For those of you unfamiliar with the event, Microsoft holds an annual internal conference called TechReady that pulls together the latest from internal teams, as well as some outside speakers, on basically every product area. People fly in from around the world to participate and get some technical training. Well, its been happening all this week, taking place in downtown Seattle at the Washington Convention Center. My ‘Hello World!’ moment in the SharePoint community happened shortly after joining Microsoft back in 2006 as part of TechReady, when I was invited by my team member Joel Oleson to help present on the topic of SharePoint governance. It was not new subject-matter for me — I have been involved in corporate and platform governance initiatives since the mid-1990s, but this was my first foray into the topic with the SharePoint audience. And in 2006, that audience was not very receptive. Governance was still viewed as a “nice to have” activity in 2006.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
I connected with Melinda Morales (@TrulyMelinda) sometime last year — I believe it was through some webinar feedback of some sort. At the time, Melinda was leading the governance efforts for a massive SharePoint deployment at Sony Electronics, and providing expertise on the topic to the various Sony divisions. We kept in touch, and when the timing was right, she moved with her family to the Seattle area — and then I hired her. Melinda is now a consultant with GTconsult, located in Bellevue, WA and focusing largely on helping organizations implement sound governance practices. I asked Melinda to share some detail behind her latest project: the SharePoint Governance Maturity Model, which is something every organization needs to at least take a look at and consider.
[CB] Melinda, what is your background, and how did you get involved in SharePoint? You know… how long have you been working with it, what is your current role, etc?
[MM] Thanks Christian. This is exciting! I’m a business analyst and member of the awesome A-team at GTconsult. Yes, it is as cool as it sounds. I get to help organizations of all different shapes and sizes discover the fun of the world of SharePoint and guide them through their journey. I’ve been working with SharePoint since 2007. I got my first taste of the kool-aid when I was just a little power user at Sony Electronics (SEL) after which I spent the next 8 years growing into new SharePoint dedicated roles and ultimately becoming their business-side platform owner. While with Sony I got to interface with all levels of the organization and really got a good idea of the many different ways users interact with and sometimes even become frustrated with the toolset. I took it as my personal goal to help make transitions easier and to advocate for the users with every step. I still work towards that goal in every project today.
[CB] You’ve recently started writing for ITUnity and started up your own blog, with a strong focus on governance. There is a ton of great information in your posts, and some very practical examples of how to get started. What is your experience, specifically, with SharePoint governance and what is different about your perspective?
[MM] I really am just a newbie to the great big SharePoint community but am super inspired to become involved and learn from all the great people out there. I initially started sharing my experiences, both successes and failures, with SharePoint governance through my involvement with local SPUG’s. I heard over and over again, as I’m sure many people do, that governance is often a struggle and ends up as a huge hindrance when organizations are trying to progress their SharePoint deployments.
As I mentioned before, I am big into user advocacy and governance falls perfectly in line with that passion. Through my time at SEL, we went from having a big ol’ spaghetti mess of an environment to a streamlined and closely monitored business-critical platform. The biggest win in that journey was our approach to governance. We took the long road and had many stops and starts but ultimately the shift in focus to a collaborative, user-centric approach is what made the win for the team.
Over the years while sharing my governance journey, I had a ton of great discussions with people from several different organizations and came to realize that not only was what I experienced with SEL exactly what others experience, but the approach that was successfully implemented was quite intriguing to others. It looked like there was a need for others to be able to leverage my experiences and hopefully help them avoid taking the longest route to success.
Before I get to the answer of what differentiates my preferred governance approach, let me just put a disclaimer out there. I don’t think my approach is really “different” only because there is no one way to tackle SharePoint governance. It is very much a unique journey for each organization and should be approached as such. There are simply too many moving parts to have any kind of one way or the other discussion. That said, there is one thing that I think has defined the success of the approach I prefer – what I call collaborative governance. The most successful governance strategies I have seen all have an aspect of business and IT teams working together toward a common goal. My approach is centered around fostering this relationship.
[CB] I think that’s a great point. I think a lot of people are looking for a tool or a magic list of “must do” requirements that will solve all of their problems, but governance is one of those areas where the infamous SharePoint answer of “it depends” really does apply. In your opinion, what is the general state of governance in the SharePoint community? We’ve been talking about it for many years now – is it even still an issue with most organizations?
[MM] Governance is one of those topics that just will not go away, right? It’s like that stuff that gets stuck on the bottom of your shoe. You try to shake it off or scrape it on something but it just won’t go away and actually ends up spreading all over the place. There’s a pretty visual for you. In all seriousness, governance is still a hot topic and will remain a hot topic because it can make or break your SharePoint deployment. No matter how you are using the features of the platform, you will come up against governance at some point. It doesn’t have to be a problem, though. One thing that Office 365 and the mobile first/ cloud first strategy has done is force us to broaden our horizons when it comes to governance. For a long, long, long time we approached governance as an IT security control and nothing more. Today we as a community are finally starting to open our eyes to the fact that it is much more (even though great people like yourself have been telling us this very thing for years).
[CB] You’ve developed a SharePoint governance maturity model, which reminds me of the SharePoint Maturity Model (SPMM) developed a few years back by Sadalit Van Buren, who is now a Partner Technology Strategist at Microsoft. Do you borrow from Sadie’s model, or is this different? Can you walk us through your methodology?
