Governing the SharePoint 2010 Ecosystem : Creating the Governance Plan (part 1) - Reviewing the Vision and Scope Documents

The Importance of Governance

Is governance something that needs to be implemented with SharePoint, or should the SharePoint environment be a place for creativity and freedom? Although cases can be made for lack of structure, most organizations don’t need to think for too long before they can come up with examples of IT projects that could have gone better and produced better results, and of technologies that failed to deliver the functionality that was expected. A governance plan must carefully balance user innovation and freedom versus manageability and support.

An almost universal experience is that of data repositories that have not had the proper governance, whether it be paper-based files, file shares, or the email environment, and these generally tend to be inefficient and sources of contention. There are many strong reasons for putting governance in place for any applications, three of which follow:

• Although maintenance costs of “unmanaged applications” seem low initially, the impact on the organization can be significant in the long term in less tangible ways. User complaints about “not being able to find anything,” or not understanding the purpose of different applications through lack of training, or not being able to get support when issues are encountered, erode the level of confidence in the application and ultimately in IT.

• Unmanaged applications over time will either become abandoned or fail to garner user adoption. Consider a poorly managed intranet. It may have cost a considerable amount of time and money to create, and there may be recurring software costs and resources dedicated to keeping it running, but without appropriate governance, it can become disorganized, the content stale, and users unhappy with levels of support provided.

• Unmanaged applications are difficult to secure. If policies for entitlement and rights are not well defined from the beginning, securing vital corporate assets can be difficult later on. It is typically harder to take away user privileges and tools than just to control what is provided to begin with.

SharePoint is a powerful tool with tremendous potential. By spending time prior to or during the implementation of SharePoint 2010 on the governance plan, IT can help ensure that the project is initially perceived as a success, that the environment offers a well-defined set of tools to end users, and that it will be managed over time as it evolves.

A final thought for this section is that the governance plan does not need to fall into place all at once. There can certainly be phases to a governance plan, as there are phases to technology implementation projects.

Creating the Governance Plan

Governance is the process of governing, or managing, the SharePoint environment, which consists of hardware, software, data, processes, and people. Determining the right level of governance for the organization requires an understanding of the goals of the SharePoint 2010 infrastructure and related projects. If the SharePoint environment is being built to simply provide My Site sites for employees to get to know each other better, the goals are quite different from an implementation where SharePoint houses the corporate Internet site and allows customers to conduct monetary transactions. Therefore, a key step is defining the governance plan from a high level that takes into account the goals for the SharePoint implementation and sets forth a plan of action for ensuring that those goals will continue to be met after the “go live” of the SharePoint environment.

This section discusses the importance of having vision and scope of work documents in place before diving into the governance plan, and provides recommendations on a starting point for the governance plan creation process through a visualization tool, and then moves into the components of the governance plan.

Reviewing the Vision and Scope Documents

Before beginning the governance plan, the vision and scope of work documents should be dusted off. If they don’t exist, these elements need to be defined. Even for the smallest implementation, documenting the vision and the scope of work are critical factors for success, even if each is made up of a few bullets on a Post-It. The vision document should provide high-level goals and objectives for the project, whereas the scope of work document should describe the tasks to take place, timeline, roles and responsibilities, communications plan, training, and support. These two documents provide the foundation for the governance plan.

It is understood that the temptation to skip the documentation process is very strong, but to show how simple this can really be, here is a simple vision and scope of work statement that provide enough basic guidance to develop a governance plan:

• Sample vision statement— The goal of SharePoint 2010 at Company ABC is to provide a better alternative to our current intranet and file share while providing enhanced collaboration tools.

• Sample scope of work summary— SharePoint 2010 will be implemented by internal IT resources, with assistance from subject matter experts in a phased approach. The phases will be proof of concept (POC), pilot, implementation/migration, and finally governance and support. Best-of-breed backup, management, and add-on web parts will be identified in the POC phase. Documentation of server builds and recommended best practices for maintenance will be included, as will knowledge transfer to internal IT resources.

Guiding principles and steps such as these provide direction to the project and define basic milestones. Without at least a basic and agreed-upon foundation of vision and scope, the chances of a successful project are reduced; in fact, even determining whether the project was or was not successful will be difficult, because the success criteria and milestones were never set.