Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

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1. Veronique Palmer says:

   March 18, 2010 at 9:45 am

   Very nicely done Mark.

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2. EndUserSharePoint says:

   March 18, 2010 at 10:03 am

   > SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer
   > Rockstars in this category are Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller

   As much as I would love to be included in this group, I’ll have to bow out. The solutions you are seeing here on the site were started by Paul Grenier with his ‘jQuery for Everyone’ series, followed by Christophe Humbert’s ‘Path to SharePoint’. Now you’ve got Marc Anderson in the mix with his web services library.

   At this point, I’m nothing more than a conduit to expose the tremendous work these guys are doing. Thanks for including me, and implicitly including them, by inclusion in this group of Rockstars.

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3. Frank says:

   March 18, 2010 at 10:30 am

   I hope I can say this without offending you or anyone else. This is good information but that is in the ‘corporate’ world. I work for a Department of Defense (DoD) military hospital and in ‘our’ world, I’m the only person that handles all that has to do with SharePoint. We live by “Do more with less’ we have a staff of over 4,000 employees, I’m the all of the above you mention (Administrator, Developer, Architect and Power User). The one added role is teaching I hold regular SharePoint classes from ‘Beginner to Advance’ users. On our IT SharePoint site I post all the ‘How-To’ PowerPoint slides. On one side it would be nice to have a staff as mention but it helps to make my days go ‘fast’ and I’m learning a lot more from this experience. My dream team would be having one or two more individuals to help with the ‘backend’ of SharePoint.

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4. Richard Harbridge says:

   March 18, 2010 at 3:09 pm

   Loved it Mark!

   It’s interesting to see other perspectives on how many people are needed for the size of the organization.

   Wanted to share my thoughts too (because it’s such a fun topic!)
   1. The way they are applying and using SharePoint has a huge impact on how many resources are necessary. Any guidance is better than no guidance but I wanted to echo your points on the fact proper planning and careful consideration is necessary. {Can’t hurt to say it a couple time extra.}

   2. The SharePoint BA isn’t necessarily an Architect. (Though many are.) It is crucial in an organization to have (in my opinion) at least 1 BA focused individually who understands how to translate user needs into SharePoint. – To be fair I have been focused on this for a long while now so it’s something I am biased and passionate about, but I definitely see it as often a separate role when we are dealing with large enterprise organizations.

   The reason I separate it is that this person really needs to doLoved it Mark!

   It’s interesting to see other perspectives on how many people are needed for the size of the organization.

   Here are the gaps I see though:
   1. The way they are applying and using SharePoint has a huge impact on how many resources are necessary. Any guidance is better than no guidance but I wanted to echo your points on the fact proper planning and careful consideration is necessary.

   2. The SharePoint BA isn’t necessarily an Architect. (Though many are.) It is crucial in an organization to have (in my opinion) at least 1 BA focused individually who understands how to translate user needs into SharePoint. – To be fair I have been focused on this for a long while now so it’s something I am biased and passionate about, but I definitely see it as often a separate role when we are dealing with large enterprise organizations.

   The reason: There is TONS of new work and possibilities that spin up from a good SharePoint implementation and this is where you need people who understand how to properly gather and translate requirements more so than the people who understand the technical infrastructure (though understanding how to apply and architect SharePoint is also important to these sorts of roles).

   3. A SharePoint, Intranet, Extranet, or Internet Champion, Director, Leader, etc is NECESSARY. Not one that is external either. This is a very real role. This person is responsible for maintaining the vision, objectives, strategy, and managing priorities for a SharePoint implementation. This person needs to ensure everyone has a Shared Understanding of where the Intranet, Portal, or SharePoint implementation is going, what real issues its solving, what it’s business value is, etc etc.

   This person might also be an architect, or a BA, or something else, but it’s a role that is necessary in ANY SharePoint environment. This person often also may not be focused on just SharePoint (depending on the size of the organization and it’s usage) but certainly the role would take up/require a significant amount of say a director of communication’s time and energy (as an example).

