SharePoint Governance Best Practices

Seattle WA

18 March, 2021

3:33 AM

Description

Why do SharePoint Governance Best Practices matter? SharePoint Governance Best Practices play a major role in the smooth and efficient functioning of Advanced Collaboration platforms such SharePoint, M365, Microsoft Teams and more. Good governance can add significant value to your organization by extensively integrating this platform to your centralized business goals. A proper governance strategy connects your business and users to this platform to help, support and secure all your content and collaborative communication. It lets you: Drive user adoption Maximize ROI Reduce risk. Improve productivity and business agility. With expert-curated governance plans and guidelines, a governance strategy helps support and secure the content and users of the SharePoint platform. For instance, SharePoint is so useful and SharePoint sites can be created and deployed so quickly and easily that organizations end up in a cluttered mess. As a result, users can’t find the content they need, and administrators can’t keep track of sensitive content and protect it properly — the platform fails to meet the organization’s goals due to the governance gap. Having strong governance in place avoids these issues, enabling the business to: • Drive user adoption — Strong governance helps ensure SharePoint content is easy to create, find and use, so users will embrace the platform rather than try to find ways to work around it. • Maximize ROI — A governance plan helps you uncover the value of the platform and guide its strategic development, so you get the most from your investment. • Reduce risk — A governance plan that protects business IP and is aligned with appropriate compliance regulations minimizes potentially devastating risk. For instance, a good governance plan will include provisions for regularly running audits on usage, security, content or permissions. • Improve productivity and business agility — A well-governed SharePoint platform creates a deep pool of collective intelligence across an organization, arming users with the information and context to move faster and make smarter decisions. PILLARS TO AWESOME SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE Four secrets to success More broadly, you need to build trust in your SharePoint governance strategy. Following these four principles can help ensure success. VISIBILITY Make the work you do to define policies and procedures a matter of public discourse. One of the more successful governance initiatives I led started with a town hall event, with a Q&A for anyone interested enough to come and raise their hand. Our regular governance body meetings were open-door sessions, with end-users and executives alike joining in when something they had a vested interest in was being discussed. REGULAR KEY UPDATES Keep people informed about your progress. Sometimes updating a SharePoint task list at the end of the day is sufficient; sometimes more frequent communication using other tools is the right choice. Vary this collaboration level depending upon the immediacy of the workload in front of you and the maturity of your governance plan over time. CONSTANT OPTIMIZATION Don’t roll out a governance plan, document it in a binder, and put that binder on a shelf to gather dust and be forgotten. Project activities, reporting, and communication strategies constantly evolve because of changing business requirements, customer needs, and other factors. Keep upgrading your governance strategy for the better. GATHER FEEDBACK, ACT ON IT This tip was mentioned earlier but it bears repeating: Seek out feedback from your users and pay attention to it. Some people have no problem speaking up, but other people might not be so forthcoming. Look for opportunities to reach out and connect so that you can get a more complete view of what people think. When people are heard, it builds confidence in your strategy. BEST PRACTICES FOR BUILDING A SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE STRATEGY Developing and maintaining a strong SharePoint governance strategy requires careful planning upfront and continual nurturing and adjustments as you use the platform. The following best practices will help you throughout the process. CREATE AN INTERNAL SHAREPOINT USER GROUP In an ideal world, organizations will build a SharePoint governance plan before implementing the platform. If you’re proactively building a governance plan, the first step is to talk with your future users so you can understand their content, workflows and anticipated usage. However, as noted earlier, SharePoint is so useful and easy to deploy that often sites go up first and governance comes later. In that case, the first step is still the same — talk with your users! Find out how they are interacting with SharePoint, including what sites are out there, how much they are used, who has access to them, what types of content are being stored there, and what frustrations users have. Learn more..