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Organisations utilise SharePoint for a variety of reasons, such as a collaboration tool, but don’t always utilise the Governance opportunities or set up the solution in a way to maximise all the solution can offer.
Governance is the set of policies, responsibilities and processes that control how your organisation’s business teams and IT department works together to achieve its goals. Microsoft recommend a governance first approach however a number of business haven’t had this approach. The pandemic had a need to create opportunities for collaboration and worry about security and governance later. Now is the time to take stock of your usage of the platform and to improve what actions you should be taking going forward.
Governance Planning.
There is no one size fits all organisation but there are key elements each plan should include in order to ensure your SharePoint solution is secure and governed effectively. Here are some of the elements you should include:
Vision
Create a vision statement to guide your governance plan. The vision should provide a framework for your investment in governance. Once you are clear about your vision, your teams and governance individuals can use that to guide the governance decisions.
Site Provisioning and Decommissioning
One of the key governance decisions is around determining who can create new sites. Are you happy with a self-service model or do you want to manage site creation through a form submission and workflow? You have the control to choose which is right for your business but you need to consider governance.
Content Management
One of the most important decisions you need to define is your content plan. A major user issue is a poor search experience caused by content sprawl. Your governance plan needs to include where content should be published, accessibility standards, naming conventions as well how content should be written and organised. While it may seem excessive, it becomes a big pain point for employees if not considered earlier in the plan.
Roles and Responsibilities
They say it takes a village to successfully support SharePoint development and governance roles are a key part of this. Some of the roles you need to define are Intranet Business Owners, Site Owners and Corporate Communications. Each of these roles needs to understand what is expected of them and how they are to contribute to the overall governance strategy.
Feedback Channels
Successful governance doesn’t work without complete acceptance and buy-in. If individual employees are not abiding by the governance strategy, it won’t work. So a feedback channel is vital to understand if the current strategy is working, if it is flexible and working for each individual. Then the responsibility of the organisation is to act on those comments to improve the strategy as you go forward.
Training and Support
If organisations don’t support their employees, the result won’t be as successful as it could be. If we don’t train our employees on our systems correctly, they can’t maximise the opportunities the solution provides. Organisations need to ensure they are providing helpful and productive training to Site Owners to empower them to great the best solution as possible. Governance needs to be part of the training so that there is buy-in and employees are understanding of what is needed of them.
Secure Your Business Support With ThinkShare.
Starting a Governance Strategy can be daunting and not knowing where to start. If you are yet to set up a SharePoint site, stop! Start with governance strategy, it will make you site more successful. It isn’t the most glamorous job but it is vital to the success and effectiveness of your solution. If you are in a place where you have an established site and have challenges with lack of governance, it’s time to review where you are and clean up.
We have worked with a number of clients at various stages and varing governance needs. We are experienced in running these projects and can help you secure your data, bring in a successful governance process and clean up your sites to help them work more productively going forward.
We can help your business. Contact our team today for an honest discussion about your needs, what we can offer to help and an idea of costs.
