Achieving Sustainable SharePoint Governance

Governance Model Breakdown

Here's a more detailed description of each role involved in governance (see Figure 2).

Steering Committee

Each steering committee member is a senior-level executive charged with ensuring that his/her strategic objectives are both clearly defined and being addressed via the portal. The Steering Committee also approves funding and resources for portal initiatives.

Portal Program Manager

While it's common for the Portal to be managed by IT, you should instead assign portal management to an organization outside of IT, usually either the Communications or Human Resources pillar.

The program manager reviews various site traffic metrics and trends, and analyzes site visits, views, and user paths through the site. The program manager presents these findings to the working committee for discussion, evaluation, opportunities, and next steps. The program manager will (in most cases) manage portal projects and initiatives, and handle the overall budget for the portal.

Working Committee

This team is responsible for the overall management, quality and maintenance of portal content. The working committee should meet bi-weekly or monthly to review current issues, action items, and program status. This group will review and approve new functionality requests, as well as changes/additions to portal navigation and metadata classifications (content types). The committee will also create proposals for new functionality—especially those with associated costs—for funding approval by the Steering Committee.

A key responsibility of the working committee is to ensure all pillars of the enterprise are conforming to the portal's guiding principles, including labeling, look and feel, and style.

Content Stewards

Usually this is a "power publisher" representing a pillar of the business whose members are both experienced with and passionate about the best practices and principles of information design and web publishing. Content stewards present new functionality requests on behalf of their users for initial approval by the working committee. They also review and present new navigation/taxonomy/information architecture requests for approval by the working committee.

Most importantly, content stewards review and discuss issues of style or content that are not in keeping with the guiding principles for the portal. In this way, the portal is QA'd by the working committee rather than being "policed" by the portal program manager.

Contributors

The Contributors group includes anyone who creates content for the portal. Some will have self-approving rights, others simply the ability to submit content for approval.

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portal, SharePoint, governance