Increasingly companies have adopted Governance as a way to control the roll out of SharePoint in their organisation. This has resulted in SharePoint Governance taking on a life of its own; with a proliferation of white papers, blogs posts, conference sessions, consultancy engagements and even training workshops dedicated to the subject. 

Ask yourself, do you have a Governance Plan?  How many meetings have you attended where a Governance Plan has been discussed?

The problem with Governance

The problem faced today is the term Governance has become a buzz word and is used to refer to a wide range of subjects, all of which leads to misunderstanding and miscommunication.  No one really knows what Governance actually means.  Often companies think that by creating a Governance Plan everything is covered and the SharePoint roll out will go without issue, much like the Project Manager who has to adjust the project plan to make it fit, just because you say it, doesn’t mean it’s true.

The term Governance has been morphed into an all encompassing process, predominantly written by IT departments or consultancies, covering everything from the Information Architecture through to the type of source control system that should be used.  Clearly these two topics are the domains of completely different areas of the business.

Why would a Content Author be interested in the way the organisation controls its source code?

Why would the development team Build Manager need to understand the rationale behind the use of a particular metadata field or structure to the portal?

Some clarity on Governance

The word governance derives from the Greek verb to steer

If we apply this definition of Governance to business and specifically the roll out of SharePoint we naturally look to the Governance Plan to steer the project in towards meeting the business objectives.  Governance articles often refer to the decision makers, the people who have the power and vision to make change.  These are the people who should define the Governance Plan, to provide a steer to the business, the same people who provide the statement of a quality policy and quality objectives in an organization adopting ISO 9001.

There are some very good white papers published that cover in detail the areas that should be considered as part of a successful rollout. Microsoft has a dedicated area on Technet, Governance Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007 which has links to some excellent resources; however this has a very IT focused view due in part to its own terms of reference.

It is very easy for the IT department or the external consultancy to use these guides as a blueprint for ensuring a successful SharePoint rollout. Many have already done this and a large number of them will be battling with controls and processes that seem work against the very reasons for adopting SharePoint in the first place. Remember that whole “steering” thing?

Putting Business back in Control

Business need to take control, they need to create and own the Governance Plan.   I don’t mean the 50 page Governance Plans being used today, I mean the plan that provides the steer, the plan that sets out the objectives and goals for the business to work towards and within.

At this point I want to use a term coined by Paul Culmsee, IT and Business consultant for Seven Sigma,  in his post ‘It’s all Joels fault’ where he discusses the same issues around the abuse of the word Governance, the term SharePoint Assurance.

SharePoint Assurance

By breaking down the areas that need process and management and delegating the responsibility for assurance to the relevant areas of the business it is possible to give the business back control of the SharePoint rollout.  By providing the business with the freedom and responsibility to utilize the platform as it was intended, to give them the power to change and adapt you will be better placed to achieve your business objectives. 

Allow the IT department to focus on the infrastructure, backup, disaster recovery.  I find it useful to see if IT can adopt a similar approach to an Exchange Server deployment where it is more common to focus on the core platform offering.

Within the software development world there is significant interest around agile development techniques.  Agile teams generally have more rigorous processes because the developers see the value in them, they continually inspect and adapt the way they develop software always looking at ways to do things better.  SharePoint has moved the goal posts in what can be achieved within the business, the tools and facilities exist to allow the business to develop solutions, to inspect and adapt, to own the process and constantly look for ways to do things better.

Rather than prevent the use of tools like SharePoint Designer because it is possible for someone to do something bad, adopt a policy where users are trained and empowered.  Don’t prevent teams from creating collaboration sites for ad-hoc working groups, but apply processes and auditing to monitor and review. 
In order to provide assurance adopt a similar policy of auditing that you would for a Quality Management System, which would take on the roll of validation, support and an element of training.

Summary

SharePoint Governance has come about because of the increased knowledge the industry has around the SharePoint platform and through a sharing of this knowledge and experience.  As with many terms like ‘web 2.0’ they can be mis-used and tend to lose their meaning. Hopefully we can start to recapture the meaning and adopt the right processes to give us SharePoint Assurance.

References and Further Reading

Microsoft Technet Governance Resource Centre for SharePoint
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb507202.aspx

Governance guide for Office SharePoint Server
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc718727.aspx

Joel Oleson: SharePoint Collaboration Governance Plan
http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=194

Paul Culmsee: The mother Hen Reflex
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governance

 

Guest Author: Andrew Woodward, SharePoint MVP
Andrew Woodward, SharePoint MVP, is founder and Principal Consultant at 21apps as small company focused on providing expert consultancy around the expanding SharePoint platform.  Andrew has a passion for agile development and is challenging the SharePoint community to adopt better development practices.
Blog: http://www.21apps.com/blog Twitter: @AndrewWoody