The SharePointGovernance ManifestoDisruptive Governance thinkingfor the masses

Ant Clay

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/The-SharePoint-Governance-Manifesto

This version was published on 2012-11-04

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Contents

Dedicated to… 1

Credits and Thanks 2

Prelude 3

User Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

State of the community . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Governance versionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Why? 11

Why did I write this book? . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

What is this crazy thing called Governance? . . 14

Why are SharePoint projects so complex? . . . . 16

Future Chapters 22

References 23

Who are Soulsailor Consulting? 25

Dedicated to…My wife Claire for always being here to “steerme” on the right path.

and of course…

My awesome kids Rowan, Flynn and Erinfor your sheer honesty, playful insights andconstant support.

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Credits and ThanksI really appreciate the immense positivity, help, support,feedback and inspiration from everyone I know on Twitter,LinkedIn, Facebook and within the awesome global Share-Point community, for this my first, very tenuous step, intobecoming an author.

I want to especially thank the tireless reviewers who sharedwith me their advice, experience and a real dose of prag-matism when I most needed it!

This book really wouldn’t be what it is today withoutyou guys: Andy Talbot, Joe Capka, Jon Maunder, NancySkanks, Paul Hunt, Richard Martin and Seb Matthews.

And finally, sincere thanks to the ‘Constant Doodler’Shaun Cuff http://www.theconstantdoodler.co.uk for thesimplicity and beauty of the cover image for this book; youhave captured the very essence of Governance in that onesingle pen-stroke!

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Prelude

3

Prelude 4

User Guide

This book is about the challenges, impact and approachesto implementing SharePoint Governance in your organisa-tion.

If you thought from the cover image that it was aboutsailing, then sorry it’s not, although it does get a mention.

The reality is that, although the basis of this book isMicrosoft SharePoint, its actually relevant to any social orcollaborative platform (Yammer, IBM Lotus Connections,Jive, Huddle, etc.) that you and your organisation may beusing.

When I set about writing this book I wanted it to be threethings:

• Disruptive

• Thought provoking

• Informative.

The disruption comes from the early chapters where I“Poke the Box” as Seth Godin would say (Godin, 2011http://bit.ly/PokeSeth) and highlight our challenges withGovernance itself.

The mid-section of this book is more visual and playful. Itwill illustrate, key points, both positive and negative, aboutour perceptions and the future of SharePoint Governance.

Prelude 5

Finally, in the last section, I focus on being informative,in a disruptive way. I articulate my approach to imple-menting and embedding SharePoint Governance, usingthe ‘7 Waves of Governance’ approach. I describe indetail how this approach works and the practical aspectsof implementing and embedding SharePoint Governancewithin your organisation

I hope that the combination of these chapters will beinformative, engaging and deliver practical advice that canhelp you deliver organisational value by disrupting yourtechnology projects.

Prelude 6

State of the community

When I asked the SharePoint Twitter communitywhat theyperceived as SharePoint Governance, this is what a handfulof people told me:

“I think governance starts when some[one]with a lot of pull says, Man! This is crazy!”- Stacy Draper

“abused term defined differently depending onwho you ask”- Andrew Clark

“Good SharePoint governance starts with anIM strategy”- Alan Pelze-Sharpe

“gov = organizational &management environ-ment defining accountability & responsibility4 return on SP investment”- Symon Garfield

Prelude 7

“The G word that Allows, Controls, Denies,Defines, Dictates, Enables, Governs, Innovates,Promotes, Promises and Delivers :)”- Dave Heron

“Governance = Rules to tell us what we shouldor should not do outside the ways the technol-ogy itself limits us”- Marc Anderson

“The thing you’re not doing, that you knowyou should be doing. :( :)”- Art Ho

“Governance is about taking action to helpyour organisation organise, optimise andman-age your systems and resource”- James Fowell

“Guidelines that provide useful insights intothe value that can be delivered to support thebusiness’s aspirational state”- Jon Maunder

Prelude 8

“SP Governance is like parenting - give themenough rules to keep them safe, & enoughflexibility to be creative and grow.”- Linnea Lewis

“SharePoint Governance is a guideline of ruleswithin your organisation, includingwhat, why,when, where and how”- Andy Talbot

“Governance is not a software or technologyproblem, it’s a people problem”- Seb Matthews

It’s quite a divergent set of thoughts and ideas about whatSharePoint Governance is isn’t it?