[MM] Ahhh, yes. Please allow me to fan girl for a moment. Sadie’s SharePoint maturity model is such a great tool. I actually used it to help with roadmapping during my time at Sony. I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a great way to illustrate their SharePoint deployment’s level of advancement, especially when transitioning from 2010 to 2013.
I was definitely inspired by the ease of illustration through the use of a maturity model when introducing a new framework. While the maturity assessment method I used is similar to many maturity models out there, the areas of measurement are completely focused on governance. The SharePoint governance maturity model is very specialized and focuses only on the core framework for growing into a collaborative governance strategy.
In the assessment in particular, we take a look at four major pillars of a holistic collaborative governance strategy – Foundation, Administration, Communication and Adoption – and how you get from being in a chaotic, ungoverned position to implementing a cohesive governance strategy.
Aligning with this maturity framework means you will explore:
- team formation
- priority setting
- policy
- platform structuring
- security
- growth of soft skills
- establishing ownership
- user empowerment
- reporting and monitoring
There is a great deal of detail on each of the pillars available in a free whitepaper over on the GTconsult website!
[CB] I’m always a fan of the self-promotion! The fact that I helped write the paper is icing on the cake. But back to the topic — I’ve always felt there is a huge gap between guidance from the “experts” and the practical application of governance. You and I have talked about this on numerous occasions. People tend to gravitate toward tools and technology rather than solve the fundamental issues that cause governance problems. What is your approach with customers that only seem to focus on the tech?
[MM] I second that emotion! Governance consulting is a hard nut to crack, I think. It is a pretty long, involved process and requires a lot of hands-on work. The focus on tools and tech, in my opinion, stems from the need to have a quick fix. I seriously think this contributes to why governance has remained such a hot topic for so long. In order for governance to be successful, you have to build a strategy. Unfortunately this sometimes means the need for governance gets deprioritized because resources are tight and there is no quick fix tool to slap on and be done.
I have to say, I don’t think I have had a customer that WASN’T focused on the tech. One of the things I love to do with customers is to dive in and do some discovery involving their users and site administrators. Most often IT is the team doing the inquiry into governance and perhaps solely owning the SharePoint space which usually leads to a little bit of a narrowed view of how the platform is being used and what it is being used to accomplish. Having sit downs with business users is always an eye opening experience and also serves as the very first opportunity to start bridging some of the gaps that may exist between the two “sides” of the platform. It is not as scary as it sounds. There are absolutely ways to facilitate these discussions in a positive manner and the output is uber valuable – and usually ends up steering your aim toward process instead of tech!
[CB] Rarely do organizations have a clean slate or a brand new SharePoint deployment on which they can build the perfect governance framework. The reality is that governance is often mentioned only after problems pop up. Suddenly there is some kind of data breach (yes, I went there…but I’m not naming names) and the executive finally recognizes that governance is not an unnecessary cost. Where do you go from there? How do you apply your maturity model to that scenario?
[MM] “…………….” Is my answer to your not so subtle call out. And you can quote me on that!
Data breaches, accidental leaks, audits, user adoption decline, user dissatisfaction. I have seen all of these as catalysts leading to governance discussions. It is very common to not even realize you need governance until you NEED governance. That seems to be the nature of the beast because of SharePoint’s epic ability to touch every part of our organizations without administrators even realizing it is to that point.
Let me start by explaining a little bit more about GTconsult’s governance strategy focused workshops (called Jam Sessions). We engage and explore, make recommendations then help implement and coach. The governance maturity model is just one of the many tools used during our discovery phase. It is a good way to get an idea of where an organization is in regards to implementing a holistic, collaborative governance strategy and how far they may need to go to get to where they want to be. All of our governance offerings start with this basic discovery. This enables us to jump in and assess governance at any stage then help to define the “Where do we go from here?”
Along with a picture of where the organization is currently with respect to governance, we also conduct several other discovery exercises including a technology culture assessment. This allows us to get a good understanding of where potential roadblocks may be and who the key players are. I recommend this kind of discovery for anyone looking to start down the path to governance, even if it is in response to a large event on a mature environment.
If anyone wants to take a gander, the tool is available for anyone to use in order to help kick start discussions on governance strategy as a whole and can illustrate a clear, defined path to achieve results. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/govmaturity
[CB] Back to your more recent content – what are you writing about these days? What are your most recent posts?
[MM] Over on my blog http://trulymelinda.com/ , I try to keep up with posting and have a variety of topics. There is a pretty cool walkthrough on a mechanism for measuring user knowledge in SharePoint and one of my favorite posts “Smile, Your Users are Watching. The #1 Soft Skill for the IT Pro” because it’s just fun and something that people forget. I also plan to write some on the Windows 10 experience, wahooo!
I find inspiration in the wackiest places sometimes (such as my 4-year old son playing Minecraft) so you never really know what will pop up on my blog.
Thanks again to Melinda from pulling yourself away from Minecraft with your son to answer my questions, and for sharing links to such great content. You can reach her at melinda@GTconsult.com, on Twitter at @TrulyMelinda, or visit her blog at www.TrulyMelinda.com. As I mention above, the Governance Maturity Model whitepaper with free assessment survey are things that every organization need to review. There is always room for improvement, and Melinda and the GTconsult team have made it easy to create your baseline.