Author: Lee Reed

Train beyond Your Users Education Plateau

Training your users on ‘SharePoint 101’ topics is only the first in a multi-step process to get people into the collaboration mindset.  After the initial training has occurred, make certain that you have a game plan to train your users to move beyond what they already know about SharePoint.  It’s your responsibility to educate them on the power of the tool and show how it can be applied to streamline business processes.  After your users have gone through their initial SharePoint training they will generally retain about 35% of what was presented.  They will take that 35% and reduce it to the 28% that is more applicable to their needs and may have difficulty moving beyond that 28%. 

It’s your job, over a period of time, to move them beyond that 28%.  You can do this by offering things such as SharePoint lunch-and-learn sessions or by creating a brief video to show them an interesting capability of SharePoint, such as the benefits of version control, exporting a list’s contents to Excel or how to insert HTML code into the Content Editor Web Part.  Unlike the SharePoint 101 training that was offered on a single day over several hours, this continuing training should be offered in shorter time periods (30 minutes or less) with higher frequency (once every two weeks or so).  Training your users isn’t a 100-yard sprint, it’s a marathon.

Provide a SharePoint Sandbox for Experimentation

As users are being educated on SharePoint it’s important for them to have a ‘safe’ place where they can use the platform and educate themselves on what it can do.  Providing your users with a sandbox area is a key part of the learning process.  SharePoint isn’t a tool that can be completely learned in a single training class and then immediately implemented to resolve business challenges.  It requires hours of hands on experimentation mixed with trial and error.  This is a vital part of the learning process.  Without a sandbox, your users will be unsuccessful when trying to translate a business challenge to the platform’s features.

A sandbox site is easy to create, as well.  Simply create a team site within your SharePoint environment.  Apply permissions to the site so that the general user community is unable to access it.  Off of that site, create a team site for each of your business people that will be working with SharePoint.  Give them ‘Full Control’ to their own site and ‘Contributor’ permission to the ‘main’ team site.  Setting up your SharePoint environment in this way allows the ‘main’ team site to be a meeting place where they can post questions and collaborate with one another as they learn the platform.  The sooner you get your user community supporting one another the sooner you will see your SharePoint environment take off!

IT’s Goal should be a Handoff of SharePoint to the User Community

Information workers flourish when the IT department empowers them through the use of tools.  Therefore, IT’s goal for SharePoint should be an eventual handoff of the creation and management of sites to the user community with the IT department providing support and oversight.  IT’s involvement after a deployment (within the first 3 months or so afterward) should move from daily involvement and education to weekly oversight and the strategic planning of rolling out new features.  Don’t assume that your users won’t be able to understand how to use SharePoint Designer to create a workflow or convert a list to XSLT format.  Open up the more powerful capabilities to those that are showing they are truly grasping the platform’s power and you will be astonished at the solutions that are created.

Internal User Groups – Don’t simply attend, Get Involved!

As you build a community of users around SharePoint, consider creating an internal user group to help foster the communication of what the platform can do.  During these internal user groups, allow the users to present the solutions they have built.  This will work to create a culture of community and support within your company.  It’s essential that the users drive the content of the group discussions as well as the presentation topics.  The information technology department should participate to provide guidance, education and to act as a subject matter expert on SharePoint.  Ask the user community what you can do to help them utilize SharePoint and then act on their suggestions.

Author: Lee Reed

Lee is a SharePoint Consultant in Atlanta, GA and has held technology leadership positions in the healthcare, commercial real estate, multifamily, consulting and legal industries.

He is laser focused on assisting companies to leverage their technology investments with a driving passion around demystifying technology.