My hope is that this bookwill shed some light, deliver someclarity and be a comfort to all you out there wrestling withwhat SharePoint Governance is, why it matters and howto implement it in your organisation.

Prelude 9

Governance versionality

I accept that’s not quite a real word, but versionality in thecontext of this manifesto is the state whereby Microsoft(or any other vendor) delivers an exciting new piece oftechnology, just as you get your head around the currentversion and have started to focus on the business not thetechnology.

At the time of writing, SharePoint 2010 is the prevalent ver-sion and SharePoint 2013 preview has just been released.I’ve witnessed over the preceding year and a half that thetechnology community had just started changing the waythey work. I was heartened by the fact that it felt like, as acommunity, we were moving at a quickening pace towardsa more business led perspective on SharePoint projects.

But you suddenly changed!

Now, with the water-cooler chats, tweets and blog posts alllooking forward to the next version of SharePoint, I fearand I’m already seeing the signs that a large proportion ofyou SharePoint people have had your heads turned. Theshiny new version [it does look good!] is beckoning youwith its new features and you have started to veer off-course and back to being SharePoint tech, not businessfocussed.

You may think that’s bad news for me and this man-ifesto, but no… Take note SharePoint 2007, 2010, 2013or vNext+++, or any other damn collaboration platform

Prelude 10

vendors out there. Yes I mean you Yammer, Huddle,IBM and SAP! You all need Governance, this manifesto istimeless, or at least I hope it will be and I’ll be waiting forthe SharePoint vNext excitement to die down and a newbusiness focussed normality to return.

Governance lasts forever…

I hope you’ll join me on this kick-ass road-trip disruptingGovernance thinking…

Why?

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Why? 12

Why did I write this book?

I’m sure you can’t have helped but notice the huge amountof Governance content out there? There are blogs, videos,slides, tweets, status updates and water-cooler conversa-tions to name just a few common sources. It’s an absoluteminefield for anyone new, trying to fathom out what thehell SharePoint Governance is, what it means to them andwhat the dire consequences are if they don’t do anythingabout it soon.

Whywould Iwant towrite thismanifesto about SharePointGovernance? Why would I think it was a good idea todeliver “Disruptive Governance thinking for the masses”?

One reason is that I want to put a very clear stake intothe ground about what Governance really is. My personalperspective, is based on many years of using and imple-menting collaborative technology platforms across a rangeof sectors. Just like you, I have been stumbling through theGovernance challenges that most, if not all organisationshave with this type of solution. I really wanted to distiland articulate how you can practically deliver a holisticGovernance approach within your organisation.

Lastly, I want to make a difference.

I want to make a disruptive, bold, emotional, ass-kicking,blinding-light kind of difference…

Whether that’s even possible with a subject like SharePointGovernance I don’t know, time will tell, but that is very

Why? 13

much my ‘big hairy audacious goal’ (Collins & Jerry, 1994http://bit.ly/BigHairyAudaciousGoal).

Simply put, I want to enable you all to deliver value toyour organisations. I propose to do this by disrupting yourSharePoint projects with the words, experiences, analogies,tools and techniques that are contained within this mani-festo…

I hope that this book will cut through all the existingSharePoint Governance crap that is out there and steer youon a path to SharePoint awesomeness.

Why? 14

What is this crazy thing calledGovernance?

Well at a very simple level, it’s all about putting things,but not necessarily just large documents and overbearingrules, in place that help your project achieve its vision orgoal. Put another way, Governance helps to ensure thatyour project can actually start to deliver the difference itshould make to your business.

