Last week, the Cardiolog Analytics team had the pleasure of Hosting Hilton Giesenow, a SharePoint MVP and an expert in the SharePoint space, for a webinar dedicated to providing the top tips for driving SharePoint and Office 365 strategy. The webinar focused on strategies organizations can implement to leverage SharePoint more effectively. Here are a few takeaways from what Hilton had to offer:
Oftentimes, there’s a “Tale of Two SharePoints. These two diverging scenarios are the most common occurrences after organizations implement SharePoint.
1.) The “very stuffed and overloaded, struggling to do its job version of SharePoint”
and
2.) The “giant empty room, essentially the scaffolding”. Infrastructure that was put in place but was never used and is now out of date.
There is tremendous potential for improving enterprise productivity and engagement within SharePoint, but the right strategies must be in place in order to achieve this.
3 Simple Ways to Drive SharePoint Strategy
1.) ROLES– By establishing dedicated roles within an organization, the improvement and sustainablity of SharePoint can be better ensures. Many people refer to SharePoint adoption as something that has to do with enterprise culture. By establishing a SharePoint Strategic Advisor, enterprises can place an “internal enterprise consultant” from within the confines of the organization to serve as a go-to person for all things SharePoint. Another successful role is the SharePoint Platform Marketer. This person is responsible for evangelizing or marketing the SharePoint capability into the organization.
2.)RIGHT PROJECTS– Often times long-term projects are created for SharePoint initiatives, the kind that span months to years. They’re so overloaded it’s hard to understand what success can mean. Implementing short-term projects, aka “super-quick wins” (spanning hours to days) super quick wins should be encouraged as well. Often times these can be achieved with OOTB features.
3.)THE RIGHT DIRECTION– It’s critical to assess what the long-term roadmap is with SharePoint, and this means understanding SharePoint’s maturity. Maturity goes from a base level to ultimate levels with a particular aerial discipline and includes topics like publication, business process automation, collaboration, integration, etc. Understanding the timing of when these types of projects should be implemented is also crucial for driving SharePoint’s strategy as effectively as possible.
In essence, enterprise organizations should set up a formally defined SharePoint practice to come together cohesively as a team. The team should act beyond the scope of a project, to ensure that the practice is there and focused to get SharePoint entrenched, adopted, used, and delivering value to the overall organization. It should behave more like an internal consulting practice. How can organizations get the “practice” right? By developing a business plan for the “SharePoint internal business”. To get more details on developing this type of business plan, click the link below and catch the recording of the webinar.
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