Case Study: SharePoint Governance Lessons Learned

Christy Punch, Senior Intranet Strategist at SCANA Corp and Share Conference speaker tells us about the lessons she learnt when implementing a governance plan in her organisation and shares her tips on what (and what not) to do.

Times are tight. You'll have to make do. We hear it all the time in business and unfortunately there are not many organisations or industries that are exempt from hearing these phrases.

When faced with tight budgets and limited resources, sorting out SharePoint governance can be a daunting task. Especially if you're largely managing it yourself. But SharePoint governance is an important piece of the puzzle to get right and resource strain should not be a reason to forget about it altogether.

The good news is that it can be done with limited resources and virtually no budget. With some careful planning and strategic positioning, you too can create a solid governance plan that everyone can get on board with.

Here are three lessons Christy Punch with SCANA Corporation shared with us that she learned from putting together a SharePoint governance plan at her organisation that may help you when thinking about your own plan.

Do your homework  

Christy found that the best approach for her organisation was to do a lot of the work ahead of time and keep it very simple.

Based on her experience of managing the intranet and working with different people across the organisation, she developed and documented processes, guidelines, training plans, security levels and roles- all the elements she knew her intranet stakeholders were going to be concerned about. Christy made sure this governance documentation was simple and succinct. For example, the SCANA Corp. intranet guidelines for what content belongs on the intranet is only eight bullets long.

Once you have all your governance elements together, you’re ready to talk to the business.

Don’t get everyone in the same room  

One mistake Christy thinks a lot of people make is pulling 10-20 people representing each area of the company together in a room to decide on a governance strategy. What happens here is there are too many cooks in the proverbial SharePoint kitchen. Most people don't know where to begin, in fact most people don't even understand what SharePoint governance is!

Christy instead created processes and documented everything ahead of time before meeting with stakeholders. Then she met with stakeholders individually and walked each through the governance plans and documentation. She explained what they had set up and what risk mitigation plans were in place to address the stakeholder’s unique concerns. Christy then had each stakeholder sign the document to say they had seen it and that they gave their approval to go ahead.

A key consideration here is to make sure to explain how each part of the governance plan acknowledges their concerns and issues. What Christy found was that most stakeholders were so impressed that the team went ahead and did the work upfront and were willing to own governance. It made the governance buy-in process go very smoothly.

Have a retention policy 

 Christy told us that if they could have done one thing differently, it would have been to build a retention policy into the governance plan from the beginning. For example, what do you do with content that is no longer relevant on your intranet, but you need a record of it? What happens to that PDF form that’s been updated? Does the older version need to be archived?

This is one thing Christy and her team at SCANA did not do when they created their initial governance, but something they are currently trying to get in place before the upgrade to SharePoint 2013 next year. The company has existing retention policies for email, personal drives, and shared drives, but the team didn’t consider creating a policy for the intranet. Christy admits that it is an easy need to overlook, because when you launch your new intranet with updated and new content, you don’t really think you’ll need a retention policy.

Even with audits in place to keep content up-to-date and to ensure governance is being followed, four years later we make retention decisions on a case-by-case basis. Content is only growing and we realize that a formal retention policy is needed more than ever.