Don't Toss the Grenade Over the Wall! It Will Blow Up!

I attended a presentation at the Mindsharp Best Practices Conference titled "Understanding Change, Power, and Conflict in Your SharePoint 2007 Deployment." The presenter was Mark Schneider who has over 30 years experience specializing in strategic technology planning and governance.  He really knocked the ball out of the park on this one.  Having been a SharePoint administrator for many years previously, he really brought to light why many SharePoint deployments fail and the preventative steps you can take to avoid this from happening.

First of all, SharePoint is a disruptive tool.  It changes your business and threatens your end users.  Fact of matter, workers DO NOT LIKE CHANGE.  SharePoint implementations will directly affect both your business processes and your people that perform them.  And what do your people really care about at the end of the day; paying their mortgage and feeding their families.  This new way of doing business and process changes really need to be balanced to keep social order within the workplace.

How Do You Make This Change Successful?

• Get a Powerful champion (CEO or high-level business sponsor)
• Get Grassroots support (make sure they know you aren't out to make their jobs harder)
• Make sure your budget is Approved and Funded
• Document clear and objective goals
• Maintain control over the project

What Do You Do When Your People Perceive SharePoint as a Threat?

• Identify how your organization will react
  • Identify your opponents (they are least likely to adopt)
  • Determine your opponents needs and make sure you meet them
  • Invite your opponents to initial planning activities (this will give them a sense of ownership)
  • Always be humble and invite criticism
• Fail on the whiteboard, not in production

What Are Some Tactics to Remove SharePoint as a Threat?

• Training, Training, Training - end-users, power-users, champions, IT
• Blogs - get your champions and power sponsors involved
• Examples - start with a small department and show your end users how SharePoint works and why it's beneficial to them
• FAQs - invite and accept all
• Testimonials - take every chance you can to promote positive experiences
• Dialogues - maintain open lines of communication around your project and be very candid

OK, so we've mitigated the threat of SharePoint as something that IT is just going to throw over the wall, users won't like it or adopt it, and its just something that the company has wasted more money on...at least we've attempted to mitigate this.  Now let's understand some other tactics that need to be put in place to make your deployment a success, such as governance and an effective communication plan.

How Do You Establish Collaborative Governance?

• Establish a team across the organization - get high-level business user, information workers, etc. involved
• Review planned changes from a variety of perspectives - everyone does business in different ways, understand this
• Get input and ownership from all groups impacted by the change - no surprises
• Ensure you have awareness and advocacy within impacted groups
• Gain trust from all groups impacted - remove the "us vs. them" mentality

How Do You Establish an Effective Communication Plan?

• Over communicate - you can never provide enough information
• Always provide candid responses to questions - don't hide anything
• Communicate any problems before others find them - OK, so there's a problem, but you've still that trust level established
• Always have answers for why changes are being made - don't just use the IT knows best excuse
• Have applicable and understandable answers to the "What's In It For Me?" question - this will go a long way

So, in review, the following steps will aid in a successful deployment and increase end-user adoption for your new SharePoint deployment:

1. Over communicate
2. Keep your plans sensible
3. Establish an effective governance team
4. Training, Training, Training

Here's an excellent Microsoft-provided resource to get you started:

GEAR Up
"GEAR Up is an online content tool that will assist IT professionals and business managers to find timely resources and guidance through phases of a typical SharePoint Server 2007 deployment cycle: Get Ready, Engineer, Adopt, and Release.  Each phase relates to end user adoption of SharePoint Server 2007."