Gregory S. MacBeth - : Governance

QUESTION - I am Program Manager Charged with Implementing SharePoint - Now What?

gregmcb — Mon, 26 May 2008 08:44:00 GMT

This post is targeted towards the large customer and may not completely apply to medium or small organizations. This my list of the top ten priorities that a PM should focus and consider when given this task. This is a high level overview based upon my experience and I am sure we could detail and add more but ten is good to start.

PRIORITY ONE - As a PM you must start to develop the SharePoint Govenance Plan by using the the Microsoft Published Resource Center. This wlll allow you to do acoomplish several key items which will make your program a sucess:

Protect the enterprise, such as by helping to ensure regulatory compliance.
Greatly increase the usability of a solution. For example, the governing body in an enterprise can define metadata requirements for all content that makes it easier to categorize and search for the content across the enterprise.
Increase an organization's efficiency — for example, by requiring training as a prerequisite to becoming the administrator of a SharePoint collaboration Web site.
Build your Technical Team Focused upon the service and not individual old world silo based management virtualized teams for core skills
Establish a Service Model with Solid Service Level Agreements with the Business Unit Leaders (BULS) and a Solid Service Level Map

PRIORITY TWO - Build Your New Service Based Team.

This is going to be hard becuase you are going to have to convince your leadership that SharePoint is and should be managed with the same priority as how you manage your Exchange team and its not going to be cheep. The first problem I see organizations run into is who manages the team. The virtualized team doesn't seem to work IMHO becuase the individual managers don't have the same stake as you. My advice for whats its worth is that their should be one manager focused with direct control over the following roles: SharePoint Admins, SharePoint Developers, SQL DBA, the Architect, Windows & Cluster Admins, IIS Admins, and an Office Admin. Then their needs to be a virtualized team connected to the MOSS core team with these roles: SCOM Admin, Network Admin, SAN\Storgae Admin, Security Admin. There are ther roles that will and could be added but tis covers the core.

This is why the Program Manager needs to be a strong leader. A quote from John Fenton's Book describes exactly what you need:

"Managers think incrementally, whilst leaders think radically. "Managers do things right, while leaders do the right thing.". This means that managers do things by the book and follow company policy, while leaders follow their own intuition, which may in turn be of more benefit to the company. A leader is more emotional than a manager . "People are governed by their emotions rather than their intelligence". This quotation illustrates why teams choose to follow leaders.
"Leaders stand out by being different. They question assumption and are suspicious of tradition. They seek out the truth and make decisions based on fact, not prejudice. They have a preference for innovation."

I share this quote becuase it is the best statement I have found that describes exactly what type of person needs to be the Program Manager. As the PM for SharePoint you are going to have convince your superiors of the innvovative nature of SharePoint and why they can't think of it in the traditional fashion.

What I will provide is a solid proven example of how the United States Marine Corps has taken this strategy to fact by being agile enough to build a services based unit called the Marine Air Ground Task Force (MAGTF). MAGTFs are a balanced air-ground, combined arms task organization of Marine Corps forces under a single commander that is structured to accomplish a specific mission.which we would define in IT as a Service. If the government can pull this off then it can certainly be implemented with even greater success by the private sector.

A good way to understand this strategy of leadership would be the following book a it applies the Marines Way to business which has more in common than you may think.

PRIORITY THREE - It's not going to be cheep, think about how much it costs to runa good Messeging Environment as its the closest comparison I can provide.

Use your Governance Plan and SLAs to drive getting what you need to meet the demands of the business. If the budget is not there then go back to the governance plan and SLA's and ask the BULS what they want to cross off their list of requirements. If they say nothng, then the only thing you can say is this is what the team determined we need to provide the service you asked for. If your provide less then we have to cut the service. Where do you want to start?

PRIORITY FOUR - Plan for explosive growth

Once people see SharePoint, they will use it and accept it just like people did email in the 90's.

Use x64 Hardware starting from SQL, to Application Servers (Index, PerformancePoint, Excel Server, InfoPath Server, etc), to WFE
Plan for the best disk subsystem you can get for SQL in terms of IOPS weather it be DAS or SAN(which should be dedicated and not shared)
Decide if you you will Cluster or Mirror SQL
Use 8GB RAM WFE on x64
Develop of Main Farm with Multiple Child Farms for really big organizations by planning a good Taxonomy from the start

PRIORITY FIVE - Training

Train your Admins
Train your Developers
Train your End Users (Some say 75 % of your Trainign Budget Goes here)
Train your Staff in Integration Troubleshooting

PRIORITY SIX - Plan and Build a Dev, Test and Production Environment that is Exactly the Same

You need this to test custom code
You need this to test hotfixes and service packs

PRIORITY SEVEN - Build Unit Tests and Conduct a Full User Acceptance Program

Based upon your SLAs build unit tests and require BULs to signoff on acceptance
Test Your environment before, during and after you Go Live

PRIORITY EIGHT - Operate & Maintain Your Environment

Engage Microsoft Premier Support for Yearly MOSS Risk Assessments at a minImum. I would recommend a MOSS Risk Assemesnt after any major change or upgrade to hardware or Service Packs.
Do multiple Triail runs of any major upgrades such as Service Packs, Hardware Changes, as well as Storage and Network modifications. Do enough test where you have a step by step document and can complete the upgrade in test with zero flaws.
Train Your Team to Use System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to proactively manage your environment and identify the KPIs before production.
When you do have a problem DO NOT FOCUS ON THE SYMPTOM. You should FOCUS ON FINDING THE ROOT PROBLEM!
Ensure you have a Service Level Map, this way you know exactly what and who will be impacted by any changes made.
Build a documented and tested at lest quarterly DR Plan

PRIORITY NINE - Control Growth and Set Standards

When I talk to customers, I often hear we had a lot of organic growth. What I translate this to is our Rose Garden is full of weeds!

