Using Governance to Manage SharePoint Adoption
To make the answers easy to find, publish them as a FAQ within SharePoint. When it comes to training, your governance plan becomes a core part of your plan. You can't just train people on how to use the basic SharePoint product and expect them to correctly apply it in their day-to-day tasks. Instead, train them on how they will use SharePoint to perform these daily tasks. For example, you might have an HR scenario such as, "Using SharePoint to manage the onboarding of a new employee." When you do this, you'll often get an unexpected benefit: users want to use the new system. By showing users how it will make their job easier (which hopefully is a business goal), you're able to sell them on it, making them advocates. This is the best way to address low adoption.
Can You Enforce It?
While you hope most people do the right thing, if you have no way to enforce a governance policy, it quickly becomes weak and ineffective. Within SharePoint, some policies can be enforced in an automatic way, whereas others must be enforced manually. For example, you can enforce what types of files (e.g. PDF or MP3) users can upload into SharePoint, but there is no automatic way to limit the total space used by a single user.
While SharePoint is an incredibly powerful product, there are a number of areas like this where built-in features do not provide any automatic enforcement. Fortunately, SharePoint is very customizable, and often a software developer can write custom code to supplement these limitations. Also, a number of third-party vendors offer products to help address many of the governance needs. Be sure to consider all of these when planning your governance enforcement.
As a general rule, you should not define governance policies in areas where they cannot be enforced. So, in the previous example, unless you have someone regularly monitoring a report on how much space each user has, you should not have a policy on it. This is a reason why your IT department has a seat on the governance board: He or she provides input on what you can and can't do with the system.
However, sometimes the limitation is not with the system, but with the organization itself. For example, you may need to have legal approve all portal content before it gets published. If your legal team is busy (isn't everyone?) and you publish a lot of content, this becomes a bottleneck and is impractical. When this happens, the governance plan is perceived as a bureaucracy, stifling productivity and adoption. If you really need to have legal approve all content, address the resource problem.
Keep The Governance Plan Fresh
One of the biggest worries with a governance plan is that it will be written, stored in a binder, and left on the top shelf to collect dust. For your governance plan to be your "how-to" guide, it must be kept up to date. Plus, I can guarantee that you'll be off target with your first version. You'll find that you can't enforce parts of it, and guidance in other areas is lacking.
Of course, how people use SharePoint will evolve over time. You'll encounter new and better ways to solve problems. You'll incrementally release new SharePoint features, and newer and more powerful versions of SharePoint will come out. Business processes will change, requiring you to adjust your policies. Remember that your plan started out small. Give your plan the necessary attention so that it grows with you. At a minimum, I would suggest your governance board meet quarterly to revisit and revise as needed.
Don't fear the governance plan—embrace it. It should be an intrinsic part of your deployment and operational guides. But don't just take my word for it, though: Do it for the right reasons. And when you do it, take a good, hard look at your organization to create a plan that will work today and can grow into tomorrow's plan. Your staff works hard already, so give them the guidance and structure that empowers them. That's the recipe for success.
To learn more about enterprise content management, and how AvePoint can help you unleash SharePoint's full ECM potential, please visit www.avepoint.com.