Mark Schneider's SharePoint Taxonomy and Governance Blog

A Project Framework Tuned for SharePoint Implementation Projects...

The VitalSkill cheat sheet (speedyproject) for understanding SharePoint project planning.  Note that this diagram shows where governance and taxonomy fit into the grand scheme of things, and what role they play in the SharePoint implementation and operations project.

Over the years I've managed a great many projects and programs.  The fundamental principles and best practices remain the same (see www.pmi.org) whether you are building a software system or a building a new bridge over the Mississippi river. 

However, having said that there is a need occasionally for fine-tuning project methodologies for a particular technology or task.  Not only do I have technology management experience with project budgets up to several hundred million dollars, I am also a fundamentally lazy man.  I believe in finding the simplest and most concise method for solving any problem.  I was also the lead architect for a $500,000,000 IT outsourcing project, so I have a decent handle on technology planning in general.  I also believe that laziness is a virtue in architecture, in that it encourages simplicity and elegance of design. 

Anyway, here is my project framework for SharePoint implementation projects.  When I developed this framework I had coffee with John Zachman on a couple of occasions and asked him how he created the Zachman framework.  for those of you who don't know, John Zachman is the grandfather of computer architects everywhere.  Way back in the day he created a simplified framework that would make it much easier to plan and organize technologies in an IT context.  He is something of a hero of mine, along with Grace Hopper who invented COBOL.  I ran into John Zachman a few times at architecture conferences and we seemed to get along pretty well.  For the price of a coffee in the morning, or a beer in the afternoon, he was more than happy to talk about clear thinking, technology planning, and dumb luck (all of which are necessary in developing a meaningful career in technology).

Well, I took John's principles to heart and added them to my own.  My goal was to come up with a simple reference tool that would make it much easier to organize a technology project.  I also wanted to make it easier for non-project managers to be able to sort through all the jargon and standards to understand what exactly is going on with their projects.  it is, in short, something of a cheat sheet on project management.

Here it is.  This is my standard project cheat sheet (which I lamely call speedyproject) adapted for use with SharePoint.  This little chart will help you organize your thinking with regard to SharePoint planning and implementation.  You can still use your favorite methodology.  This is not a methodology but a definition of concepts and how they relate-- in other words it is a taxonomy matrix for major project phases and activities.

Here is my matrix.  It also shows you how my Governance and Taxonomy Workshop fit into the project management cycle.  The Workshop gets your project initiated and moving forward in the context of SharePoint.

   

©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

So What do You Do if You Can't Afford a Small Army of Consultants?

My blog post on evaluating SharePoint consultants was only meant to draw attention to the fact that there is far more to the story than development and administration expertise.  So how do you proceed using SharePoint if you don't have an unlimited budget?

1. It is always a good idea to get some help kicking off your project, especially where new technologies are concerned.  That is the idea behind my Governance and Taxonomy workshop.  It is best when it is completed before you have rolled out SharePoint, but can be used to put SharePoint "back on track."  It covers Governance, Taxonomy and a Project Charter.  And it is not, by any means, the whole story.  That is why I hold it down to two days, to limit your cost.  This may seem like a luxury, but it is hard to have a project end well if it doesn't begin well.

2. Next it is a really good idea to get a SharePoint MVP to come in for A DAY OR TWO to help develop and validate your deployment plan, infrastructure,and capacity plan.

3.Invest in SharePoint Administrator Training. Rather than invest in more consulting, at this point it is important to develop your own staff.  This is true whether you have a staff of two or two hundred supporting SharePoint.  You need to make sure you have the internal expertise to keep SharePoint alive and cared for.  This takes about four to five days of training with a live instructor.  There is a definite mentoring process that is needed to gel the administrator's thinking and behavior patterns organized, so a live trainer is essential IMHO.

4. Invest in Site Administrator Training.  This end user training goes by many different names, but you are going to need to have intelligent and motivated business folk do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to creating and maintaining sites.

