Author: Lee Reed

When you don’t take the time to define what collaboration means in your environment then you won’t have a baseline to compare current-state against previous-state to determine if your project has been a success or not.  Take time before your SharePoint project starts and discuss what collaboration means within your organization.  Define it.  Test the definition.  Ask people throughout your company how they define collaboration in order to build holistic view of what collaboration means to people.  To some companies, collaboration means that information is freely available to everyone that needs or wants access to it.  In others, it means that people are working together in a way that they are unable to currently.  Still others define collaboration as being able to more easily socialize the content that they produce as part of their job, such as providing reports or other documents.  Collaboration means different things to each and every company so be sure and find your definition at the beginning of your project.

Share a Specific Business Pursuit

One technique you can use to drive the definition of collaboration within your company is to share a specific business pursuit or corporate goal.  After discussing a corporate goal, brainstorm how one would build a SharePoint solution in support of the pursuit.  Discussing a business issue and applying the concepts of collaboration against it functions to educate on what SharePoint can do in support of the goal.  It also acts to crystallize one’s thoughts on addressing the issue through the use of technology rather than understanding the technology and seeking a business challenge to apply it to.  Discussing how the issue might be addressed also helps to define what collaboration will look like, what information will be placed on the platform and what corporate information will be maintained elsewhere.  The goal is not to force collaboration where it is not desired but instead to support work currently being performed that would benefit from collaboration.

Thought Leaders Should Lead by Example

Adoption of your collaboration environment will have a greater chance of succeeding if the thought leaders within your organization are using it and leading the charge.  If the executive and management levels don’t embrace the ethos of collaboration then their teams and direct reports will likely not embrace it as well.  Individuals that are ‘selling’ the idea of a collaborative, team-oriented environment must be using the SharePoint platform for more than simple document storage.  If they are not blogging, contributing to others documents or managing tasks and projects on SharePoint then others will question its value and will adopt a ‘wait and see’ approach to determine if this is something their management will actually embrace or if it’s just the next ‘cool technology of the week’.  An extended wait-and-see approach by your businesses thought leaders will kill your SharePoint adoption.  Get some on board prior to the beginning of your project and have them write articles on how they see the successful use of collaboration tools occurring within your company.

“6 months from now, I am using SharePoint to…”

Often, users have difficulty understanding how to answer the question, “So..what would you like SharePoint to do for your team?” When users struggle to understand what SharePoint can do for them user adoption will be negatively affected.  It’s recommended that you, as the business management books recommend, ‘begin with the end in mind’.  One easy way to do this is to give people a scenario and have them fill in the blanks.  Don’t talk about the technology but instead discuss capabilities they would like to use to enhance their working life.  Give people the chance to dream a little bit about their best possible scenario and they will almost write the SharePoint specification for you.  Here’s a question you can use to get your user’s brains working on the challenge:

“Imagine that it’s six months from now and you are working with a geographically distributed team on a project that requires the creation and management of project documents, contract review and the creation of project plans and budget spreadsheets.  Tell me how you would do this today using the tools that you currently have available to you, what isn’t working well and how you would like for it to work.”

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.