Jumpstart your SharePoint Community Efforts

Editor's Notes

• #6: As a technology evangelist, my role is to provide feedback and enhancements to our product team based on input from customers, consultants, SharePoint experts and partners. Across many conversations with a diverse group of people, one theme is clear: end users are not involved enough in SharePoint planning.
• #22: OK, so you have the high-level scope of your project: in this example, it is to migrate several SPS 2003 and MOSS 2007 environments to a brand new SharePoint 2010 farm (or multiple farms). Your team has a defined development methodology (or a set way of doing things) and assigned a project manager. Your management team has an idea of how they’d like to see the new site or system designed, but you need to gather input from the people who will be using the system on a day-to-day basis.Here are four strategies for feedback that will help you get your end users more involved:
• #26: There is no single way to manage a project. Your methodology, the documentation you generate, and the level of involvement of your end users all depend on your corporate culture, the size and scope of your SharePoint upgrade / migration, and the standard project management measurements (time, cost, resources). However, the key to success is the same no matter how you approach the problem: understand the scope before you begin, and remind yourself of that scope throughout the project. Right behind that project truth in importance is an equally critical success factor: get your end users involved early, and often. Decide where and when to involve users as part of your pre-planning activities. This is the most fluid of the strategic considerations, as it really just depends on who your users are, what the current environment looks like, and the overall goals of your migration. Understand the culture of your organization, and be aware of your end user’s needs. Remember: users who participate in the creation of a system are more likely to accept and support that system once deployed. This is sage advice for any project. Your users know their content – so let them drive activities around file share migrations, taxonomy development, metadata assignment, and signoff of the overall project plan. If you do this, you’ll find that people actually care about the system. And if they care about it, they’ll use it.
• #36: There is no single way to manage a project. Your methodology, the documentation you generate, and the level of involvement of your end users all depend on your corporate culture, the size and scope of your SharePoint upgrade / migration, and the standard project management measurements (time, cost, resources). However, the key to success is the same no matter how you approach the problem: understand the scope before you begin, and remind yourself of that scope throughout the project. Right behind that project truth in importance is an equally critical success factor: get your end users involved early, and often. Decide where and when to involve users as part of your pre-planning activities. This is the most fluid of the strategic considerations, as it really just depends on who your users are, what the current environment looks like, and the overall goals of your migration. Understand the culture of your organization, and be aware of your end user’s needs. Remember: users who participate in the creation of a system are more likely to accept and support that system once deployed. This is sage advice for any project. Your users know their content – so let them drive activities around file share migrations, taxonomy development, metadata assignment, and signoff of the overall project plan. If you do this, you’ll find that people actually care about the system. And if they care about it, they’ll use it.