At the beginning of every SharePoint project you will need to study, train, and work with a number of different people to understand how your company really functions. You need a firm understanding of the users and the business problems they face to produce something that will be useful to them.
Research confirms that two significant drivers of adoption are:
1. Perceived usefulness
2. Perceived ease of use.
How do you build a useful SharePoint site? Well, you should always start by asking users what they think they need, but you will need to dig a little further. Users accustomed to an established process or technological limitation often have difficulty imagining a new/different way to accomplish their goals. They may not even realize or be able to articulate areas that need improvement in their usual processes.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Henry Ford
It is the project team's responsibility to identify and tease out these “latent needs” before the project begins. This is where it comes in handy to have a dedicated business analyst on the project team. You want someone who understands the user’s job and can translate that business objective between the users and the SharePoint developer. The members of the project team, including the business analyst, should have experience finding clever ways to solve business problems.
As an IT leader, you should maintain regular contact with leaders of other departments, asking them about their goals and challenges. Tailor SharePoint development work to align with business processes, not the other way around.
Before you implement a new SharePoint site, you should ask yourself the following questions:
• Does the team implementing SharePoint understand how your business works?
• Have you set aside time and budget for the project team to interview your users?
• Does the project team have a dedicated business analyst?
• Are your users ready and able to devote time to being interviewed by the business analyst?
• Does someone on the team have experience solving the kinds of problems your users are facing?
• Has the project team researched or experienced a variety of solutions across different companies?
• Have you built, or begun to build, the relationships you will need with other leaders in the company in order for the project to be a success?
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Our relationship with our clients often begins when they notice something that they’re not quite happy with within their SharePoint environment. Maybe it’s slow performance, or maybe things have gotten a little bit out of control with the number of sites, subsites, or the way documents have been stored. We can help figure out how to maintain your ROI, how to increase user adoption, and figure out what’s wrong with your SharePoint environment.
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