Governance in SharePoint

I was approached by a company who wanted SharePoint training using their SharePoint Infrastructure at their site and they wanted the course customised to include only the tools they will use for Document Management.  I asked one question, "What policy do you have in place for naming files?"  After much silence followed by a few "ums and ahs", the answer was "We don't have one."  File naming is a tiny aspect of SharePoint document management but a key one, and one that can paint a picture about how much planning has gone into configuring SharePoint to meet business goals.  How do you determine if a document is still valid after a period of time?  What process do you have in place to prevent any SharePoint library having redundant files or having 1,000,000 files unmanaged?  Are you looking to keep your expense and overtime forms in Excel or are you realising the potential of using SharePoint content types or InfoPath to make this procedure fast and robust?

The bigger picture is document management is a tiny fraction of SharePoint's capabilities.  Add to this the hundreds of strategy and policy concerns for information architecture, business process management, taxonomy, personal information management, site management, permissions and security, branding, and the list goes on.  You simply cannot install and configure SharePoint and let the training provide knowledge and experience to the staff.  How can you customise anything when you do not have a vision of what the final product is, how it's represented or what areas of the business SharePoint is to integrate with?  Respectively, how can staff follow these policies and procedures if they have not been made aware of them or "skilled-up"?  Simply put, "If you don't know how to share, what's the point?"

We are talking governance, that big word that has become a real hot topic over the past few years.  But what is Governance and why should you be concerned about it?  Rather than hear my vision on this term, let's look at how other experts explain it:

• "Governance determines who has power, who makes decisions, how other players make their voice heard and how account is rendered." - Institute on Governance.
• "Governance is a set of policies, roles, responsibilities and processes that you establish within your organisation to guide direct and control how it uses technologies to accomplish business goals." - Dux Raymond Sy, SharePoint speaker and Microsoft ™ MVP (Most Valuable Professional)
• "A Governance Plan describes how your SharePoint environment will be managed. It describes the roles, responsibilities, and rules that are applied to both the back end (hardware, farm, application, database configuration and maintenance) and the front end (information architecture, taxonomy, user experience)" - from the Microsoft ™ White Papers.

In short, "control".  Governance allows you to maintain control of everything and everyone within your organisation.  It defines what should be controlled, how, and who controls it.  Furthermore it allows you to control the manner users understand it and use it.  But good governance will not force or demand the control, but will encourage control so everyone will see the benefit especially for themselves.  SharePoint has plenty of tools "out-of-the-box" that demonstrate great ability and advantage to its users and with the right amount of tweaking from site owners, Site collection administrators, designers and developers, you can customise SharePoint to respect your business governance and control process of information removing so much of the human workflow that can add time, cause confusion and allow errors in process. 

But control can guide people and businesses in the right direction rather than force change.  People like support whether they admit it or not, but not everyone likes the thought that they are controlled, but rather they are in control, so people will more likely buy into governance when they see it give them power and an advantage to work smarter and easier, and that is where SharePoint comes into governance, SharePoint has enough eye-candy even out of the box to raise a few happy end-user eyebrows.

So where does training come into it?  Right from the beginning.  SharePoint is not one solution; it is made from many Microsoft and third-party products that collaborate together.  So if we are speaking Microsoft Solutions for example, your IT technical team will need support on configuring Servers, IIS, Active Directory, Exchange Server, SQL Server to name a few.  We call this the "Back-End" governance and even this should be in place before they get the software out and install it.  Back-End governance for IT infrastructure is commonly in place in many businesses as IT has awareness and an experience of the pitfalls without it.  Microsoft technical courses provide a degree of governance and guidelines in their 5-day courses, instructors commonly add real-world experience to this.  What is commonly missing is the "Front-End" governance such as document management, taxonomy, information architecture, etc.  This is where the QA Business Applications team of instructors can help.

QA are soon to release a SharePoint Governance training course aimed at the senior staff (QASPGV10), and stakeholders who reside in the "Information worker" resource pool.  This course is aimed at identifying the various areas of governance that SharePoint can respect and how you would implement it into your solution.  With governance in place, SharePoint training for end-users provides not only purpose for them but a guidance to the instructor too so they know what topics are key and what end-product the audience is expecting.

So when is this Governance course coming?  We hope to have it ready and scheduled by the beginning of December but Governance is a big monster to train and can create political discussions in the classroom so we have asked an expert experienced in the SharePoint Real-world field with Governance - Jeanne Hatton - to author the course.  The Governance course is aimed to provide the audience of awareness of what is involved in the "Front-end" are of governance that SharePoint essentially needs.  With this knowledge your SharePoint configuration and its purpose to the business staff will be made stronger.

So when you are looking for training in SharePoint, you do not want to ask a company "how should we use it to complete this goal" but rather, "this is how we work and how we define the procedure to complete this goal, now tell us how SharePoint can respect this?"

Customised training can take full advantage of implementing and teaching business and team governance to staff, so they are learning about SharePoint and encouraged to use it in a way that conforms to the business policies and procedures. 

So, happy planning and governing, and then  why not contact QA at info@qa.com or contact your QA account manager and enquire about customising SharePoint training to suit the way you work,

In my next blog I will help guide you to the "perfect customised SharePoint training experience" so stay tuned.