EndUserSharePoint.com: SharePoint is so easy anyone can do it… not.
This plea for help came in earlier this morning. I hear this about once a week, so I thought I’d see how other people are selling up the food chain when it comes to telling management “We can’t do it alone!”
Please point me to the best, most persuasive article or case statement for bringing in an experienced consultant to advise us on best practices for building out first real, non-beta MOSS environment. Our executives think we can do it on our own and we DISAGREE. There is so much at stake. Help me make the case to budget some $$ for a knowledgable mentor at this crucial time. Thanks!
Response from Mark Miller:
You are not alone in your frustration in convincing upper management that SharePoint is not a simple plug ‘n play. I get requests for consulting engagements every week, helping people get on their feet because there has been no internal person trained and given hands-on experience to implement a solution of any complexity. Microsoft has done too good a good job selling the idea of self maintaining environments.
I’ll start by pointing you to two articles, one by Bob Mixon and one by Robert Bogue. These won’t help you sell the idea of hiring a consultant as much as show management how complex the process becomes and that it is imperative to have some experienced help when planning the implementation of your site:
- SharePoint 2007 – Site Collections and When to Use Them
- Whitepaper: Increasing SharePoint Engagement
Bob Mixon is your main resource for Information Architecture, which is critical before you even start to build your site. Robert Bogue is the author of The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users. He has many articles on his site that might help show management this is not simply a matter of opening up a site and letting people have at it.
Anyone else? Where do you turn for resources? Have you hired a knockout consultant that really put you on track and was able to get you up to speed in the process? How did you get over the initial hump when implementing your first SharePoint site? Inquiring minds want to know…
Thank you- I am looking forward to these replies. This is a hot topic for me right now.
Nancy, you are quite right. I don’t have time to get into a long response right now, but I can share two quickies.
I worked with a client last year who had rolled out SPS 2003. It was introduced to a small group, it grew and grew and GREW and next thing, it was all over the place. No standards, almost no useful governance. Everyone was doing their own thing, their own way and most if it in a wrong/inefficient manner. That client contracted with us to move them to MOSS and we introduce real governance, a good information architecture, etc. These kinds of things take time and experience to learn. SharePoint is great in the sense that with very little knowledge, you can get up and running with doc libs, checkin/checkout, approval workflow and the like. However, it’s terrible because that stuff is so easy to do wrong and then replicate over and over and over again.
That “over and over again” part brings me to my second point, which is that I saw a client recently who for some reason created an entire content type hierarchy based off a task list. They took the task list, removed most of the columns and then add a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with tasks. The implementors obviously understood some of the use of content types, but had no clue and now there are 10’s of thousands of docs out there with this wacky setting.
Good luck!
I’d say that you CAN roll out SOMETHING without any SharePoint expertise, so in one sense they’re correct…but the prevailing wisdom is that doing so will cost you more later.
And by cost, think more in the sense of “cost of reprogramming everyone” instead of money. Mental energy, not cash. But yes, cash too.
As one on the “knockout consultant” side (hopefully!), we are seeing that not only do companies need help in getting their SharePoint implementations up and running smoothly, they are asking for our help with everything from governance to rollout strategies to user adoption to training. SharePoint can be overwhelming from much more than a get-one-setting-wrong-during-setup-and-spend-many-hours-troubleshooting perspective. It spans a lot of competencies and can sometimes involve a good deal of process change. I, too, am very interested in reading more comments from the “client” side.