5. Invest in Developer Training.  Although I hammer away at the economics of custom development, it is an excellent tool for your organization, when it is properly used and implemented.  Again this is, in my opinion, best done with a live trainer.

5. Do invest in a few books.

6. Go as far as you can with the out-of-the-box toolset, templates and webparts.

7. Join a good User Group.  I can't emphasize the importance of this enough!

8. Buy your custom BDC tools, web parts, and master pages off the shelf.  Use Bamboo Solutions, Lightening Tools, and other reputable tool manufacturers.  Their stuff is usually pretty cheap.

9. Establish a good relationship with a consultant or consulting organization that has strong developer and administrator skills.  This is, at the end of the day, where you will need the most help.

10. LOB integration is probably not something to do right away, so don't worry about this one just yet.  this is definitely not a Mercury Capsule project.  It is more like a Space Shuttle project.

11. Make sure your other technology partners and vendors are bonafide Microsoft SharePoint partners.  When it comes to storage planning, you are going to have to rely upon your NAS or SAN vendor and they are going to have to understand SharePoint.

12. Do go to conferences where you can rub elbows with vendors and peers alike.

13. DO NOT fall for every snake oil salesperson you meet in the SharePoint Space.  If somebody has a whiz bang tool or application that magically solves all your problems for you, then you are going to want to validate that it actually works.  Rule of thumb--if an application or tool takes away the pressure to think through your organizations' management and technology issues, then it is most likely bogus.  You are still going to have to do the heavy lifting when it comes to thought and preparation.  Again, that is why I created the workshop.

14. MOST IMPORTANTLY - Start small!  Remember to build your Mercury Capsule first (a site or site collection), then your Gemini Capsule (a larger site collection or two) and then your Apollo Capsule (your first enterprise deployment).

15. Wait a while before you start building externally-facing solutions with SharePoint.  It is much less embarrassing to mess up internally than it is to do so in front of the whole world.

16. Find a graphics, marketing and advertising agency capable of creating and modifying Master Pages.

17. Treat your internal SharePoint people very well indeed.  They are part of the most employable technology profession on the planet.  If they are any good at all, someone else is going to hire them if they can.  So don't overwork them, undertrain them, and under support them.  If you ignore them they will go away.

©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

The Cost of eDiscovery - Between $5K and $7K per GB !

According to a recent article in Information Week

Even employing precise keyword searches,Verizon (NYSE: VZ) places the price of processing, reviewing, culling, and producing 1 GB of data at between $5,000 and $7,000, according to a study by the University of Denver's Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. (Click here for full article)

This means that a simple search appliance will, in the long run, be a very expensive solution to an organization's search requirements.  Search appliances are good but they can't do your thinking for you! 

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

Understanding Federated Governance

Confused by the term "Governance" where SharePoint is concerned?  The problem is that SharePoint is intended to delegate administration tasks out to groups of end users so that they can be self-governing.  To most of us in IT, it seems like we've given the asylum keys over to the mental patients.  How will we maintain order?

Enter the concept of federated governance.  SharePoint provides for administrative control through inheritance.  This means that any individual is able to act as administrator at a site they own and those that are attached below it as subsites.  So, in SharePoint there are a number of locations in the site structure that are critical to administrative control.  These provide ideal locations to establish self-governance opportunities for communities of end users.   

Here is how it works.  Above and outside the SharePoint environment is a "Policy Governance" board or team.  This is composed primarily of organizational policy makers from across the organization.  The Policy Governance Board should have no more than twelve members and ideally only seven.

The Policy Governance Board manages the Policy Taxonomy (or top-level taxonomy) that organizes policies and workflows for categories of information across the organization.  These taxonomy categories can be implemented as site collections or content types depending on the design of the SharePoint implementation.

The Policy Governance Board establishes and maintains business policies like document retention, approval processes for outwardly facing information, security models, handling of financial or human resources information and so on.  This is primarily a technology agnostic board that sets the "Business Policy Architecture and Business Policy Taxonomy for the organization.  This is the focus of my Governance and Taxonomy Workshops.