   4. Sometimes you want your people to have more than one role. No one person can be all things, but that flexibility is key, and invaluable in smaller organizations (which probably still includes ones in the low thousands of users). So that combination of multiple roles (which many users are) while it may seem is a bad thing, can sometimes be a great benefit. If the roles can be separated great, but even for smaller sizes (such as 4000 as mentioned above) it’s not crazy to think one person really can manage multiple roles (you outline this, but I just wanted to add a bit to it. Especially when we deal with the case of succession planning, or covering for a resource when they are away etc.

   5. In many situations the needs change based on the activities going on (upgrades, patches, performance issues etc all might highlight a need for more administrators as an example). So this means you need to carefully consider your needs over time before hiring. If you hire an extra developer (for example), and then realize you aren’t doing as much custom development because your team learns more about SharePoint’s capabilities/can leverage more than before all the sudden the new hire isn’t such a good idea. So again stressing it’s a – does this meet my needs over time?

   Anyways I could ramble about this stuff forever, and you already explained many of the important points :)

   Thanks for sharing and I can’t wait to see what other people might share about their own thoughts around resourcing for an effective SharePoint environment. The more people who share the better pictures we can paint, and the more evidence we can use to ensure SharePoint teams internally have the resources they need to be successful.

   Richard Harbridge

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   • Richard Harbridge says:

     March 18, 2010 at 3:10 pm

     Hah, I mixed up two drafts of the comment. Its messy, but the points I guess still are there – Ignore the word GAPS as I didn’t mean it in that sense.

     Reply
   • Tony Stanley says:

     March 18, 2010 at 6:22 pm

     I’ve found that Information Architects should be work alongside a BA when working with SharePoint. Or due to most organisations reducing the number of staff then hopefully the BA is the IA. Without understanding the business processes and the business data – SharePoint can become a very expensive white elephant or at best, a glorified file server. Ultimately SharePoint is just a platform to display data and in order to display data you need to understand it both in a technical and business sense.

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   • Ruven Gotz says:

     March 19, 2010 at 12:36 pm

     Richard beat me to the punch here: I also think that there is a role that’s missing from the main article: The people who understand how to apply SharePoint to business problems.

     It’s a unique position, because this person needs to be a great listener, hearing what the underlying business issues are while understanding organizational strategies and politics at multiple levels.

     This person also needs to know what SharePoint is capable of, both out-of-the-box and with custom dev, and be able to translate between the business and the technical teams.

     Another area that these people need to understand and apply is the organization of information within a business. They guide owners of content towards building structures (taxonomies) that help them find/access/use/share their information & knowledge in an efficient way.

     There isn’t a great name for these people, but BA/IA comes closest.

     If you’re looking for superstars here: Erica Toelle, Richard Harbridge, Dux Sy, Susan Hanley, are the people that I know directly.

     -Ruven

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5. Richard Harbridge says:

   March 19, 2010 at 6:10 pm

   Ruven also forgot to include himself in that.

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6. Jason MacKenzie says:

   March 22, 2010 at 9:35 am

   Great article although I have yet to see an organization, other than a bank, that would have 9 people (excluding no code solution developers) focused on 10,000 users. But I agree with Richard in that how SharePoint is being used is obviously a major driver of appropriate staffing levels.

   I would also suggest that there is likely an inverse relationship between the rockstarishness of your architect and no-code solution developers and how many custom code developers you need.

   I do struggle with the idea of a BA focused only on SharePoint – as Richard can attest to first-hand as a former colleague. I’m still not sure how to balance the need for deep SharePoint expertise with the need for Business Analysts focused on your specific functional areas. In other words a tech-savvy mechanical engineer to deal with the Engineering group for example In my view those Business Analysts should own the customer relationships and use a SharePoint BA as an expert resource when delivering solutions to their customers. The risk is the SharePoint BA thinks in terms of SharePoint (obviously) where the traditional BA thinks typically in a more technologically agnostic way. However, sometimes the SharePoint BA can deliver some very quick and visible wins but in what context should they be dealing with customers directly? I’m not sure.