The word Governance, as stated in Wikipedia, is said tohave been derived from the Greek verb κυβερνάω [ku-bernao], used for the first time in a metaphorical senseby Plato. In Latin, the term Governance means ‘To Steer’and this is my seminal definition, first imparted to me bythe famed Australian SharePoint and collaboration sense-maker, Paul Culmsee (http://bit.ly/Culmsee);

It was this insight that brought clarity to my alreadybusiness-focussed perspective of Governance. It’s alsopretty convenient for me that Governance can be groundedin the nautical steer theme, as I am an avid sailor!

Take a look at the statements below, are these concepts thatyou can see within your organisation?

• A SharePoint Vision

• Stories about SharePoint making a difference

• A SharePoint Business Case

Why? 15

• SharePoint Return on Investment

• Measurable SharePoint Business Outcomes.

Ask yourself, do you really deliver these things to yourstakeholders and users?

Do you think perhaps Governance could be part of theanswer?

I Do.

Why? 16

Why are SharePoint projects socomplex?

My experience, over the last decade is that in way toomanyinstances, SharePoint projects fail to deliver true businessvalue. They’re delivered as though they are just anotherMicrosoft Office productivity solution, implemented as atechnology project with a huge and catastrophic assump-tion that “If you build it, they will come” (Field of Dreams,1989).

Dave Snowden’s ‘Cynefin Framework’ (Snowden, 2012http://bit.ly/Cynefin) is immensely useful in sensemakingthe complexity of delivering collaborative and social solu-tions, such as SharePoint, to my clients. I apply the CynefinFramework to demonstrate whywe can’t just assume that atechnology solution on its own will deliver value and solveour organisations business problems.

Why? 17

Cynefin Framework sketch with StoryCubes

Why? 18

Originally developed in the context of knowledge manage-ment and organisational strategy, Cynefin, a welsh word,literally translated to mean ‘habitat, or place of multiplebelongings’, is now applied in many diverse ways, includ-ing complex adaptive systems, decision-making, culturalchange, organisational strategy and community dynamics.

As you can see we have a typical four quadrant diagram,with each quadrant sensemaking particular scenarios, oneof which I feel is most appropriate to SharePoint andcollaborative or knowledge management projects.

In the Simple quadrant, life is very much cause and effect.As you can see by the character, every time they dropthe ball it falls to the ground, that action is infinitelyrepeatable with the same predictable effect. Have youever implemented a SharePoint solution that you couldrepeat in any team, company, or sector that would alwayshave the same repeatable and predictable cause and effect?Nope, I didn’t think so! So SharePoint, collaboration andknowledge management solutions don’t live here in thisquadrant.

Also, you know all the focus in SharePoint land on ‘BestPractice’? It’s an oxymoron.

Moving up to the Complicated quadrant, this is wherethe previously simple and repeatable relationship betweencause and effect requires investigation, analysis or the ap-plication of expert knowledge in order to be effective. Herewe can see from our characters that an expert is analysing

Why? 19

the situation, the consultant character is reading about thatknowledge and implementing a solution influenced by thatthinking. The result being the end user character is walkingaway happily. Now we may see this kind of behaviour inmore infrastructure based projects such as Microsoft Ex-change, but not for collaboration, knowledge managementand SharePoint scenarios. True, most technology projectsare implemented as ‘good practice’ or even worse perhapsusing ‘best practice’, but if we analyse those projects wewill see that the projects are deemed failures because theydo not deliver the outcomes required by the business.

What I have found, in my experience, is that projectsdelivered with the assumption that the business problemthey are solving is in the ‘Complicated’ or ‘Simple’ do-main, although outwardly they do fail, they do make somepositive steps towards the goal. The challenge is thatthe implementers, very often do not see things with aperspective of learning and continuous improvement andtherefore the one-shot project cannot hope to capitalise onthe value that has already been delivered.

Now things get interesting in the Complex quadrant. Asyou can see from the characters, we have music playing inthe background and we have two emergent behaviours:

• The first person is dancing

• The second person is listening intently.

