How's it going? In the last few years, we’ve had the great opportunity to interact with a lot of people in various SharePoint events (SharePoint Saturdays, User Group meetings, conferences) and a consistent theme that resonates with the people we meet is the challenge of not getting buy-in and long term commitment from decision makers when implementing SharePoint and related technologies.
Based on our experience, a key factor we found is often decision makers' limited understanding of the platform benefits versus the obstacles for successful implementation. It is imperative that executives have the full scope of how these technologies can be fully maximized for their organizations and be aware of technical and organizational change issues.
Here are three tips we’d like to share on how you can better secure executive buy-in when implementing SharePoint:
1. It doesn’t have to be 'All or Nothing'
Employees often forget that a huge part of any executive’s job is making tough choices regarding where to apply scarce enterprise resources such as talent (time), and money. No matter how compelling the technical and business arguments, large and costly projects, such as an enterprise SharePoint deployment, with longer term Return on Investment (ROI) presents risk to the organization.
Key to securing buy-in from executives is helping to allay their concerns over high risk projects. One way to do this is create a plan that builds on successive smaller wins on the path to an overall project success. Such a plan will give more confidence to executives that they’ll see value along the way and have the ability to make course corrections (possibly even pause the project) as necessary to maximize the investment.
To accomplish this, begin by including various stakeholders at different levels of the organization:
- Enterprise
- Department
- End-User
Identify key pain points at each of these levels. We term solutions to these ‘value points’. Prioritize the value points by benefit to the organization and by difficulty to accomplish (technical, change management, etc.). For example, instead of generically implementing SharePoint as a network share on steroids, perhaps it can be leveraged by HR to automate common processes such as onboarding, training request or even expense reimbursement.
2. You had me at 'Hello' – adoption planning begins at project inception
Every organization has some process for approving, initiating, and managing large projects. SharePoint projects are often run by the IT department. If this is the case in your organization, here’s an approach that might turn resistance into support – possibly even financial support: create excitement about solving business problems BEFORE formalizing the case/plan.
In our practice, we generally get a group of key decision makers into a meeting room for a 2-4hr Education and (solution) Engineering session – we term it ‘Eduneering’. During this time, Line of Business (LOB) managers are asked to discuss common problems. Interactive demonstrations using SharePoint OOTB and some 3rd party Web Parts show simple approaches to some of these and other common issues.
Granted, IT departments are (rightfully) cautious about not setting unrealistic expectations about what can be accomplished and in what timeframe. Therefore, it’s important to caveat all discussions with statements regarding the need for appropriate technical and change management practices.
3. For the skeptical Execs who have seen SharePoint go badly: Assess, Plan, THEN Execute.
Here’s something we see all the time that absolutely does not work: IT spends months (or even years) building a strategy, infrastructure, training plan, etc. for an enterprise deployment without involving the business in a meaningful way. By meaningful we mean that line of business (LOB) managers have decision making influence over the project. Just being included in status meetings does not count… That said, the opposite approach, where SharePoint instances pop up all over an enterprise with little or no governance or standardization can be equally ineffective.
Since SharePoint has been around for a while now, it is likely that most organizations have attempted some variant of the two approaches described above. To get from where you are now to where you need to be, it will be important to perform an assessment of the situation and determine the best way forward.
Key elements of a good assessment are:
-
Discovery/‘deep dive’ into what exists and where – to know where you are going, you have to first know where you are.
-
Excitement building around the BUSINESS BENEFITS of SharePoint – again, it is critical to identify which business need/challenge SharePoint can help address. At the end of the day, you don’t want SharePoint to be yet another tool that people will find burdensome to use.
-
Gain consensus for the key drivers for SharePoint – different people will have different ideas of what SharePoint should be in the organization. That’s why it’s important to prioritize and get everyone on the same page as to what the implementation would look like.
In the end, a SharePoint roadmap should be produced after the assessment is performed. This would define what and when specific SharePoint solution(s) (intranet, enterprise content management, executive reporting, etc) will be implemented based on business needs and priorities.
We hope you found this post beneficial! All the best with your SharePoint implementation.
Dux Raymond Sy and Mike Taylor