Achieving Sustainable SharePoint Governance

Governance in Action

To view this model in practical terms, here's an example of governance in action. The scenario is that two pillars of the business are vying for funding and resources to support their portal initiatives; one is for the Call Center, one is for Finance.

The Call Center has identified a number of strategic objectives for the coming year, including reductions in:

• Call-handling times
• The number of call transfers to other staff with expertise in a given subject
• The number of call backs to customers

The portal has been gaining traction as the company's centralized information resource. One site within the portal is dedicated to Call Center content, policies, procedures and regulatory information. But the wheels are coming off; the portal has become a dumping ground, a place where people blithely post documents and web content, with little regard to usability, classification, hierarchy, or search. Consequently, Call Center staff have reverted to using non-SharePoint ad hoc repositories (LAN drives) rather than the portal.

After discussing the strategic requirements with users, Fiona, the Call Center's content steward, is proposing a Call Center-oriented information hub that will be deemed a business-critical initiative for the portal.

Fiona needs a clearly defined and enforced document library template, associated with new content types. She needs a new search box, scoped to just those Call Center libraries and its unique information types, and a customized document type dropdown box. She needs a news and information web part to inform people of new content and changes to existing content. She'd like to create a RSS feed and encourage people to subscribe.

Brian, the Finance content steward, is also proposing a Finance-oriented project, a new site that will display key performance indicators from the backend finance system, detailing performance of the company's financials against its yearly plan. He'll need connections to the financial system via SharePoint's Business Data Catalogue (BDC) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) designed to show various metrics. He also has some scenario-based interactive spreadsheets he'd like to post via Excel Services.

Working Committee Presentations

At the bi-monthly Working Committee meeting, Fiona, the Call Center content steward, presents her case. She outlines her proposal's alignment to both the company's and the Call Center's strategic initiatives, outlines various stages of her project, and seeks buy-in from the other content stewards on the Committee.

Brian also makes his case by outlining its alignment to Finance's strategy. All the staff need to understand where the business is from a performance and profitability perspective.

The working committee decides that both projects have merit. The next step is to present them to the Steering Committee for approval.

Steering Committee Approval

In its monthly meeting, the two content stewards present the Steering Committee with their project ideas. By this time, the portal program manager has also analyzed, defined deliverables and created cost estimates for each project.

After hearing both presentations, the Steering Committee notes that Finance already produces a monthly performance report that is posted in PDF format on the portal, which they feel will do for the time being. In contrast, the Call Center is the first line to the company's customers, so the Steering Committee selects and approves funding for the Call Center initiative.

With the project approved, the portal program manager submits the project plan, identifies key stakeholders, secures resources, and proceeds to create and manage the project.

The Payoff

Creating this sustainable user- and business-centric portal management model will ensure that your SharePoint implementation stays aligned with the business' goals. It also ensures that the deployed system remains flexible, so that it can continue to evolve and cater to business' and users' changing needs.

For more information, check out these related resources:

• Sample Governance Plan
• Key Governance Considerations in a SharePoint Deployment
• Governance Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007
• Sample Governance Plan
• SharePoint Governance Checklist Guide

TAGS:

portal, SharePoint, governance