Governance is a blueprint for how your portal will be managed. It usually is abandoned after a bad start. These posts about governance will share our wisdom as SharePoint consultants for literally decades to make it as simple as possible.
Creating SharePoint Governance
Governance is a set of rules and procedures put in place to help inform deployment, configuration, and management of SharePoint. Proper SharePoint governance assigns responsibilities to various members of the organization to ensure that SharePoint performs well, and that business alignment occurs. In short, SharePoint governance determines how SharePoint will run, who will do it, and what equipment will be used.
SharePoint systems can grow quickly and become unwieldy. If administered wisely, SharePoint can be a tremendously powerful resource. And that is why a SharePoint governance plan is essential. Its guidelines and a blueprint for holding the whole operation together, and can also serve to measure the success of a SharePoint installation.
We suggest - keep it simple and take it one piece at a time. Before we jointly enter this virtual restaurant of an all-you-can-eat buffet of technology solutions we need some plans. Who's ordering, who's paying, and who gets to decide if the food is unworthy and should go back to the kitchen? Start the Governance in pieces, and don't try to attack the whole thing at once. What's important is not to get caught up in little details and focus on providing a set of rules to help standardize the use, maintenance and customizations of your SharePoint.
The fundamentals for all intranets:
- Provide an enterprise front door
- Provide trusted information
- Deliver internal communication
- Foster staff engagement
- Foster collaboration
- Promote the organization's culture
Leading edge thinking that delivers business value:
- Enhance knowledge management
- Streamline business processes
- Improve customer service
- Mitigate business risks
- Provide 'anywhere' productivity
There is no need to over complicate what a SharePoint Steering Team. A Governance plan is a set of rules that help facilitate the use, maintenance and operations of your SharePoint. The Governance plan helps set expectations and guidance for your team as well as the end users.
Most Governance plans try to do or say too much and enumerates all the control mechanisms and their settings. The result, no one reads it's because it's all about SharePoint lingo and switch settings.. Most start on TechNet page dedicated to SharePoint Governance. The information Microsoft provided is amazing, but it has way too much content which leads the person in charge of Governance to overdo it.
We suggest an alternative - a Wiki of topics in plain language that is written for the business needs and is not filled with tech jargon. We have started one that addresses topics from 1.) IT department, 2.) Business, and 3.) SP admin perspectives. This enterprise Wiki can easily link your pages. Attack the governance by topic and have tag for each Wiki identifying the "topic" pages. WHAT ARE YOUR
TOP CHALLENGES GOVERNING SHAREPOINT
The first post can be found here and the third post can be found here.
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