The IT Governance Board. This is the focus of nearly every other governance speaker and writer in the SharePoint universe.  This board may be a federation of infrastructure, support, operations, administration and development stakeholders.  The IT Governance Board owns the technology standards and best practices used to implement the policies of the Policy Governance Board.

Top Level Governance Board.  Each Top Level Site Collection has an owner who is reponsible for managing the subsites in his or her collection.  These are power end users and not controlled by IT.  They provide user support, mentoring, and administration for the site collection under their control.  All the Site Collection Administrators form a collaborative board to share ideas and problems across all the Top Level Site Collections.

Site Owners.  The Site Owners can form a collaborative group that shares information and ideas through the use of one or more team sites.

A Sketch of the Escalation Process.  Governance escalation occurs when a Governance Board needs to move a problem or idea "up" to another Board.  As an example, the Top Level Governance Board may see a need for a new business policy or taxonomy category to meet a need among the user community.  The request is submitted to the IT Governance Board to make sure it is feasible and necessary, and then it is escalated to the Policy Governance Board.

Federation refers to the cooperation of governance teams "vertically" through the chart above.  Collaboration refers to cooperation horizontally through the chart.

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

Viral Growth Patterns Teach Us a Few Lessons About SharePoint

The bottom line is that SharePoint will grow virally if it isn't properly managed.  Why?  Because people really badly need effective and agile collaboration tools.  You really can't blame the tool.  I imagine when Neanderthals first invented fire it probably spread like, well, like wildfire.  Two really bad approaches to managing viral growth are to: 1) do nothing and see what happens, or 2) lock it all down and prevent people from making their own sites.  For lack of a viable third option, most organizations have had to choose between one or the other.

Enter a governance model that provides both control and agility.  This new governance model is collaborative (meaning that everyone chips in and contributes to the governance process) and federated meaning that there can be a number of governance teams operating in cooperation with each other.

Like so much in the SharePoint world, there just aren't any good words to describe this new model yet.  We could call it Collaborative Federated Governance, but that is quite a mouthful.  So instead we all just tend to call it "governance" but that begs the question, what kind of governance? When we all get together and talk best practices the technical folk get frustrated because they want to talk technical standards.  Project folk want to talk project management standards.  What we need to remember is that Federated Governance means that each of these groups is vitally important in the grand scheme of things, and that we mean them all when we talk about SharePoint governance.

My Governance and Taxonomy Workshop refers to the Business Policy Governance Board which organizes and coordinates the activities of the various federated governance teams.  The Policy Taxonomy is the framework of information policies that provides the major requirements for things like retention and security processes.

The ultimate goal is to create a governance model where various stakeholders are able to make their own tactical decisions with the assurance that they are protected by a larger strategic framework.

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

Project Insanity

Continuing to do what you’ve always done while expecting different results is a form of organizational insanity.

Are you deploying SharePoint 2007 in order to correct the mistakes you made with SharePoint 2003?  Then make sure you take a different approach than you did before.  If you use the same approach to the project then you will get the same results, even though you are using a superior version of the product.

How do you make sure you have the right approach?

1. Governance and Taxonomy Workshop  Initiate your project properly with a "Governance and Taxonomy Workshop."  This gives you a governance plan, taxonomy plan, project charter and pilot project that will get you off to a great start.

2. Design and Architecture Session.  Bring in a Microsoft MVP from Mindsharp to make sure that you have a SharePoint architecture and design which will support your goals and objective.

Please email me at mark@vitalskill.com for more information.

 

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

Picking a Winning Pilot Project for Your SharePoint Implementation

Choosing a good pilot project is critical to the success of your SharePoint implementation.  Let's be honest about the real purpose of a pilot project.  You are trying to gain credibility for yourself and SharePoint in the eyes of the end users.  Frankly, most IT departments are trying to recover from one or two "less than perfect" implementations over the past couple of years.  The technologies being implemented were probably quite rigid and fragile, so IT had to over-control the project.  Despite the best efforts of everyone involved the project was most likely late, over budget, and didn't work very well.  If IT was especially well funded and had the support of senior leadership, then these problems were camouflaged or simply forgiven.

