How to …

The governance overview will contain many of the items we have already discussed, including the portal's vision, mission, scope, and objectives. In addition to these are a set of guiding principles. These are also known as framing decisions. The idea is to document the high-level strategic direction for the portal and governance effort. For example, these decisions may include items such as the following:

• Publishing will be preferred in sites at the department level and above.
• The use of My Sites, personalization, and social media will be supported and encouraged throughout the portal.
• Copyrighted material will be stored only in specially designated sites.
• No customer personal information will be stored within the portal.
• Versioning will be used whenever practical.
• Large media files will be stored outside of the portal but accessible within the portal using Remote BLOB Storage (RBS).

The preceding decisions may be technical in nature when necessary, but more often they will be related to business requirements such as compliance and security considerations. These will be among the first decisions made by the governance team. They will shape all of the decisions made later. These principles should be chosen to help drive the group toward fulfilling the group's vision and mission.

Roles and Responsibilities will document the roles as described earlier in this chapter. Additionally, this section will grow to contain additional tasks and the responsible roles for those tasks. The assignment of individuals to roles can be included in this document or referenced in another location (such as a SharePoint list!).

Content Policies and Standards cover the creation and management of content within the SharePoint sites in the portal. The items in this section are described in detail in Part 2 of this book.

Technical Policies and Standards cover the management of the servers that support the portal. These are the IT Management questions covered in Part 3 of this book.

Customization Policies and Standards provide guidance on the creation of content or logic that is not native to SharePoint. This may include user interface elements such as page layouts and themes or user-defined logic such as workflows, InfoPath forms, or solution packages. These techniques are described in Part 4.

General Procedures are those processes that allow users to get things done. This is typically a list of “How-To” articles. Each article describes how to access help and resources provided by the portal and the governance team. This is basically a high-level frequently asked questions (FAQ) list for the users. These procedures may also be posted directly on the portal to make them easier to find. Some examples of these procedures include

• How to get support
• How to find training materials
• How to provide feedback to governance committee
• How to request a new site or site/content access
• How to report a problem or request a new feature
• How to request new site collections

Your organization will determine its own needs for the contents of the governance plan. More ideas for the governance plan can be found in Appendix B of this book. Appendix C contains a set of helpful checklists that can be used to establish and organize your governance plan.

Additional Planning Documents

When creating the governance plan it is often useful to create a set of subordinate plans to support it, similar to Table 3-3. Each plan is still part of the governance process but is often maintained by one department or set of individuals because of their limited audience.