Site Managers and End User Expectations, Roles and Responsibilities
Guest Author: Richard Harbridge
A challenge with SharePoint for site managers, site administrators, or site owners is understanding their own role, it’s responsibilities, and what expectations come with being a ‘site owner, manager, or administrator’.
Before I go into what you can do from a Governance perspective, and related challenges I would like to use a quote from Mark Miller (from this article on user adoption and the success of this site ) that I think perfectly summarizes the ‘job’ of a site manager.
“Your job as a site manager isn’t to provide all the content for your site. Your job is to take care of and nurture those that will.” – Mark Miller
This is coming from a strong user adoption and cultivating contribution perspective but it’s a very important point. A site owner, administrator or manager (you pick the name) has a lot of extra responsibility that takes a lot of time and energy. They are often also the primary person who coordinates, supports, and evangelizes the site’s use. For the sake of consistency let’s use the “site manager” title for the rest of this article.
So what might a site manager do? They might…
- Handle access requests to the site. Providing the appropriate permission to the requesting user.
- Know how to better roll up, or organize content for the site so that important content, or often requested/accessed content is easier to find or retrieve.
- Provide users with containers or organized areas for their content contribution.
- Communicate the methods on how content can be added or how collaboration can be improved within the site.
- Encourage, solicit, or collate site membership feedback for review or communication to other areas of the business.
- Review site usage statistics
- To determine who the power users of the site are, and how they can help them, or what ideas they might have for improvement.
- To discover the most requested areas of the site or peak times when it is used to adjust navigation or scheduling of new information releases.
- To keep track of growth, relevance, and where people are coming from or going.
- Represent the voice for the site to level 2 and higher support groups for SharePoint (such as HelpDesk, Tactical Support Team, Tactical Operations Team, Tactical Development Team, or perhaps even the Business and Technical Strategy teams).
- Manage form templates for your site’s form libraries.
- Manage existing surveys and create new ones for the site membership.
- Manage existing document templates or help in the update process for these templates.
- Run exercises and activities to improve user adoption. Here are some simple examples:
- Highest contributor to a blog, discussion board, library, or list gets a prize.
- Nominations for the biggest contributor to the site’s community (Survey in SharePoint can help facilitate. Also rewards contributing to the site community.)
- Showcase a site member/employee once per month etc – “Meet the team” or “Meet Richard Harbridge” approach with stories, and information on recent successes, what they do, or personal stories/information to make it more personal.
- Scavenger hunt – Hide a reply somewhere in the many discussion threads, hide a document in a library, or something similar. First person to find it gets a prize.
- Etc
- Provide leadership and direction for the site.
- Serve as a major advertiser for the site.
- And more!
What support should a site manager get to support them in their role?
- End User Training (Absolutely depends on your overall strategy, expectations, roles and responsibilities.)
- How to contribute, and use the ‘core’ collaboration, and communication features of SharePoint.
- Examples of end user training topics:
- Navigation (Global Navigation, Quick Launch, Breadcrumbs, IE Bookmarks, Links, Using Help, Requesting Access, How to Email a Link to a Page, Document, or Site, etc)
- Document Management (Uploading documents, moving documents, explorer view, folder management, etc)
- Document Collaboration (Updating documents (check in/check out), last modified date, version history, etc)
- Alerts (How to create them in libraries, lists, folders, documents and items and how to manage existing ones, etc).
- Search (Site scope, library/list scope, specialized searches, advanced search, maybe also search alerts, etc)
- Connecting to Outlook (Calendars, Task Lists, Document Libraries, Contacts, etc)
- Site Administrator Training (Again, may be multiple subsets, and change based on overall support and training strategy.)
- How to manage navigation for their site (Global and Quick Launch).
- How to manage libraries for their site (Available types, create, update, delete, etc)
- How to manage lists for their site (Available types, create, update, delete, etc)
- How to manage views for lists/libraries (Available types, create, update, delete, personal/public, etc)
- How to manage pages for their site (Available types, create, update, delete, check in/check out and publish process for a page (Publishing Features if possible), etc)
- How to manage webparts on pages for their site (Moving webparts around, updating existing ones, perhaps focus on some most used ones, etc)
- How to review usage details, site statistics, and reports.