No, I'm not psychic and I am not thinking of you personally.  This is just the way things have gone for IT up until the introduction of SharePoint-class tools.  SharePoint really does change the rules and boundaries that have hamstrung IT departments for so long.

However, easy as SharePoint is to use, it is vitally important that you choose a small fast and impressive pilot project to begin with.  Choose something with absolutely no risk of failure and use it to catch the end user's imagination.  The slightest hiccup in your preliminary implementation will compromise your newfound credibility.

As I say in my workshop, NASA didn't start out building a moon rocket.  First they built the Mercury and made sure they could keep a guy alive in low Earth orbit.  Then they figured out how to get two guys up into space with the Gemini.

Do the same with your SharePoint implementation; start really small and widen your scope slowly.  Build fast and simple solutions.  Build and master your Mercury project before you build your moon rocket.

Ragan Media / Newsgator Webinar on SharePoint Secrets Went Well

It was an honor to speak on Governance and Taxonomy during Ragan Media and Newsgator's online seminar "SharePoint Secrets Revealed" this week.  Here is a link to the slides that I presented.

(CLICK HERE FOR COPIES OF MY SLIDES)

(CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE REGAN MEDIA SITE FOR THE WEBINAR)

(CLICK HERE TO GO TO     RAGAN MEDIA)

(CLICK HERE TO GO TO     NEWSGATOR)

The 2008 SharePoint Best Practices Conference was a Huge Success!

It was wonderful meeting so many of you at the 2008 SharePoint Best Practices conference in Washington D.C. this week!  Many thanks to both Mindsharp and Microsoft for making this conference happen.

It is amazing how much we all learn from each other at an event like this.  Not only that, but the SharePoint community seems to be unusually full of really great people.

I had the honor of presenting sessions on best practices and strategies for SharePoint in the following areas:

1. Organizational Change                    (CLICK HERE FOR COPIES OF MY SLIDES)
2. Taxonomy and Governance              (CLICK HERE FOR COPIES OF MY SLIDES)
3. Project Management                       (CLICK HERE FOR COPIES OF MY SLIDES)

It was really fun speaking to overflow crowds and even having an "encore" presentation on Taxonomy and Governance.  I've been fascinated with Taxonomy and Governance topics for a couple of decades, and now that SharePoint has focused attention on these two topics it is nice to have some company!

I'll be blogging over the next couple of weeks on topics that arose from the conference, and follow up questions I've received from varioius folks during and after the conference.

(CLICK HERE FOR MINDSHARP)

(CLICK HERE FOR SHAREPOINT BEST PRACTICES CONFERENCE)

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

Getting IT and marketing on the same page

Somewhere I read that in order to be able to understand a newspaper, the reader must already know at least 70% of the information being presented.  Without this common 70% the reader simply can't establish enough context to interpret what is being said.  The individual words may be known but the meanings and conclusions will be lost or misunderstood.  Whether or not 70% is the magic number, I don't really know but the principle is valid.

Next time you sit in a meeting with both business stakeholders and IT professionals, listen to each group and see if they have established 70% common ground with the other listeners.  Business folk complain that IT is speaking "technobabble" and IT complains that the business folks "just don't get it."  Is it any wonder that the vast majority of IT projects are considered failures?  Add to this the fact that both parties may kick off the project without even attempting to define measurable requirements, and it is a wonder that IT projects can get closure at all.

The power of a taxonomy, simple as it is, is to provide a common framework or context for every participant in the discussion.  The top level taxonomy provides the big bucket definitions that provide context for everyones words and documentation. It is pretty hard to communicate across disciplines without a high-level taxonomy providing common ground.

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved