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Govern your Governance
One of the major issues that businesses run into is rate of change. As a matter of fact, many businesses actually revise their workflows once per month, others as often as once per week. SharePoint systems are extremely user friendly, and they make it easy for users at all levels to make relevant changes to site features, content, documents, and even infrastructure. SharePoint is deceptively easy to use, even though it has an extremely complex environment. An end user can literally build a functional SharePoint site in 5 to 10 minutes. Because it is so easy to build collaborative websites, they can grow extremely rapidly and become unmanageable. How can you keep up?
You keep up by governing your Governance, and doing so from the very beginning of the design. If governance is not written out in advance, re-work, miscommunication, and technical errors are likely to ensue. Good Governance consists of rules, technology, responsibilities, protocol and policies, but it is up to you to implement the how, when, where and who of it all.
In this article:
What is governance?
Governance is basically the rules, procedures, and guidelines, and workflows that will be applied to each project, organization, or company that it represents. All employee roles, responsibilities, processes, and policies that define businesses do so through governance. A given corporations different divisions, departments, and teams that work in cooperation to achieve pre-determined goals use governance to keep everything organized. Degrees of access, responsibilities of different employees, and any other necessary parameters should be determined within the governance of any SharePoint project from the very beginning. How SharePoint will run, who will do what, and what equipment will be used is all determined by governance.
Some examples of Governance in action include:
Checking reports for server health, site utilization, & user trends: What site was the most popular? What site is least popular? Is there a site out there that nobody uses at all?
Monitoring site activity levels by checking reports, manual process for security or provisioning: Who’s been opening up files that they should not have access to? Where is this unusual amount of downloading coming from?
Getting Started
In order for Governance to be effective, it must anticipate the needs, goals, and possible technical & user issues that your organization may face. It should also be coordinated from top to bottom between all of the users who touch it. The IT department, top executives, and end users on the front lines should be able to communicate with each other seamlessly through pre-determined parameters of Governance. Every business is unique, so each enterprise will have different challenges. When executed correctly, Governance will allow the user to observe & manage the same information as it occurs, and take immediate action if necessary.
Assemble your Team
SharePoint is not a disjointed effort, it is a full blown infrastructure, so you really need to account for the various roles that will need to be provided to optimize it’s tools. A competent team should cover these roles:
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Operational representation (defragging databases, back up, maintenance)
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Security – talk to internal legal group, internal security, find out where most likely compromises are and determine usage and freedom of uses, adhering to compliance and everything.
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Site Design – information architecture, and user interface. It is recommended that each department has input in the site design because these users will have the best insight as to how the site can be most efficiently laid out.
Document roles & responsibilites
Identify all employee roles & responsibilities for each roll in writing. Rate them against goals through business objectives each month, quarter, and year. The absence of true accountability will work against you, and your system will suffer, so it must be measured accordingly. Come up with processes & procedures, document them, and put them into a WIKI with SharePoint. This way, each team member understands exactly what is expected, and they know how the processes need to be adhered to.
Training
SharePoint is extremely user friendly, but don’t let that fool you! It is an extremely complex environment, and users who are not properly trained will be prone to make mistakes that they don’t even realize they are making. If you take the time to consistently train your user community appropriately, you can increase the efficiency of your governance, and reduce unnecessary errors.
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Provide live training sessions
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Record live training tutorials and put them up on your site.
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Point people to each training that you have online.
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Highlight when people follow guidelines, refer back to their articles, and explain what they did correctly.
Training must be ongoing. It is NOT a one-time event. Provide training consistently to keep up with the always-increasing rate of technological, procedural, and inevitable change that occurs in today’s business environment.
What should be governed?
Every organization is different, so each will have different needs when it comes to governance. Larger organizations will most likely require more detailed governance than a smaller organization. A successful deployment of governance should include the following features:
Content types
Content types are re-usable containers that hold collections of customizable metadata. They are necessary to organize, manage, and handle information in a consistent manner. They define the attributes of a type of list item, document, or folder, and because they are re-usable, they can be utilized to decrease re-work and typing errors. Each Content type can specify Metadata properties to associate with items of its type, available workflows, templates, and policies. Content types can be used to facilitate consistent information in management, Metadata requirements, and security, or other Metadata that directly affects the governance of your application. *For more details on content types & how they work, check out the follow up article “Conent Types can make life easier”
Using metadata with content types
Metadata is associated with a content type as a column. Metadata, or columns, provide information about a certain items content that is used to categorize and classify them. (Date of input, name of customer, associated department, and so on...) Metadata provides contextual information, which allows users to search for & locate documents, features, and content types by associating it with an author, subject, audience, language, etc.
