Author: Lee Reed

Fostering a culture of collaboration means much more than just educating professionals on what SharePoint can do and how it can be utilized to make their job easier.  It means supporting them in their efforts and helping them apply the technology to their unique business requirements.  Don’t speak to them in generalizations.  Speak to them with specifics about how it will support the work they do.

Create a culture of Sharing Successes Using SharePoint

One way to foster a culture of collaboration is to share the successes that departments are experiencing as they implement and use solutions built with SharePoint.  In an environment that is not familiar with electronic collaboration, information regarding successes and wins will help people have confidence that the tool will transform the way they do things.  In a collaborative environment, this information should be socialized so that others can learn from it. 

A culture of sharing the successful use of SharePoint can be something as simple as a one-page white paper or maybe even a Podcast interview with the person that built a solution that is doing well in their department.  It doesn’t have to be a grandiose investigation as to why the solution is working, it just has to be available for people to read, easy for them to understand and help them map their ‘current state’ to a ‘future state’.

Highlight Creative and Interesting Solutions

As you find people that are creating creative solutions to challenges in your business share those with your other departments.  Highlighting creative solutions to business challenges, and providing that information to the larger organization, dramatically decreases the learning curve people experience when applying SharePoint to their needs.  SharePoint can be very challenging to learn and understand but as one learns the basic through trial and error, reading SharePoint blogs and books and attending a SharePoint Saturday or two it becomes an fun challenge to come up with a solution for a particular need. 

As these unique solutions surface make sure that others know about them, understand how they were built and can recreate them within their department.  Which leads to my next point: how you can socialize these solutions to your user community.

Scheduling User Meetings with a New Member Presenting each Meeting

Internal user group meetings for your content owners and departmental collaboration leaders will help them determine how SharePoint can be applied to their needs as well as make connections between people that are building interesting solutions with SharePoint.  This forum also gives talented solution builders an opportunity to shine in front of their peers and share what they been creating and implementing. 

Held once a month or four times a quarter, internal user group meetings serve to educate the rest of the community on what SharePoint can do.  Don’t forget that your users might be intimidated by your (IT’s) knowledge of SharePoint and that they may feel more comfortable asking those that have gone through the learning curve from an end user standpoint their questions.  Remember, it should be IT’s goal to perform a hand off of SharePoint to its user community and internal user group meetings are a great way of facilitating this.

Add SharePoint Content Owner Responsibilities to Job Descriptions

As the saying goes, “That which gets measured, gets managed.” Adding SharePoint content owner responsibilities to an individual’s job description helps to focus a content owner’s efforts on the SharePoint platform and assists in the management of information being stored on the system.  A content owner for a department, the person that manages SharePoint for that department, will need time to learn SharePoint and become proficient in its application against business challenges. 

By adding SharePoint responsibilities to an individual’s job description, you ensure that this learning and experimentation time becomes part of the work they are responsible for.  It also empowers them to respond to their manager that they need time to work on and learn the features of SharePoint in order to fulfill their job description requirements.  Quite simply, without this focus, SharePoint will not reach the adoption level that you desire for the product.  Work with your HR group to get at least one line regarding SharePoint ownership added to the job description of each individual that will have responsibility on the platform.

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 to drive collaboration success.