SharePoint Knowledge Base

Governance is a blueprint for how your portal will be managed. It usually is abandoned after a bad start, but these posts about governance will share our wisdom as SharePoint consultants and aim to help you make it as "simple as possible. "

Never use the word "governance" again (to your company). Steering committee sounds like something much more fun to be on. Right?

Keep it Alive

To be useful and effective, your governance plan needs to remain "alive." Be sure that you have a plan for keeping your document up-to-date, especially as policies change over time. Remember to do the following:

• Establish a governance plan to ensure quality and relevance of content and to ensure that all users understand their roles and responsibilities.
• Make sure that you have a Governance Board or Steering Committee with a strong advocate in the role of Executive Sponsor.
• Keep your governance model simple. Solutions need a strong governance model, but they don't need complicated models with lots of bureaucracy.
• Don't make the solution itself more complicated than it needs to be. Be careful about "over designing." Just because SharePoint has a cool feature doesn't mean that you need to deploy it – at least not right away.
• Ensure that all users with design or "full control" privileges have internalized your design guiding principles and that content contributors understand guiding principles related to content.
• Think about how you will ensure compliance with your governance plan over time, particularly for highly visible sites. You may want to carefully monitor and review some sites and only spot check others.
• An effective governance plan doesn't have to constrain every move – it has to provide guidance to users to ensure that your solution remains effective and vibrant over time.

Typical Issues Breakdown by Audience Groups

• IT department - health of server, backups, antivirus, patches and general server maintenance
• Business Users - establish branding guidelines, QA testing protocols after new workflows are provisioned
• SharePoint Administration - the day-to-day mapping of business requirements to SharePoint features

The second post can be found here and the third post can be found here.

We love helping with SharePoint and it's all we do so feel free to contact us!

Mention this post and we'll send you a white paper on all of the ways to keep SharePoint simple!