- How to use the recycling bin.
- How to manage permissions (How inheritance works and how to use it effectively, what is securable and how it can be secured, how to use groups, distribution lists, and other methods to make permission management much easier, etc)
- Basic workflows (out of the box content approval, or how to create and apply the other out of the box ones such as approval, feedback, three state, collect signatures, etc)
- And more…
- Knowledge of what other third party solutions may be available and how to use them.
- Understanding of the support process for their site.
- Availability of training material and further reading to improve their capability (Microsoft resources, company training materials, EndUserSharePoint.com (bit of a plug :P), and other wonderful online resources.)
- Immediate support for issues. (Don’t give the 911 call from a site manager a busy signal.)
- And more!
Holy smokes! That’s a lot of stuff, and we have barely started. It’s no wonder SharePoint can be really overwhelming for people. Not only are they often responsible for their normal work but now they might be taking on a whole bunch of other responsibilities. So how do you make it easier for them? You can make it easier through effective planning and governance as well as communication.
Planning for Site Manager’s, Expectations, Roles and Responsibilities
There is a lot I could go on about here but instead I am going to try and cover some high level important points to try and provide direction.
Who will manage your sites?
It’s not as simple as saying ‘Site Managers’ will manage your sites, or the SharePoint support team(s) will manage our sites (forgot to mention site managers are part of the SharePoint support groups.. but that’s a longer story). You need to think about the different types of sites you have, their objectives, purposes, and audiences then you can get an idea of what out of the above lists (and more) the Site Manager or Site Managers will be responsible for.
You might even need an entire Site Management team. Considering the incredible number of possible responsibilities, tasks, and areas of focus a Site Manager may need to work with. This can often greatly help and also increases ‘ownership’ and a feeling of commitment to a site from many people. (Team mentality and ‘team ownership’ can be a really good thing).
Plan for Scope/Size, Growth, Longevity, Availability and more…
One thing that is very important to think about when selecting site managers, training site managers, or thinking about the expectations and governance around them is the scope/size, growth, and longevity of their site. This is often based on the ‘classification’ of the site they own or manage.
Example: If the site is very large, with many contributors and has a large number of access requests on a constant basis then you will certainly want to consider a team of site managers rather than just one person, as well as backup site managers (especially if it’s a critical area, or requires high availability), etc. I have even seen organizations that have SLA like agreements that the Site Managers sign off on. At the same time simply providing some ‘rules of engagement’, supporting resources or expectations of use can help provide clarity around the topics mentioned in this article.
Plan for Common Requests…
There are patterns to site usage and what people do with certain ‘classifications’ of sites (defined by the Governance teams). Think about these common actions and focus on them first. Make sure you give the list of actions and expected responses to your site managers and how they can perform these tasks. It’s always better to have consistency when possible for how users engage site resources.
If you consider the number of challenges a typical user faces, the easier, more consistent, and natural you can make the process/procedure the better it will be. Remember you don’t have to plan for everything here. Realistically that would be impossible, so put your time and energy into outlining the most popular actions, and most requested ones first.
Challenges…
There are numerous challenges you experience around assignment of site managers. Sometimes it can be very hard to find the ‘right kind’ of ‘super user’ or a person that can fufill many of the expectations I outlined earlier. Keep in mind a ‘site owner’ or someone who approves and is the representative for the site may not be the same person as the Site Manager (if desired). Someone with technical skill who is a bit more ‘savvy’ may be a better person to give many of the Site Management responsibilities too, while contact, co-ordination, and other activities might be run by a different site owner (or even site ‘secretary’).
Sometimes a site’s scope may be very limited or small so it can seem difficult assigning a site manager. It is still very important to do this though as it ensures someone owns management of the area. Often a site manager can manage multiple sites if they are smaller/simpler as well.
Due to site sprawl it’s good to have points in the expectations stating that the site manager is in charge for any subsites unless otherwise stated. This helps clarify responsibility and again promotes a sense of ownership, control, and clarity for end users.
When planning anything around people it’s important to recognize that you need a succession strategy around the role. There should be a pre-defined (if possible) process for abdicating responsibility of the site management tasks, and should never be a site without a site manager.
