Successful SharePoint Deployments

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) has undoubtedly exceed the expectations of early adopters, even Microsoft must have underestimated the potential of SharePoint (MOSS is the fastest growing server side product in Microsofts history). SharePoint is one of those rare products we get to see that can almost certainly be a great investment for organizations, but there have been several cases of “SharePoint casualties” interestingly most of these had nothing to do with technical aspects of SharePoint. We have been working with several customers on SharePoint implementations and have found common patterns that can ensure the success of MOSS deployment. Listing out all factors that can lead to a successful implementation can result in a humongous blog so instead of on discussing on what-to-do style this blog post will focus on a what-not-to-do style. (Note that this blog focuses only on MOSS when leveraged as a collaboration solution within the enterprise)

Major causes for SharePoint failures:

1) Cultural issues: Every organization is unique and has a different culture, unlike implementing transactional Line-of-Business systems like ERP, SCM, CRM etc, implementing a collaboration system like SharePoint has to also consider how people currently collaborate and how the implementation of the collaboration system will improve their productivity and overall collaboration levels– this would invariably hit organizational-cultural issues (you cant replace existing collaboration mechanism like email etc). Implementing a SharePoint solution also raises questions on the type of governance model – the collaboration solution must reflect how the organization is currently collaborating and extend it. Very tight governance will result in a difficult to use/grow solution and governing the system loosely will result in the solution being unmanageable and loosing value over time. Getting it right should be the first step and an ongoing process. Nothing worse than investing on a portal system and no one wanting to use it.

2) Big Bang Approach: Ok your company has invested in SharePoint, you have spent a good investment on implementation and you want the whole company to know about the portal and have all the employees start using it overnight. Wrong. Lets learn from the mistakes of SOA projects, most SOA projects have been implemented using the big bang approach (rolling out everything in one shot with extremely lengthy implementation cycle) big bang SOA implementations have almost always failed (giving SOA a bad name :) ). The best implementations are done iteratively over a period of time prioritizing on features that are important to end users, however its equally important that the focus should be on portal features that give the most visibility to stakeholder and provide highest returns on investments (many a times its good to look for the lowest hanging fruit).

3) Poor rollout strategy: Most non technical organization have hired external contractors to build the SharePoint portals however these contractors just build the solution and packed out, there is no internal knowledge with the organization how to use the solution and how it works. No SharePoint implementation is complete without a proper end user training of the solution and without setting up a team that will champion the portal initiative and train other knowledge workers. The rollout strategy should also take into consider the owners and stakeholders for the portal initiative and how stake holders are given periodic reports on various portal metrics (these are metrics that can justify the ongoing support and maintenance costs of the portal, cost center management etc). Last but not least its important to create a buzz around the portal initiative, this ensures that people in the organization (particularly if it’s a geographically dispersed org) know that the portal is a major and serious initiative (were talking of creating a buzz here not creating hype :) ), would be plain silly to have made a huge investment on a portal and not have people know about it.

There are several other small factors that can ensure a successful SharePoint implementation however the above 3 should provide you good guideline. Sure enough there are technical design considerations to be made for a successful SharePoint implementation but will leave that for another post. Making things MOSSible :) one step at a time.