SharePoint: How Can Companies Kill the Things that Kill Productivity? – Part 6: “A Little Help Here!”

Guest Author: Steve Russell
Global 360 Inc.

In this last posting Kill the Things that Kill Productivity series, I’m going to talk about collaboration, which is a long time sweet spot for SharePoint. Typically, when you hear about collaborative business processes, most people think about creative efforts where something is being designed or developed by a group of people. However, there’s another type of process I’ll call real-time dynamic collaboration. This is where people come together on an ad hoc basis to exchange ideas, recommendations, expertise, and help one another on the spot.

Probably the most obvious cause of inefficiency is people not knowing what to do. Policies, procedures, and end-user application training give workers the essential information they need to perform their responsibilities, yet inevitably situations arise where the appropriate course of action is not clear. System errors, odd customer requests, and little known transactions are examples of things that cause workers to get stuck. Have you ever been on the phone with a call center when someone puts you on hold so they can consult with an expert or supervisor?

Workers normally rely on their peers and supervisors to provide assistance in working through such issues. However, the quality and accuracy of the feedback they receive can be hit-or-miss. Not all scenarios or outcomes can be documented within a standard operating procedure, and a precedent may not exist. In other cases, people may not feel comfortable raising questions and prefer to work in a vacuum without exposing their uncertainties.

Dynamic collaboration is the key to improving productivity in this area and SharePoint 2010 provides a load of features to enable this. The extended personal profiling capabilities within SharePoint enable people to maintain personal profiles with their interests, ratings, and roles allowing others to locate them when they need help. The “Ask Me About” feature allows people to apply expertise tags to themselves making it easy for others to locate people with a needed expertise. Similarly, subject matter experts (SMEs) can post newsfeeds to their sites with updates on new policies, best practices, and other relevant knowledge sharing. As people in an organization connect through My Site social relationships they build personal networks of SMEs that become invaluable when they need to dynamically collaborate with expert resources.

SharePoint is also integrated with Office Communications Server, which displays everyone’s real-time presence. A person needing help can see the availability of all his or her SMEs and reach out to them directly through instant messaging, email, or phone.

Lastly, people can use their newsfeeds and presence indicators to broadcast their personal work status and alert team members when they have a problem. Team-leads and designated SMEs can be notified of these situations and immediately engage to help them with their issues.

By providing users with a network of easily accessible experts and consultants, and by giving them the tools to interact with them, work is no longer held up while issues are being researched or resolved. SharePoint and Office Communications Server are well integrated and provide all of the building blocks necessary to create a real-time collaborative platform. By integrating these collaborative capabilities into business applications, these collaborations can be contextual in that transaction specific information can be shared and the collaboration itself can be linked or copied into a system of record so audit trails are more complete and reconstructing how decisions were made is easily enabled.

Guest Author: Steve Russell
Global 360 Inc.

Steve Russell is the SVP of Research and Development and CTO for Global 360 Inc., based in Dallas Texas. He has over 25 years of experience as a technologist developing enterprise process and document management software platforms. Steve has extensive experience with large, mission critical systems development and deployment within Fortune 2000 companies.