Rescuing SharePoint Projects

Let’s be honest, SharePoint implementations typically aren’t cheap investments, especially when you factor in the licensing and overheads. Committing to a SharePoint implementation carries with it the responsibility to make sure you get it right. You want to make sure your provider has the experience.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to spend the time up front getting the design of the SharePoint solution right. Your provider should have the experience to guide you through the preparation, planning and scoping of your deployment, determining the functionality for implementation carefully.

An experienced consulting provider can evaluate and work within the platform, deliberately playing to the application’s many strengths and avoiding its weaknesses. Furthermore your provider should have enough experience to understand when a product is the right fit, and if it’s not, providing alternatives even if it means losing the business.

Experience in your industry and understanding of typical disablers is advantageous.  Obviously industry specific solution accelerators enable you to rapidly bring concepts to fruition.

Ultimately, your provider should have the experience to ensure you don’t transfer existing problems to SharePoint and expect miracles. By taking a mature approach and asking the right questions with the right people, it positions the vendor to actually give you an indication of outlay and reward.

Once you have selected a provider and you are in your planning phase, it is time to consider User Adoption.The greatest adoption step you can take as a project team is to collectively author an adoption strategy. Let’s put it this way, you can have the best software in the world, with the most sophisticated collaboration features, glamorous look and feel, detailed analytics or mind blowing integration - but if people don’t use it, it isn’t going to add value. So the most critical factor for software success is effective user adoption. The phrase “if you build it, they will come” just doesn’t apply, you need staff to understand the change SharePoint will bring and what is in it for them.

If the SharePoint project you had implemented is not meeting your expectations there are ways to rectify the situation. Professional Advantage is running an upcoming online event where we will cover:

• Common reasons SharePoint projects fail
• Strategies to increase staff adoption rates
• Ways to quantifiably measure SharePoint usage
• Examples of projects we have rescued

Register at: www.pa.com.au/rescue

Tuesday 24 April, 2012