By James Milne 

Surprisingly the issues Myriad Technologies are seeing are not related to the technologies at all. SharePoint is now in its 5th generation of development; the platform is now mature, stable and highly functional.  SharePoint 2010 and soon to be released SharePoint 2013 are remarkable technologies that have well and truly surpassed market readiness.

This begs the obvious question. Why then do these projects fail?
Unfortunately, we are still seeing failed deployments. Very often, we get called in to projects that have gone completely off the rails, and we get called in to do an all too familiar, ‘clean-up-the-project’.
These failed SharePoint projects have become so common place in our industry that we have started to coin a new phrase which helps describe the volatile nature of these projects. We have started to refer to these failed SharePoint projects as another, ‘‘SharePoint Shipwreck’’. This metaphor has a number of characteristics in common with a real shipwreck; there may be nothing wrong with your vessel yet you still find your project perched upon a rocky shoal or maybe marooned upon a desert island. Perhaps the political winds have changed when you were not looking, or, maybe there was not enough end user training. There are numerous problems that may throw your project into rough seas.

Based from our experience, the point behind this article is to help you to identify some of the simple mistakes that you may inadvertently make. By pointing out some of these challenges that are commonly overlooked, we hope that we can set your SharePoint project on a steady course and sailing into smoother seas.

1 - Define your project goals

First and foremost you need well defined project goals. SharePoint provides a variety of solutions that range from Web Content Management to Records Management and everything in between. It is a common pitfall for the project team to be swept up in the excitement around the sheer number of solutions that are possible with SharePoint.
A common trap we are seeing with SharePoint projects is the project scope is simply too wide. The project goals are overly ambitious and the project team quickly become stretched by the sheer number of project requirements. This mistake is often referred to as the ‘‘Big Bang’’ theory of development and implementation. This is not a good type of ‘‘Big Bang’’. What is required is a clear focus on the project goals. This challenge can be managed by creating a phased project plan that divides the project goals up into smaller deliverables that are executed in a phased approach.

We work with a number of executives and project sponsors to help identify what pain points exist; align the technology and project priorities to address these problems, whilst developing, documenting and sticking to a programme of work.

This phased approach enables the project team to deliver a series of smaller quick wins rather than one ‘‘big bang’’. A typical phased SharePoint project would involve deploying a corporate intranet in the first phase. In the second phase you may consider deploying divisional portals; these will provide each department with a portal for conducting ‘‘day to day’’ operational tasks. The third phase may focus on rolling out a collection of collaborative sites. Some organisations refer to these sites as ‘team sites’ or ‘team rooms’ and are used to promote collaboration across departments. The fourth phase may focus on centralised document management, allowing the organisation to start to centrally manage corporate documents such as policies, procedures, forms and templates. The fifth phase may focus on creating a ‘Personal Portal’ which would provide a central location for organisation’s employees to find information from a personal perspective. Later phases may then focus on the capabilities of business automation, electronic forms, workflows and overall business process optimisation. Of course, none of these phases is prescriptive or fixed in the order they are run. Myriad Technologies blueprint service helps businesses understand and align their problems to the solution delivery, and hence achieve an optimal balance of time, benefits and investment.

Whatever phases you decide are important for your organisation you need to ensure the project goals are aligned with your corporate strategy. If your project goals are not aligned with your corporate strategic goals your project may lose corporate sponsorship, or even more frequently,  loss of focus on which deliverables are important and why.

2 - Define Content Ownership

The second factor that is critical to the success of any SharePoint project is content ownership. Everyone knows ‘content is king’!  So to ensure your content is up-to-date you need to delegate the content ownership back to the business users. You should be able to delegate the content ownership of each site to one or more business users, and this includes security management!

A common mistake that is made when it comes to content management is the process of creating content, or securing content is put back onto the IT Department. SharePoint is fundamentally designed to support a distributed model of content authorship, management and security.

A centralised model driven by IT departments, or worse the business leadership, inevitably makes the IT department the bottleneck. Further issues arise when a centralised ownership model is adopted.

