Welcome to SharePoint is often the initial statement you hear when you begin your SharePoint journey.  But what is SharePoint and how on earth is it going to benefit your business, also where do you start? By Samuel Conway. 

These are questions that take a while to answer, so you look for a definition, an explanation from an expert on what it can do “It’s a collaborative platform from which users can create multi-dimensional portals of information and document collaboration”. 

What is a portal? And how do we build them? 

This is when IT normally steps in and reinforces that SharePoint is the almighty steed on which they can ride in and solve all of the organisation’s problems, with a bit of custom coding and a couple of lists and libraries. Well that’s what they want you to believe anyway, the reality is that SharePoint is changing the traditional roles that IT played in the system development and deployment within an organisation. 

Before the IT departments of the world unite and set their tasers to stun, SharePoint is challenging the paradigm of where the responsibility lies in the customisation and deployment of solutions within organisations. 

However it must be stressed that IT is still an integral part of the success any SharePoint system from a server management and features configuration perspective, once deployed their role needs to change from being the gatekeeper to system maintenance, a shift in traditional thinking. 

So where do you start with respect to a SharePoint solution? SharePoint is implemented into companies for many different reasons, whether that’s to provide the company with an intranet, document management system or setting up automated process flows. 

SharePoint is many different things to different people and as we move from 2010 to 2013 and new cloud based hosting solutions the definition of how SharePoint can solve companies pain point’s is becoming more and more complex. For SharePoint solutions to be of value to an organisation, they not only need to embrace this complexity but also must have an overall methodology, to ensure the system is coherent and not just a series of ad hoc developments.

Within manufacturing the philosophies of lean business practices have been taught for over two generations now, one of the so called fathers of lean W. Edwards Deming once said,

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.”

By describing a system or an organisation as a process you begin to see how things link together and the interconnectivity of its parts. This philosophy relates perfectly to the creation of a SharePoint system because if the person designing the solution does not have a clear understanding of the organisation and the issues that it faces, then the project is destined for failure. I am sure we have all heard or read of some spectacular SharePoint implementation failures 

The technical SharePoint community needs to embrace a systems analysis approach to the design and implementation of solutions.  As a technology lover it can be very easy to get distracted by the new shiny software available to us, but for the average business user all they care about is that it’s reliable and provides them the information when and where they need it in a format they understand. 

When I start talking to organisations that are either in the SharePoint design phase, just implemented SharePoint or are looking to improve its functionality, I always get a myriad of interpretations on how the system should be structured. So what design methodology should you use? Is SharePoint a website? A document management system? An Intranet? A CRM package? And how should we structure and theme it?  

For me, whatever SharePoint is to your organisation, it has to do two things; 

1. Be functional and provide benefit to the business in a way that doesn’t currently exist and 

2. Be functional and understandable to the end users. 

Always starting and keeping the end goal in mind and a holistic view of the business is important, not just implementing point solutions. A holistic solution? Hmmmm I can hear you murmur under your breath, I have specific issues that I want SharePoint to solve for me and this guy is talking about a holistic solution.

If you were the Town planner, you wouldn’t begin building a city street by street without having a firm plan in place as to what the finished product will look like and what functionality it will provide. The same can be said about SharePoint, as all the Microsoft advertising literature states, SharePoint is a platform, and as such you need to see the big picture from the very start. 

If you build it they will come!!!! Create the dream the vision of what the system will look like in a couple of years’ time. Sell the benefit of how it will change your working environment, to not only the management team that finances the project but also to yourself and your development team. So how do you do this? Plan out how you want the system to function, create the dream, then scope the vision, then refer back to what it is that the organisation is trying to achieve by implementing SharePoint and most importantly ascertain if the IT infrastructure is in place (So you do still need the IT guys involved well for a server based solution anyway). 

Then once you have the vision and think you have solved all the companies issues with a rough idea on how you are going to build it, take it to an end user (with the least amount of IT knowledge). Explain to them how the system is going to work and how its going to make their life easier.

This will be the much needed reality check, because people don’t like change and so far you have neglected the most important part; making the user part of the design phase. Including the end user as early as possible helps in defining a sense of ownership in what you are trying to build.

Another solution methodology that I would avoid like the plague is giving your users SharePoint site administration training and then telling them that they can go off and build their own sites. This leads to chaos and a lack of unified structure in the system. Picture moving to a new town you may know where the streets are but how the hell do you find your way around if you haven’t grown up there. 

So talk to the end users about their jobs their roles, the information that they need all the time keeping in mind how this fits into the overall structure and theme of the system. Now the challenge comes as you work your way through the end users and discover that you have people that do the same job but don’t look at the information they use or how they have it structured on their file folder structures the same way. 

Well that’s easy fixed, we will build a better search engine so that they can find any document or piece of information they want, problem solved. 

Well not really. SharePoint has its limitations, just like all search engines. How often do you go to Google and type in something you want to find and it’s not the first answer or response, what if you don’t exactly know what you are looking for or you need to group your search in a specific way to bring back documents of a particular type from across the organisation? 

Relying on SharePoint’s in built search to help your users find the documents they want is the “cheat’s way out”. What you should be trying to achieve is a system that enables users to find documentation in an intuitive way. 

One solution is to create a visual process perspective of what the organisation does, so that if you don’t know what the document is or what it’s called, you can search for it based on the organisation’s structure or function, not just a better search engine. 

When designing any SharePoint system, starting at the end with a solution that fits the business need is a great way to ensure that the customer is really getting not only what they want, but also the functionality and ROI they need.

Samuel Conway is managing director of SharePoint solutions provider Business Process Visualisation Australia (BPVA). Sam has an undergraduate degree in Bio-Medical Engineering (Electronic Engineering and Medical Science) and a post graduate MBA in International Business.Email him at sconway@bpva.com.au