   Hence my confusion :)

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7. Mark Justice says:

   May 7, 2010 at 9:51 am

   Now this is a topic that involves everyone, enterprise-wide. Great ideas here: who builds it, who runs it? what talents are needed? I suppose the best responses out there are “it depends…” and what is the right balance for YOUR GROUP? I’ve found with my teams over the last four years that the primary driver is how does the tool solve the BUSINESS problem? First you have to put that business problem into focus, something like starting with the objective and deciding on the best strategy ant tactics. Also very influential is the reason for doing it all (I think it was Mark Miller or Bob Mixon who told me this one): make sure your solution is more than a TECHNICAL success; it must also be a solid BUSINESS success”–that has been the blend in the art and science of SharePoint that has worn a path out of the darkness. THX–Mark Justice

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8. Kat Weixel says:

   July 19, 2010 at 1:57 pm

   I’m chiming into this one way too late, but hopefully some of you will see this and reply. :)

   I am at an association. We have about 250 employees. We are trying to use SharePoint for our intranet, including private team collaboration, and we use a separate install of it for a type of extranet for our boards and committees. I am the Intranet Manager and, by default, am also managing the extranet sites.

   Mine is actually the only position dedicated to SharePoint. We have our IT guys who manage the servers, but SharePoint is only a small part of their overall daily focus. We have a knowledge manager who spends most of her time managing our web site search engine, but she also is responsible for managing our SharePoint search. Our helpdesk guys are getting up-to-speed to help out w/ more of the SharePoint-related errors and basic troubleshooting, so I am no longer responding to as many of those type of calls. But in the end, my name around here is synonymous w/ SharePoint. :P

   My role is really to manage the day-to-day operations of the intranet and our overall strategy. I support our team site administrators and manage our training materials and one-on-one trainings. There are a lot of pieces to my job, and they certainly keep me busy full-time, so I agree with Richard and others that this role, whatever you want to call it, is essential to evangelize, educate, translate, problem-solve, and grow your intranet.

   There is one issue that continuously comes up for us, and I’d love to get your help and perspective here. Our governance plan is lacking in the permissions management department. We have outlined the basics: where files should be saved, how the intranet should be used, what roles and responsibilities people have, how we manage our sites, etc. We have templates the we use and plenty of guidelines and recommendations for staff. In that sense, we have a general governance plan in place. BUT…

   We have lots of individuals who have “full control” on sites. We also moved, with advice from a consultant, from a multi-site collection structure (one per unit/group/project/team) to one w/ only 4 main site collections (grouped all teams under one umbrella site collection, all projects, all service-oriented groups/sites under another, and of course, our portal site collection). This has made our design easier to implement and keep consistent, our search scopes, etc. But it has also made managing permissions and SharePoint Groups a big headache. Nearly every subsite breaks inheritance, and it is nearly impossible to keep track of who/how many people have been granted “full control” of the various subsites. I’m the only real site collection administrator nowadays.

   We have a lot of site administrators/owners (i.e. have full control on a specific site and its subsites) as well as many folks w/ design permissions. Over the years, many people who were trained site administrators wound up granting others full control, and they didn’t get training, and well… you can imagine. We also have lots of people who got training as site administrators who then failed to practice and keep their skills sharp. They need help w/ everything, or they try on their own and mess up a lot of stuff. Sounds a lot like what Mark was saying about the overall end user problem. :) Ours don’t have SPD, but they still have managed to mess up a few things. More than anything, they aren’t really providing guidance or direction to their teams or meeting their needs by building out solutions for them. The management of their sites has either gone crazy/messy or fallen flat and died.

   So, I say all of this because I am looking to finally form a true group of power users here to train and keep engaged and give them the tools they need to stay sharp and active as designers and admins in SharePoint. What to do w/ all the others, though? And how do I go about cleaning up the permissions nightmare created over the years/upgrades? I don’t want to remove permissions so much that I get a bottleneck of support requests for new subsites and lists or customizations. But I don’t want to continue to grant scary powerful permissions to folks who won’t be trained or stay trained in SharePoint. I would love to limit the power to those who have really committed to staying trained, staying active, and spending a good chunk of their time managing SharePoint sites.

   Help?! Advice VERY welcome! :)

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