When Metadata is added at the site collection level, it is associated with content types. Content types will inherit some or all of its Metadata from the parent content type at the site collection level. Additional Metadata can then be added at a lower level such as a document. *For more detailed information about metadata, see the article “Data that Describes Data”
Web application permissions and policies
Permissions for a Web application determine what any given users access level is, what they are allowed or not allowed to see, what they can change, and what they can delete or add. They are comprehensive settings that apply to all users and groups for all site collections within a web application. These policies are essential in that they prevent users from deleting critical data or making changes to documents to the projects detriment.
You can control user actions by enabling or disabling the associated permission on the Web application. For example, if you do not want users to be able to add pages to a Web site, you can disable the Add and Customize Pages permission that is one of the site-related permissions.
Document management
Document management is exactly what it says it is: the management of your documents. In Governance, controlling the lifecycle, creation, review cycles, publishing, distribution, and how documents are ultimately disposed of or retained is essential. Project managers, developers, and end users will need policies that assist them with keeping the workflow organized. Policies should implement auditing, document retention, labeling, and barcodes, and to help an organization comply with legally mandated requirements, such as the need to retain records.
Information architecture
Information architecture should help users collect, store, and retrieve information. The best way to do so is by determining how the information will be organized, accessed, and distributed to the site through pages, documents, lists and data. A Web site’s information architecture determines how the information in that site is organized and presented to the sites end users.
Workflows
A Workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. Workflows force the implementation of business processes for users of a SharePoint Server site. They can be associated with documents, forms, or list items. Workflows determine the organizational structure, functions, teams, projects, policies, and hierarchies of your project or site.
An effective Workflow should address:
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Targeting project management - are my adoption levels on track?
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Business management - is my staff working more efficiently?
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Knowledge management - are our taxonomies working?
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I.T. management - when will I need more disc space?
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Webmaster information - Can I get my web stats straight out of SharePoint?
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Developer Tools I need an easier way to build reports
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Auditor Information - who changed this document, and when did they change it?
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Maintenance - Regular maintenance activities, such as backing up and restoring data or installing a comprehensive assessment of your organization's information architecture can help you identify potential inefficiencies.
How governance of workflows can keep you organized
How can you deal with large site collections that are growing too big? In the past, we would have compiled a set of reports. This is fine, but the thing is somebody would eventually have to go and look at those reports, spend the time to research where the problems where and what was going on. With the correct governance of Workflow, users can create & customize a report can that gives them the size of all of the site collections in their environment. Manipulating the parameters that determine when specific triggers fire and why can customize these reports.
A user that wanted to filter out all of the sites of a certain size could customize a function that loops through all of the sites that come back that are greater than 300 meg. Furthermore, they could automate it to e-mail a specific user once they get to a certain threshold.
Detailed performance monitoring is another way that workflows can be used to streamline Governance. CPU Performance, memory usage on servers, what’s happening over a specified amount of time should all be taken into consideration for monitoring. This way, the I.T. guys can track if something important is going on with the server, or if there is an unbalance with the server. CPU reports can be filtered with any given specified parameters.
Lets say an employee gets fired. A lot of things need to happen between a lot of different departments. Governance is the key to making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Using some of the tools that we have discussed for SharePoint governance, you can integrate workflows that call reports, or call data from a report that ran previously. Data from a SharePoint list can be distributed to the initiator, initiators manager, legal department, HR, and whoever else may need the info. I.T. will need to disable x- employees account & re-assign access to their boss. Inventory will need to be notified so they can collect work property (key card, laptop) upon x-employees departure. You can automate the entire process so that 1 week prior to the fire date, a new trigger fires to make sure each department has completed it’s designated tasks. Any task that has not been checked off in SharePoint will be flagged, and an e-mail will be sent to whichever party/department was responsible for completing the task.
Conclusion
The best way to deal with today’s business environment and the rate at which processes & procedures change is by establishing strong governance for your share point environment. SharePoint gives you fantastic tools to automate, maintain, update, and improve the Governance from the bottom user to the top user. Surprisingly, it is at the same time one of the most overlooked, and most powerful concepts that can make or break the organization of your SharePoint environment. The prospect of Establishing Governance can seem overwhelming, but the results are very well worth the extra effort. Governing your Governance should definitely be considered a key element to the success and efficiency of your SharePoint environment.
Looking for more information about SharePoint? Don't miss the next article in this series:
Metadata: Data that Describes Data