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Sep
8
SharePoint: Will the pain ever stop?
My six year old son got his finger caught in an expandable/collapsable step stool this weekend… the kind that has the exposed metal hinges, right where you want to put your hand to close the thing. Stupid design.
After the initial shock of pain, he gasped for breath and started crying, “Will the pain EVER go away?” That was an epiphany for me. We, as individuals, have to learn what is eternal and what “goes away”, as he said. I looked at his finger, saw there was no blood, but a diagonal black and blue mark was appearing on the ring finger of his left hand. I had him bend the finger to assure myself, and him, that his finger wasn’t broken. I then responded, “Yes, the pain will go away, but to help a little bit, let’s but it inside a glass of ice water.”
We stopped the swelling, and he was back to himself within five minutes, proud that he was able to recover so quickly and to realize, yes, pain will go away.
Whenever my eyes go glazey and I’m thinking hard, my kids, four and six years old, look at me and say, “You’re thinking about SharePoint again, aren’t you.” In this case it didn’t take my son long to realize the life lesson he had just learned was about to be turned into an example for SharePoint training. I guess I’m just too transparent.
When your End Users first start using a new technology, it’s a legitimate question, “Will the pain ever go away?” Especially with SharePoint, using a new paradigm of information access through metadata and filtered columns, it can initally seem as if the pain will never go away. It’s only through consistent usage, through context relevant training and hands on discovery, that most people will realize that the pain of discovery is worth the end result.
Learning to use SharePoint is not an intuitive process, although the marketing material has led us to believe that it is. If your End Users are having trouble getting their mind around how this software is supposed to make their life easier, if they push back hard and say, “I don’t need this. I’ve already got what I need”, what are you to do? In many cases, taking a one business problem and solving it through the use of the new technology, and then getting a few in-house evangelists to use it, might do the trick.
I’m currently working with a national client, building automated workflows to solve a document tracking problem. As we started to develop the solution, I told the business user to get a list of just three people she could trust to work with the system. Even with a very large company, you can start getting End User buy-in through incremental wins by producing simple, easy to understand solutions for typical business problems. At that point, the incentive to use the system overrides the inertia that is keeping an End User from mentally making the leap to the new system.
So when does the SharePoint pain go away. The pain goes away when a person realizes that the proposed solution will actually help them in the day to day business processes. The pain stops when the solution is used and evangelized by the core group of users who can help you with your solution adoption.
Hopefully, it won’t be necessary to get their finger caught in a step stool hinge before they realize the pain does go away.
When something is painful or unpleasant, there is a strong desire to return to ‘business as usual’. In other words, back to the comfort zone. The ‘art’ behind successful SharePoint projects is to push people outside their comfort zone, just enough that there is a new ‘business as usual’. Push too hard, too fast and people will always go back to their original comfort zone and avoid the stress.
This applies to all aspects of life. Ever had an argument with a colleague? Do you then tend to avoid them for a while?
This for me is the heart of the SharePoint governance challenge. The word govern comes from the latin word “to steer”, not to “to force”
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/07/03/the-secret-to-understanding-governance/
regards
Paul
Is it just me, or does the RSS feed for this site keep breaking?
Using Outlook 2007, I’ve had to delete my feed folder and re-subscribe twice in the past 2 weeks because new feed items were not appearing.
Joe – Not sure. I’ve been using twitter so much, I hardly ever look at feeds anymore. I haven’t heard of any problems, though, when it relates to the feed from EndUserSharePoint.com. — Mark
You are correct about wins within large companies. I have worked in several very large companies and have seen the same mistakes over and over. Some IT manager wants to look like a hero so they commit to some kind of “world hunger” massive customization project and use something like SharePoint as the platform. Then when it invariably fails or becomes a support nightmare, the platform is blamed and users cringe at using it going forward. The best wins are small ones. Organic growth is stronger. Pick a few small, yet visible, business problems that can be solved very quickly (not months, but weeks). Let those users be your evangelists. Rinse, then repeat. Eventually SharePoint will become baked in to the collective conscious of the organization and you win.
We’re in the “rinse” stage, as Jason called it, and trying to recover from a catastrophic event that impacts all of our PWA-based sites. The “flag ship” of our site collections is sailing better and gaining speed which, as the implementation lead and primary site collection admin, is becoming scarier to me by the day as my little team of 3 attempt to manage rapidly spreading growth pains in a government organization undergoing rapidly spreading change.