The Site Manager doesn’t have to be the biggest contributor, or the most active person on the site. Often they might be, but this is certainly not a necessity. That being said if they are the owner or representative of the site it IS important to lead by example where possible.
What do you think?
So I think I have rambled on long enough now about Site Managers and many of the things they might do. Now I have two questions for anyone who reads this article:
What do you do as a Site Manager?
What did I miss in this article?
Hope this helps,
Richard Harbridge
Guest Author: Richard Harbridge
http://www.linkedin.com/rharbridge
Richard Harbridge is a really big geek in the GTA (Toronto, Ontario, Canada area) who is passionate about technology, communication, social media, psychology, personal growth/development and business (as well as about a million other things). Richard has worked extensively with SharePoint (multiple versions) working as a Lead Developer, Consultant, Administrator, Business Analyst, Project Manager, Quality Assurance Lead, Trainer and pretty much every other role imaginable.
Richard has a bunch of SharePoint Certifications and Achievements (MCTS Config WSS and MOSS, MCTS Development WSS and MOSS, BVPS), a bunch of business awards, and some other unrelated ones.
Very interesting article and as the only person SharePoint/Web Administrator I do it all. This is my ‘two cents’. We are currently using MOSS for our Intranet after ‘testing’ WSS 3.0 for one year and MOSS for 3 months. My position is very new and I had to plan, install, develop and conduct training for our hospital staff of approximately 4,000. I developed a ‘Train-the-Trainer’ for my 44 Site Managers. I developed ‘How-to’ slides and posted them on our IT department site. Did I mention that I also develop classes for Office 2007. We are still in transition from Office 2003 to 2007 (what fun)! What I do now to save some time is, whenever anyone has a ‘How-do I’ question I make a PowerPoint presentation and post it. One other thing I forgot, the hospital I work for is a military hospital and yes we do more with less! So my role is to teach, maintain, develop any other things that have to do with SharePoint or Web sites. The biggest challenge I face is getting the staff to use SharePoint and not to be afraid of it.
Frank above and I could be good friends as our SP experience is very similar. I started out as the “pusher” for SP utilization as a way to stop the “Doc Madness” as I call it with 100’s and 100’s of file server folders filled with duplicate\outdated\uncatalogued docs. So began the quest to move SP into the limelight (after sitting unused for almost a year) I began developing and testing on my own building a base Doc Library to get us started and have managed to spawn 8 departmental sites (under the IT umbrella) with their own owners driving them.
I am the overall Admin for my department but the sub-owners are taking a lot of the load off. (Note all of this was front end only with no formal WSS\MOSS training! I had a 10-min “This is sharepoint” session by the server admin to get started.)
Some really good and interesting stories guys! Thank you for the feedback.
Frank: There are quite a few SharePoint ’supermen’ I meet out there that do it all (admin, development, support, etc) and it’s definitely a challenge and a pretty incredible feat (when it’s still done so well). It’s great that you think and approach things the way you do because you are sharing your knowledge/understanding and working smart.
It should be interesting to see where things go in a few months when your users become more self managed, and capable of more with SharePoint. The user expectations and requirements will also grow with their knowledge though, so don’t worry you will have loads of work still. :P
Konrad: That’s great news as well (that you are getting more support and help from sub-owners). It can be a challenge when starting out with that, especially when you are the driving force for many of the changes and improvements.
The 10 minute “This is SharePoint” session is something that happens a lot and is a real shame. Sometimes the several days of “Everything SharePoint under the sun” can also be a poor approach because of knowledge saturation, attention span, and the breadth of how much your learning.
Personally I really like personalized training (from templates etc to improve manageability and reduce cost in time). Where your training focuses on a few small areas in a 45 minute session and uses real scenarios or examples to make it relevant to the trainees. This is followed by a work or exercise period where users perform activities to reinforce what they were just trained on. So as an example you might cover how to collaborate on documents (and that’s probably it). Where you go over check in/check out, alerts, version history, using existing templates, explorer view, etc etc. It all depends on the audience, but in my experience that seems to work fairly well.
Hope things continue going well,
Richard