Why do SharePoint Governance Best
Practices matter?
SharePoint
Governance Best Practices play a major role in the smooth and efficient functioning of
Advanced Collaboration platforms such SharePoint, M365, Microsoft Teams and more. Good governance
can add significant value to your organization by extensively integrating this
platform to your centralized business goals. A proper governance strategy
connects your business and users to this platform to help, support and secure all
your content and collaborative communication. It lets you:
- Drive user adoption
- Maximize ROI
- Reduce risk.
- Improve productivity and business agility.
WHY DO
SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE BEST PRACTICES MATTER?
With expert-curated governance plans and guidelines, a
governance strategy helps support and secure the content and users of the
SharePoint platform.
For
instance, SharePoint is so useful and SharePoint sites can be created and
deployed so quickly and easily that organizations end up in a cluttered mess.
As a result, users can’t find the content they need, and administrators can’t
keep track of sensitive content and protect it properly — the platform fails to
meet the organization’s goals due to the governance gap. Having strong
governance in place avoids these issues, enabling the business to:
• Drive
user adoption — Strong governance helps ensure SharePoint
content is easy to create, find and use, so users will embrace the platform
rather than try to find ways to work around it.
• Maximize
ROI — A governance plan helps you uncover the value of the
platform and guide its strategic development, so you get the most from your
investment.
• Reduce
risk — A governance plan that protects business IP and is
aligned with appropriate compliance regulations minimizes potentially
devastating risk. For instance, a good governance plan will include provisions
for regularly running audits on usage, security, content or permissions.
• Improve
productivity and business agility — A well-governed
SharePoint platform creates a deep pool of collective intelligence across an
organization, arming users with the information and context to move faster and
make smarter decisions.
PILLARS TO AWESOME
SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE
Four
secrets to success More broadly, you need to build trust in your SharePoint
governance strategy. Following these four principles can help ensure success.
VISIBILITY
Make
the work you do to define policies and procedures a matter of public discourse.
One of the more successful governance initiatives I led started with a town
hall event, with a Q&A for anyone interested enough to come and raise their
hand. Our regular governance body meetings were open-door sessions, with
end-users and executives alike joining in when something they had a vested
interest in was being discussed.
REGULAR KEY UPDATES
Keep
people informed about your progress. Sometimes updating a SharePoint task list
at the end of the day is sufficient; sometimes more frequent communication
using other tools is the right choice. Vary this collaboration level depending
upon the immediacy of the workload in front of you and the maturity of your
governance plan over time.
CONSTANT OPTIMIZATION
Don’t
roll out a governance plan, document it in a binder, and put that binder on a
shelf to gather dust and be forgotten. Project activities, reporting, and
communication strategies constantly evolve because of changing business
requirements, customer needs, and other factors. Keep upgrading your governance
strategy for the better.
GATHER FEEDBACK, ACT ON IT
This
tip was mentioned earlier but it bears repeating: Seek out feedback from your
users and pay attention to it. Some people have no problem speaking up, but
other people might not be so forthcoming. Look for opportunities to reach out
and connect so that you can get a more complete view of what people think. When
people are heard, it builds confidence in your strategy.
BEST PRACTICES FOR BUILDING
A SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE STRATEGY
Developing
and maintaining a strong SharePoint governance strategy requires careful
planning upfront and continual nurturing and adjustments as you use the
platform. The following best practices will help you throughout the process.
CREATE AN INTERNAL SHAREPOINT USER GROUP
In an
ideal world, organizations will build a SharePoint governance plan before
implementing the platform. If you’re proactively building a governance plan,
the first step is to talk with your future users so you can understand their
content, workflows and anticipated usage. However, as noted earlier, SharePoint
is so useful and easy to deploy that often sites go up first and governance
comes later. In that case, the first step is still the same — talk with your
users! Find out how they are interacting with SharePoint, including what sites
are out there, how much they are used, who has access to them, what types of
content are being stored there, and what frustrations users have.
BUILD A BROADER COMMUNICATION STRATEGY
Don’t
limit your communications to the SharePoint user group; you also need to keep
the larger SharePoint community abreast of what is happening with the platform,
including details on the governance strategy, changes to policies, site
redesigns or a platform upgrade. Make sure to solicit their feedback using
strategies like community sites and polls, along with data such as search
metrics — and consider their ideas seriously. Governance should enable them not
to prevent them from being productive. Look for ways to ensure user adoption of
the platform, such as offering training and support.
PROMOTE GOVERNANCE TRANSPARENCY
Make
your policies visible. When people ask questions, point them to a SharePoint
site with the answers. Make the site functional and refresh it frequently; it
should not be a one-time dumping ground for rarely used process documentation.
This should be a working platform from which you manage your process, accept
suggestions and make changes as needed.
CLEARLY DEFINE ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES.
Outline
the functions required to deploy and govern your SharePoint environment at the
enterprise, organizational and site levels. Define roles according to skills
and interests. Define Owner, Approver, Reviewer, and Participant for each of
these tasks. It is simple and clear. Determine which functions should be
managed centrally and which are better handled at the site collection and site
levels. SharePoint works best when the management of its many functions is
distributed to the people who know how the business should be run. Be clear on
w clear on what you expect from each role so people can be held accountable.
DON’T START FROM SCRATCH, TAILOR IT TO MEET YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS
Microsoft
provides plenty of content around optimal settings and system limitations, and
that’s a good place to start. But having a personalized strategy involving
selected SharePoint
Governance Best Practices always help. Just need to remember that you need
to constantly refine your strategy based on a solid understanding of your own
business requirements. Adapt your policies (content limits, permissions,
information rights management policies, and so on) using a consistent and
transparent change management process to fit into the organizational
priorities.
STANDARDIZE YOUR POLICIES AND PROCEDURES.
Create
policies and procedures that are consistent across your organization. A given
business unit might have different information rights management rules than the
rest of the company, but the policies that govern how those rules are managed
should be consistent across the organization.
WHEN YOU NEED TO MIGRATE CONTENT, LEVERAGE YOUR METADATA
Resist
the urge to complete migrations as quickly as possible by simply dumping all
data from the source environment into the target. Instead, use your metadata to
sort your content by relevance, age, popularity, team, geography and other
factors. By reducing the amount of sprawl and improving organization, you will
deliver a target environment that’s easier for you to manage and easier for
users to navigate, reducing overhead while improving user productivity and
driving platform adoption.
GOVERNANCE AND CULTURE
Organizational
culture plays a major role in governance planning as well as implementation.
Define the rules applied to SharePoint management that is valid for everyone in
the company with maybe different permission levels. For example, some people
might believe that it is better for users to create their own sites on
SharePoint while some might consider such vast and unrestricted access to SharePoint
to be a major risk factor. There are many other areas in SharePoint related to
the use of data, where it is stored, and who has access to that data and all
you must do is, follow the basic SharePoint
governance best practices and plan judiciously according to your
organizational needs.
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