Define what strategies you will use to customize SharePoint. Each has a set of pros and cons that go along with them that will

SharePoint Designer
Site Definitions
Template Modifications\Additions
Features
WebParts
Event Handlers
Workflows
etc...

PRIORITY TEN - Have Fun Becuase You Are Leading a Project That Will Impact Your Company For Years To Come With The Same End Result as Email Had in the 90s. No Pressure:)

Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Implementing MOSS

gregmcb — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:41:00 GMT

Over the years I have seen a lot of SharePoint deployments from many customers going back to 2003. This has allowed me to develop a unique perspective and observation on how to deploy this product best. Here is what I have learned are the top ten things you need to do to make your deployment the success that will provide you with the best ROI and take full advantage of the product. MOSS and the surrounding products such as Office, Exchange, PerformancePoint, Office Communication Server, Project Server, Excel Server, Forms Server, SQL Analysis and Reporting Server have the potential to provide the same productivity increases seen when email was deployed universally in the 90’s. Make full use of these technologies AND make Your Company succeed. That being said, it is important to remember that MOSS is about people and collaboration not products.

1. “MOSS is not your father’s corporate web!” When you deploy MOSS you need to think future. You need to be thinking about not only deploying a portal but also a collaborative integration solution that will dramatically increase your companies productivity potential. MOSS is not just about document management and lists. Collaboration/portals has to be about people. If you don’t plan on training your end users about new ways to think and new ways to share information, then the value of the tools will be minimized.

2. Train your Employees on how they can use MOSS functionality and provide them with the insight they need to see how they can increase their productivity and use all the features of the product. Don’t allow this opportunity to become a means of using this new technology the same way you would in the past. Think beyond document libraries and lists. Think communication, business intelligence such as Dashboards, forms , workflow and collaboration to the fullest potential. Develop Power Users that allows for your portal to be driven by the users. They know what they need and if you provide the opportunity and knowledge to allow their ingenuity to drive the process it will allow for greater success and allow your IT staff to focus on IT and not driving the collaboration. Everyone is equal when collaborating online and senior management of a company needs to buy in to the freedom and flexibility that will come from allowing people to work like this. Consider spending 25% of your budget on training the power users and 75 percent on training all users. The Power Users should be those stakeholders in the business and should be instructed upon the possibilities of the technology so they can chose which to implement effectively for their teams. This is the key to success.

3. Plan your overall design, Taxonomy, site structure and navigation, Search, Document Management, Records Management, Security, Server Farms, logical design with great care, knowing that your deployment will grow far beyond what your initial intentions were. Think about how you deployed AD and Organizational Units so that they would sustain your deployment lifetime and future upgrades. Use the Planning Worksheets provided. Adopt a SharePoint Governance model. Here is a sample Governance plan. By implementing a distributed governance model which involves creating power users in the various lines of business for day to day governance tasks like site creation and security you not only mold champions to drive awareness of the capabilities of the platform, you offload a significant portion of the non-strategic IT tasks to end users. This frees up your IT folks to do the activities that really interest them. Those power users now represent a great foundation for a portal-steering committee that can determine standards, branding, navigation, etc.

4. Plan for performance by knowing sizing constraints, SQL Performance and how each functionality will influence your environments stability. Design and deploy an effective policy with regards to the site creation and maintenance, recycle bin, retention, and archival. Do not allow your data to become stale and out of date.

5. Go to KB Alertz and register for MOSS and WSS KBs as well as view and register an RSS feed to SharePoint Team Blog before you plan and deploy.

6. Actually, take the time to build a test, QA and production environment that are exactly the same as far as general design. Then use content management to deploy between environments.

7. Define your growth strategy before you even install the product.

8. Have a documented and tested DR plan with SLAs with each top level organization that will be involved in your project before even installing. This should contribute greatly to your design especially with regards to Content Databases and Site Collections. With SP1 you can move site collections between content databases and webs.

9. Most environment can accommodate 80-90 percent of their needs without writing a single line of code. When defining how you will meet business needs ask if a built in component will suffice and evaluate the delta between the exact business needs and the cost of designing, developing, deploying and maintaining custom code. While it’s fun to write WebParts, it is not fun to manage and debug them when something happens. That being said, if you do use the built in WP make sure they are consistent with Microsoft best practices so they will upgrade to the next version or not break on a Service Pack.

10. Think, plan and put in place your Operations Guide before you deploy. What will you monitor in MOSS and what tools will you use to do this? What are the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks that you need to accomplish to keep your master piece running at optimum levels as defined by your SLAs.

PS: Start using those mail enabled lists types to replace your public folders now. The best choice is the email enabled discussion lists as well as email enabled calendars.