Ambulance waiting at the end of the cliff

Get the picture? This is common place when it comes to SharePoint projects (or any other projects) that have gone off the rails and you are called in to review the project and why some things aren’t really working as it was perceived should work.

What makes things much harder is to tell a bewildered project manager and a project owner or sponsor that the project that they have been managing is not going to meet its deadline and potentially will not meet the organisations business goals they set out to achieve with SharePoint.

Hey.. hold on a second..this is SharePoint it’s easy right? It’s from Microsoft and it should just work?

SharePoint projects are not hard and they are not easy either. There is a saying that goes to say “you don’t know what you don’t know”. Essentially it’s no one’s fault but typically it’s because of poor evaluation or requirements that aren’t articulated well by business and not understood by IT or vice versa.

Well where do SharePoint projects go wrong? Ever come across the following situation where a business user calls you up cause he/she got your number from a mate?

“We got our IT guys to install SharePoint and we have 100 team sites already it’s just we can’t get Search working and our IT guys can’t fix it? Can you tell us how to fix it?”

Or you may be the business user who has been told by IT Search will not work and they won’t fix it.

Yes it’s very easy to install SharePoint and you can be up and running with a series of Collaboration sites within a day if that’s just what you want that is good enough. The issue here is that your users are not going to be happy with just that.. they will ask for the ability to Search, Document Management, Workflow and suddenly you are faced with some very important decisions. And these decisions depending on how you may look at them requires planning and business input before you actually even install or deploy SharePoint. The key point here is that IT departments should NOT make executive decisions on behalf of the business when it comes to SharePoint, rather IT should provide business with a service offering to enable core business functions to be met by clever solutions using SharePoint. This also applies to the Business where the business should be able to clearly articulate to IT what the expected “business” outcome for a given solution should be.

To take a random example, a software team tracks the number of bugs in a product they are building and their objective is to keep the number of bugs low. At a higher executive level such as a product manager this translates to become customer satisfaction. At the software team lead level the requirement is a issue tracking system but at the executive level the requirement is for a KPI list for performance measure of teams. So what are you going to buy off the shelf? A Issue tracking system or a performance management system?

Now if you were a clever CIO you would look at things differently. You should be able to see the opportunity to provide a service offering to the business and actually charge for the servicing of this. SharePoint actually provides this opportunity to IT departments to leverage and offer a core set of services back to the business.

The typical re-active requirements from businesses from a IT management perspective is for IT to provide applications and support ranging from desktops, PC applications. When you take these typical core system admin type scenarios aside businesses typically ask It to be able to provide Project sites for project collaboration scenarios, Electronic document management, Forms capability and in most cases the ability to ***find ***information stored on various locations in your network shares. Studies have shown that on average 56 percent of workers are overwhelmed by multiple projects and get interrupted too often and adding to that one-third say that multi-tasking and distractions are keeping them from stepping back to process and reflect on the work they’re doing. Essentially these reflect back to organisations losing time and money overtime.

So how does all this relate back to the ambulance at the end of the cliff? Well the point being that if you don’t look at SharePoint as a whole on its merits of being able to provide a platform for growth and have a plan to invest in it with the right mixture of training for business and IT through a value driven approach you are missing the point of SharePoint. And this is not only for SharePoint but for any enterprise applications that existed before such as Lotus Notes, Plone, WebSphere and Others. Each one has it’s own quirks of adoption.

Top level executives get sold on SharePoint for its strategic value and quite rightly so portrayed by Microsoft. The missing part of most implementations of SharePoint is what steps are required to ensure that it’s adopted and used for the right reasons and not just someone thought the KPI lists in SharePoint was wicked.

Blaming SharePoint for what it doesn’t do is not going to help anyone, rather the questions you should be asking is what can it do given my current business context and what can it do for the organisation in the future and does it actually match my organisation. Start taking the small steps today such and introducing new concepts to users such as blogs and collaboration sites and you will be able to achieve adoption and true business value. There are guidelines available for you and your teams today to start understanding what is involved. The Gear up site from Microsoft and my previous blog posts on Planning and Deployment will provide you with good starting points.

So before you drive off your road with SharePoint have a think about what if an ambulance was not waiting at the end of the cliff.

Joel Oleson and Paul Culmsee from Cleverworkarounds.com has these insights to say about “Why SharePoint Projects Fail”