Recently I walked into a meeting with IT business leaders, and their first question was: “What is your pitch?” I admit, it caught me off-guard because we are not sales people. We are Rogue for a reason. Even though we think SharePoint is the bee’s knees (and I’ll explain why in a moment), I would never go into a client or partner meeting pitching it just because I’m in the SharePoint business. But what I will do is answer his underlying question – what he really wanted to know – “Why SharePoint?”
First, let’s acknowledge what SharePoint is (and is not). It is not a solution for all the things, nor is it a one-trick pony.
For our clients that go Rogue, they discover that SharePoint is a business solution for efficiency and process automation. It can help support corporate culture through brand presence and communication. It contains information sprawl. It is a low-cost investment when in the Cloud. It is configurable and out-of-the-box for most of what small and mid-sized businesses need. Obviously SharePoint does many things very well. It was in the top 10 Microsoft products list of 2015 for this reason.
At Rogue, we help businesses harness those super-cool capabilities in ways that make sense to them. (That last part is key, which is why I’m employing use of italics to an obnoxious degree.)
Rogue is built around SharePoint services and solutions. Specifically, we implement solutions that are sustainable and create autonomy. When potential clients are interested a Rogue engagement, we’ll first gather general information (numbers of employees, methods of earning revenue, leadership and organizational hierarchy, etc.), and then delve into this 10-question diagnostic:
- Are there manual processes that you want to automate?
- Are there bottlenecks in your daily operations?
- Do you use a lot of paper/print-outs?
- Do you send/receive multiple all-hands emails per week?
- What document management system/repository do you use, and does it work well for your organization?
- Are your teams collocated or disbursed?
- Do you have security, compliance, privacy, or other regulatory concerns with your data/content?
- What IT products/solutions do you rely on every day?
- How much IT support do you get in operations?
- What are your budget concerns/constraints for investments in business solutions?
The diagnostic is by no means comprehensive, but it tells us a lot.
The answers to questions 1-5 give us information about whether SharePoint can help make their operations easier and whether their operational problems are emergent.
| Problem | SharePoint Solution |
|---|---|
| Manual processes need automation | Workflows and document acknowledgment |
| Bottlenecks in daily operations | Workflows and stage-gate metrics, complete visibility into process and current state/status |
| Lots of paper | Electronic files in central repository, SharePoint plays nicely with the Office suite, search |
| Frequent all-hands emails | Intranet, team portals, collaboration sites |
| Document management chaos | Document libraries, version control, complete document lifecycle process (creation, process, archival, retention) |
The next three answers give us information about whether SharePoint implementation is realistic. The attitude around the adoption of systems and solutions is incredibly relevant for SharePoint implementation because it represents a cultural shift—a different way to access and interact with information, which affects everyone’s behavior in their daily job function. We gather those details in this section.
| Constraint | SharePoint Implementation |
|---|---|
| Teams collocated or disbursed | Singular user experience, access via web browser, permissions model for content |
| Security/compliance/privacy | Auditing, records management, data loss prevention, retention, information management policies |
| Other IT solutions | Third-party tool integration possibilities |
The final answers give us some understanding of the organization’s IT involvement and overhead. Whether an IT group supports or leads operations must be discussed when any new platform is considered.
| IT involvement | SharePoint Considerations |
|---|---|
| IT support | Full-time administrator or support model needed, assignment of designated SharePoint “owner” or gatekeepers within the organization |
| Technology budget constraints | Business or IT budget sensitivities, O365 subscription or on-prem installation determinations |
My short answer to “Why SharePoint?” is—if it solves more than one business problem within a reasonable budget and the organization commits to SharePoint adoption, then why not go Rogue?
Our next blog post will be: Why do so many SharePoint Projects Fail? (Yep, we know they do!) Stay tuned. And thanks for reading!
M
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