Why? 20

Both characters are happy and are deriving value fromthe music in different ways, perhaps ways we had notimagined or expected. From a Cynefin perspective therelationship between cause and effect is only perceivedin retrospect, never in advance. For our characters, thatimplies that depending on whom they are, what theyare doing and even their mood, different behaviours willemerge from the same music playing.

In terms of our work around SharePoint Governance, thisfits nicely with what we experience every day. We imple-ment a solution based on what the business stakeholdersstate their requirements are, they use it for some period oftime and then we start to hear about the users’ unrest:

• It doesn’t quite work right

• A particular team “doesn’t work like that”

• When I said I wanted this I meant that

• Can you move the search box over there?

• But in this situation, we want it to work like this…

Does that sound all too familiar? Is that what tends tohappen to your SharePoint projects?

What we are seeing are emergent requirements, emergentbehaviours and emergent use-cases. Implementing thesolution based on what they think they want helps the user

Why? 21

community to further evolve their understanding of theproblem or goal. It is through continuous improvementthat we can work with them to evolve the solution to meettheir goals.

Finally, for completeness, although a little out of the remitfor this book, is the Chaotic quadrant. There is norelationship here between cause and effect at a systemslevel, so behaviour is unpredictable and although at timesthatmay feel true of our SharePoint user community it isn’tthe reality!

So let us remember, SharePoint projects are people projectsand people projects are emergent and therefore they aremost definitely not a one shot solution.

Future ChaptersWhat else is on it’s way in the planned future revisions ofthis book?

• An ‘Introduction’ by a renowned SharePoint MVP

• Lots More Visual Thesis

• A new practical Governance approach - The 7Wavesof SharePoint Governance

• Practical ways to embed Governance in your organ-isation

• Tips, hints and other disruptive tools.

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ReferencesAll the links within this book can be found in the followingbit.ly bundle: http://bit.ly/LinkBundle_SPGovManifesto

Collins, J. & Jerry, P., 1994. Big Hairy Audacious Goal.[Online]Available at: http://bit.ly/BigHairyAudaciousGoal

Culmsee, P., 2012. Clever Workarounds. [Online]Available at: http://bit.ly/Culmsee

Field of Dreams. 1989. [Film] Directed by Phil AldenRobinson.

Foley, M. J., 2011. All About Microsoft. [Online] Availableat: http://bit.ly/SharePointMomentum

Godin, S., 2011. Poke the Box. The Domino Project.Available at: http://bit.ly/PokeSeth

Heifetz, R., 2009. Practice of Adpative Leadership. Har-vard Business School Press. Available at: http://bit.ly/AdaptiveHeifetz

Locke, C., Levine, R., Searls, D. &Weinberger, D., 2000. TheClutrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual. PerseusBooks. Available at: http://bit.ly/TheCluetrainManifesto

Marshall, B.,Rightshifting. [Online]Available at: http://bit.ly/MarshallModel

Rittel, P. H., 2012. Wicked Problem. [Online]Available at: http://bit.ly/WickedProblem

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References 24

Snowden, D., 2012. Wikipedia - Cynefin. [Online]Available at: http://bit.ly/Cynefin

The Standish Group, 1995. The Chaos Report The StandishGroup.

Who are SoulsailorConsulting?

Soulsailor Consulting Ltd (http://www.SoulsailorConsulting.com) is a disruptive micro-consultancy, established early in2012 by Ant Clay (http://uk.linkedin.com/in/antonyclay).

We are focussed on enabling organisational value by dis-rupting your technology projects.

We work extensively with our clients and partner organ-isations to align their people and technology investmentsto organisational outcomes, whilst changing the way thatthey work through facilitation, visualisation, collaborativeplay and organisational storytelling.

Soulsailor Consulting Ltd delivers consultancy, coachingand speaks on a range of topics including SharePoint, Gov-ernance, requirements facilitation, collaboration, gamifica-tion, social business, change management and innovationplatforms and delivers a range of innovative training andworkshop sessions.

Feel free to get in touch if you think your technologyprojects need disrupting!

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