When it comes to IT being left to create content, the IT department technically owns the content because they created it. However, they are not subject matter experts. This then leads to doubts over the authenticity and veracity of the information.  The minute people lose confidence in the information presented via a web site, the web site (be it Intranet, Knowledge base or otherwise) will fall into dis-use. At best, it will not be used or referenced, at worst it will muddy the waters around where the right information is. This spawns endless discussions around ‘creating the single point of truth’, information scattered everywhere and many other time wasting discussions.  

SharePoint as a technology provides options to resolve these issues. By enabling the users to create content by using familiar tools such as Microsoft Office and web browsers, users can easily create and manage their own content in the form of web pages, documents and blogs just to name a few. These familiar tools comprise such common applications as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Word, Excel and Visio. Essentially, if the business users can use Office and a web browser then they can create and maintain content in SharePoint. By enabling the users to use familiar tools to create content we can lower the learning curve and empower the users to begin creating their own content and allow them to focus on what they want to say rather than being distracted with complicated content creation processes.
Establishment of the business model and rules around content authorship, security and many other topics is established through a series of strategic governance workshops. The outputs help apply a set of known best practices to a specific organisation and seek to provide clear ownership and accountability around all content, regardless of type. Traditionally, this work is known as information management of unstructured data.

Once you have identified and empowered the content owners you will need to ensure the business users receive the appropriate level of training and support. Besides the conventional training techniques and support methods, you might consider leveraging a ‘grass roots’ approach by creating a peer-to-peer support group of ‘champions’. Ideally, you would seek to nominate a ‘champion’ from each business group to represent the business challenges that each business group is experiencing. This grass roots approach will also help permeate the SharePoint adoption into each business group from the inside out.
Establishment of a set of structures such as these is not as easy or straight forward as it may appear. Myriad Technologies heavily utilises the practice of change management to both facilitate and empower executives, management and staff around establishing the appropriate structures, roles and responsibilities.

3 - Establish a Business Model

The third factor to consider is how to create sustainable, long term funding for your project and more importantly for the SharePoint platform moving forward.

Your project may receive some initial funding but what are you going to do when that runs out? Unless you have been given an unlimited budget (which is unlikely), you are going to need to figure out how to pay, support and maintain SharePoint (Intranet, Extranet, Internet, eDRMS or other solution) as it grows, changes and evolves over time. The project costs of establishing the initial deliverable are typically only the ‘tip of the iceberg’. Consider a typical Intranet. The initial goal of an Intranet is to have a central place to store information, or a better strategic goal might be to make an Intranet ‘a place to deliver useful corporate services’.

The important element here is to understand that SharePoint is not a ‘set and forget’ technology. If you do this, you simply will not get the full return on investment possible. In marketing terms, spend $1 on marketing to make $2 in sales. The same thing is true for SharePoint. You must provide ongoing investment to get a (higher) return on that investment.

You might be lucky enough to be able to go back and ask for more budgets, but if not then you will need to figure out how to make an intranet ‘pay for itself’ and show a return on investment. You may consider some kind of ‘charge back’ or ‘Storage Quota’. You could use site quotas in SharePoint to control how much data can be stored in a site and charge accordingly. You could create ‘Bronze’, ‘Silver’ and ‘Gold’ level packages that provides disk storage or site features that are charged back to the department depending on their level of usage. An obvious approach is to have each business unit make requests for the development of enhancements, such as electronic forms or workflows. You could consider billing the business unit for the time and materials it took to create the solution. Each organization is different so you will need to come up with a business model that makes sense for your organization.

We have evolved a number of different models with our customers. They are inevitably different for each customer.

One final thought is to consider the sustainability of your intranet project, how quickly will the intranet become ‘mission critical’ to your business. After the intranet has been up and running for 6 months, ask yourself these questions. ‘What would happen if the intranet wasn’t there tomorrow?’.  ‘Do you have the support skills in-house to recover the system from an outage?’, ‘Do you have a Disaster Recovery plan?’. 
The cloud offers some answers in this area that should be given some serious consideration. 

(Next week - Steps 4-6 Deciding on on-Premise or on Cloud, Governance and Planning for Change)

James Milne is (Chief Technology Officer) at Myriad Technologies