Introduction

SharePoint implementations sometimes put the cart before the horse: Installing SharePoint and then looking for problems to solve. I was lucky enough to work with a client who realized that this would be a mistake. Instead, they brought in executives from across the country to discuss pain-points, needs and desires from the perspective of their business units.

We were there to facilitate the meeting and capture the results. In this week’s article, I will show you how I used MindManager to capture the discussion and then prioritize the results.

Setting Context

While conducting the SharePoint brainstorming workshop, we wanted the stakeholders to tell us about their issues.  Additionally we had to set context around the types of problems to be solved. For example, we were not asking about problems with the telephones or accounting systems.

In order to set the proper context, we started with a broad overview of what SharePoint is and what types of problems it is best at solving. We did NOT demonstrate SharePoint or drill down into details of the technology.

Brainstorming

Once the context was set, we started a series of brainstorming workshops and targeted each workshop to a specific area such as collaboration or records management. Because there was a lot of overlap, we weren’t very strict about enforcing the topic areas.

We created a sub-topic for each participant. This sometimes called for us to jump around as different people chimed in, but we wanted to record who had made which requests.

See below for a simplified version of the initial brainstorming map. For simplicity, I am not showing the various workshop areas.

Initial Brainstorming Map

Prioritization & Analysis

After the workshops were complete, we expanded the map and worked through each node, asking the team to set the priority for that item to “1”, “2”, or “3”. Sometimes there was quite a bit of discussion about the relative priority level of an item. If consensus was not reached, the project sponsor was the final arbiter.

For the final pass through, we assigned each item a rough “level of effort” setting using the colored flags.

Prioritized and Flagged Items

After capturing everyone’s requirements, prioritizing and flagging them for complexity, we used MindManager’s outline view to get a summary of the results.

Outline View (Summarized Results)

One final step that was taken by the client, and which I have now permanently borrowed, was to use Excel to capture the results in a way that illustrated the priority and the difficulty level of each item. This spreadsheet made it very simple to sort the results by priority and effort, giving the customer an easy to comprehend summary of the results of the brainstorming effort.

Summary Brainstorming Workshop Results.

Conclusion

In this article and the one from last week, we have seen a couple of approaches to prioritizing SharePoint requirements.  Last week we looked at getting agreement from a couple of key stakeholders when we were already quite far down the road of defining what SharePoint would do.  In this week’s article, we examined a much earlier stage of project prioritization; one that takes place before the client really has an idea of what SharePoint is and what types of problems it could solve.

Next week, we will look at document taxonomies and how MindManager can assist with this difficult process.

Author: Ruven Gotz

Ruven Gotz is a senior consultant with Ideaca, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in Toronto. For the past five years he has been focused on delivering award-winning SharePoint solutions (most recently, a Microsoft Impact Award for Information Worker Solution of the Year, 2008).

Ruven’s blog is at http://spinsiders.com/ruveng and you can follow him at http://twitter.com/ruveng.