News from Apr 29, 2009

A few weeks ago I ran a MOSS Governance Workshop for one of our clients and I wanted to share a little about how it went.

What is Governance?

First off, what is Governance? I'm sure there are several definitions out there, but since we are talking about governing SharePoint, I'll provide a definition I found from Microsoft:

"Governance is the set of processes, procedures, policies, guidelines and tools affecting the way people direct, administer or use a specific IT service within a corporation. IT Service governance defines the relationships among how the many players involved with an IT service work together and how they collectively support the vision/goals originally defined for that service." -Microsoft

Structure of the Workshop

The goal of our workshop was to guide the client in what steps are necessary to create a governance plan so that they can offer IT services across their enterprise on SharePoint. In a two day workshop we could not write a governance plan, but we could get the client started. Here's the structure of our workshop.

Day 1 - MOSS Overview

The purpose of this is to get everyone on roughly the same page on what SharePoint can do. Many of the attendees represent IT and several of them know SharePoint fairly well. However, many attendees also represent the business and may not know what SharePoint can do. It is key to have this business representation, but before you can govern SharePoint you need to understand what is it you are governing. During the first day we focused on the following:

• Collaboration
• Enterprise Search
• Content Management
• MOSS Enterprise Capabilities

We started off with a high level overview and Platform Services, then dove down into the functionality provided in several areas of the SharePoint/MOSS Pie. Each section had an extensive demo with the exception of the MOSS Enterprise capabilities. This client did not have MOSS Enterprise so we didn't want to focus on it, but it turned out they really wanted to see a demo on Excel Services, so we provided one the next day.

Day 2 - Governance Overview & Infrastructure, Architecture and Security

On this day we went into the what makes up a Governance plan. This includes things like Information Architecture, Roles and Responsibilities, Services Offerings, and Training and Support. Interspersed through the discussion I show "Governance in Action" demos to demonstrate how some some pieces of SharePoint can be governed. For this particular client we had created a Governance site within SharePoint where we had already started to document their governance needs using lists, wikis, and content editors on list view pages. The day ended with a discussion on Infrastructure, Architecture and Security which gets more into the deployment and maintenance aspects of SharePoint.

Feedback and Next Steps

The feedback we received from the workshop was very positive. Some individuals got more out of the first day and some thought the second day was better. During the workshop we kept a parking lot of issues or challenges that will be focal points for the governance plan going forward. The only improvement request was to make sure that everyone recognizes that this workshop is not intended to build your governance plan, only to get it kick-started.

The attendees of the workshop basically became the governance committee for this client. Their next steps are to start formulating their plan using the building blocks we provided focusing on the service offerings that are important to them while keeping track of the roles and responsibilities necessary to provide quality service.

Acknowledgments and Links

I would like to thank Microsoft and Tommy Ryan for the support they provided in this workshop.

To learn more about our workshop, take a look at the ThreeWill Services Catalog and our Governance Wiki.