When you are approached to provide a SharePoint solution it's good to have a basic road map to walkthrough with your customers that helps them communicate to you what they are trying to accomplish.
WHY DO WE NEED A PHASED APPROACH TO ROLLING OUT SHAREPOINT?
- SharePoint offers businesses an great opportunity to leverage out the box features to accomplish a variety of business functions from team collaboration and information sharing to automated project task tracking and just about everything in between.
- Unfortunately, the most common challenges that businesses experience when it comes to successfully deploying SharePoint solutions usually relate to understanding how SharePoint's capabilities can address their business solution needs.
COMMON BUSINESS CHALLENGES ADDRESSED WITH SHAREPOINT
- Help desk solutions to track service requests
- Document collaboration and management
- Records management and reporting
- Scheduling systems
- Web sites supporting geographically dispersed teams
- Training systems
IS SHAREPOINT A DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM?
- Many organizations make the mistake of thinking that SharePoint can do anything and before they know it, they are embarking on a custom development project and trying to customize SharePoint to perform software functions that it may not have been designed for. We refer to this as "not playing to SharePoint's strengths" and before they know it, these organizations find themselves engaged in costly and difficult to support custom software solutions.
IS SHAREPOINT BUSINESS SOLUTION PRODUCT?
- Some organizations may look at SharePoint as a product designed primarily for storing and sharing documents while other organizations think SharePoint is only for making web sites and web pages.
- While SharePoint does provide these types of features and capabilities, it also possesses a huge number of additional capabilities like document and records management, targeted end user notifications and automated workflows.
- Organizations that view SharePoint as a "business solution product" are usually on the right track when it comes to deploying "out of the box" solutions that play to SharePoint's inherent strengths.
WHY IS THIS?
- The makeup of your solution team has a lot to do with how your SharePoint solution deployment experience plays out.
- There's a very good chance that the complexity and duration of your solution deployment will be more complex and run longer if your SharePoint technical solution team is made up of traditional "developers". On the other hand, if your solution team is made up of SharePoint "power users" and "functional architects" who know SharePoint out of the box features and functions and how to "configure" them, you may benefit from less complex and shorter deployments that quickly deliver more economical "80%" types of solutions.
THIS GUIDE FOCUSES ON
- Effectively leveraging SharePoint "Out of the Box" features to deliver business solutions that play to SharePoint's strengths ensures that solutions are simple, reliable, deployable, and maintainable.
- Leveraging a structured approach that helps to guide your customers through the SharePoint solution delivery process from the identification of business requirements to the deployment and evolution of their business solution.
MAJOR DEPLOYMENT PHASES
Let’s start by diving deeper into the DEFINE phase and then cover each of the other phases.
- DEFINE - The Define phase helps to set the stage for successful solution delivery by outlining the steps necessary to better understand customer requirements, demonstrate SharePoint capabilities and lay the foundation for effective communications during the solution delivery effort. Activities and deliverables associated with the Define phase include:
- Conducting the initial customer consultation
- Presenting a SharePoint demo
- Officially launching the solution development project
- Collecting additional business and process artifacts
- Outlining the current state process
- Documenting and clarifying solution requirements
- Analyzing the official solution requirements
- Determining gaps between the requirements and SharePoint capabilities
- Reviewing the gaps with the customer
- Exploring alternative feature/function approaches as necessary
- Presenting initial design concepts and ideas to the Customer
- DESIGN - The initial design of the SharePoint solution can be created once the project has been properly kicked off and the customer has gained a basic understanding of the SharePoint features that can be applied to their business requirements. During the design phase, the solution team will continue to review documented user requirements, content and other information artifacts. Other activities and deliverables associated with the Design phase include:
- Creating the initial solution design
- Sharing sample solution prototypes
- Completing the design checklist
- Reviewing design checklist
- Updating and finalizing the design checklist
- Presenting initial solution prototypes.
- DEVELOP - The development of the new business solution can begin once the solution design has been reviewed and approved by both the internal solution team and the customer. The Develop phase also includes the creation of a "change management" list and supporting workflows to track customer related feedback and action items related to the solution being developed. Other activities and deliverables associated with the Define phase include:
- Applying updates received during the design checklist review
- Provisioning and configuring a new SharePoint site collection
- Building the new business solution and migrating test content
- Configuring the Change Management module in the new solution
- Applying support and training tools to the new solution
- DEPLOY - Once the new business solution has been developed it enters the Deploy phase. In this phase, the new solution undergoes testing against documented customer requirements . In addition, support pages with training and support related links and best practices are added to the new solution and the customer participates in a pilot rollout prior to the formal solution rollout to the greater end user community.
- Other activities and deliverables associated with the Deploy phase include:
- Applying support information and training tools
- Planning, documenting and conducting quality assurance and quality control testing
- Conducting a pre-launch pilot with customer stakeholders
- Rolling out the business solution
- Ongoing management of the new solution
- SUPPORT - Once the new solution is deployed to the end user community, a variety of support and training related mechanisms and activities that can be applied to ensure effective usage and adoption.
- Other activities and deliverables associated with the Define phase include:
- Launching user groups and special interest groups
- Updating training materials and courses as needed
- Mentoring power users and solution maintenance resources
- Promoting and refreshing online support pages on a regular basis
- Training and supporting help desk resources
- EVOLVE - To ensure that your new SharePoint business solution gets effectively used by end users and continues to provide value to the organization, you should focus on evolving and improving the technical solution as well as the people-based processes and policies used to manage, support and improve the solution.
- Activities related to the ongoing evolution of your new business solution across the organization include:
- Connecting external solution Interfaces to your business solution
- Soliciting and planning future solution enhancements
- Pursuing ongoing network and platform Improvements
- Implementing ongoing governance and change management
Many of the activities in the DEPLOY – SUPPORT - EVOLVE phases are designed to be iterative in nature. Depending on the magnitude of the overall SharePoint solution being deployed, businesses may elect to deploy the new solution in increments (rollout “waves”)