Tutorial: How to Effectively Plan, Manage and Control SharePoint Projects by Dux Ray…

2/22/13

How to Effectively Plan, Manage and
Control SharePoint Projects

Dux Raymond Sy, PMP  
Managing Partner 
Innovative-e, Inc.

Activity: SharePoint Project Pictionary

•  Individual Activity
–  Get 3 sticky notes
–  List a SharePoint project issue that you have encountered in the past
in a sticky note
–  You will have a total of three issues

•  Group Activity
–  You will be grouped into project teams
–  Come up with a team name
–  Consolidate your list of issues and as a group, discuss and identify
the top 3 issues
–  Draw these three issues in a single easel pad

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Objectives

•  Initiate executive excitement, promote organizational buy-in
and foster user adoption for SharePoint
•  Develop an effective and practical project management
process in deploying SharePoint
•  Apply relevant strategies in mapping business processes to
identify SharePoint-based solutions
•  Identify necessary resources to plan, deploy, maintain and
support your SharePoint implementation
•  Minimize uncertainty and risk by applying practical scope
management techniques when managing SharePoint
projects

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Workshop Content

Chapter 1
SharePoint PM Fundamentals
Chapter 2
Eduneering SharePoint Solutions
Chapter 3
Establish Project Success Criteria
Chapter 4
Develop Project Plan
Chapter 5
Finalize Project Plan
Chapter 6
Executing the SharePoint Project
Chapter 7
Project Closing

#sptechcon @meetdux

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I’m Dux

•  Managing Partner, Innovative-e, Inc.
•  SharePoint Server MVP
•  Author, “SharePoint for Project Management” by O’Reilly
Media
•  For more information, connect with Dux
–  E-Mail: dux.sy@innovative-e.com
–  Twitter: twitter.com/meetdux
–  LinkedIn: meetdux.com/li
–  Blog: meetdux.com

#sptechcon @meetdux

Chapter 1: SharePoint PM Fundamentals

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Do You Know This Crybaby?

Why won’t  
this one fit?
#sptechcon @meetdux

Factors of Failed Deployments

•  Poor SharePoint technology understanding
•  Lack of executive sponsorship
•  Lack of proper planning
•  Lack of user engagement
•  Traditional top-down approach to enterprise software
deployment
•  Incomplete support and maintenance strategy
•  Lack of SharePoint road map definition

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Key Steps to Delivering SharePoint Success

1.  Eduneering SharePoint Solutions
2.  Establish Project Success Criteria
3.  Develop Project Plan
4.  Finalize Project Plan
5.  Executing the SharePoint Project
6.  Project Closing

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Chapter 2: Eduneering SharePoint Solutions

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•  What the Heck is Eduneering?
•  Educate Stakeholders About SharePoint
•  Collaboratively Engineer a Solution
•  Assess Organizational Readiness

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Eduneering = Education + Engineering

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Remember, SharePoint is Not a Silver Bullet

•  Educating the business about its’ value prior to deploying it
is paramount
–  Executives
–  IT
–  Business
•  Engineer SharePoint solutions based on
–  Business needs
–  Organizational readiness
–  Resource availability

#sptechcon @meetdux



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Executive SharePoint Ignorance is Not Bliss

•  Isn’t SharePoint about empowering End Users?
–  Who’s paying the bills?
–  Execs ordered SharePoint to be deployed
–  Do they REALLY understand the value of SharePoint to the
organization?
–  Is the budget realistic?
•  As the enlightened ones, it’s our responsibility to raise
executive awareness about SharePoint
•  Read “5 Reasons Why Executive SharePoint Ignorance is Not
Bliss” http://go.meetdux.com/393b

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It’s All About Business Value

•  Executives are primarily interested on how SharePoint can
affect an organization’s bottom line
•  Tip: Look for existing inefficiencies, measure it and prove
how SharePoint can be a lifesaver
–  Inefficiencies of meeting collaboration
–  Business process automation
–  Single platform vs multiple tools
•  How much is the investment?

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Build Solutions, Don’t Showcase Features

•  How would you like to drive a Lamborghini Diablo?
–  BTW, you just learned how to ride a bike yesterday

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Educate and Engage the Business

•  SharePoint is more than just a glorified network share
–  Stress that SharePoint is a platform
•  Tip: Address their pain points
–  Discuss business challenges
–  Map it to a SharePoint Solution

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Don’t Call It SharePoint

•  Platform
•  Point Solutions
–  Employee Onboarding System for Human Resources
–  Conference Room Scheduling System for Facilities
–  Project Management Information System for PMs
•  System Integration
•  Custom Application Development

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Keep Priorities in Order

•  You can’t do it all!
–  What business need should you solve first?
–  What are common features that can be deployed?
•  Project scope must be limited and specific
–  What’s important? Time? Budget? Functionality?
•  Tip: Involve decision makers in planning and prioritization
•  Read “How to Prioritize Business Needs Before
Implementing SharePoint” http://bit.ly/8sCiVR

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IT, Can You Handle This?

•  Implementation
–  Do you have the relevant skillsets to plan, engage with the business,
deploy SharePoint?
–  Are key processes for release management, disaster recovery,
auditing in place?
•  Support and Maintenance
–  What does the support structure look like?
–  Resources available for maintaining related technologies?
•  Future Releases

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Change Management Strategy

•  Collaboration culture
•  Governance plan
–  Business
–  Technology
•  Adoption plan
–  Training
–  Self-help
–  Feedback

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Develop a Roadmap

•  A SharePoint roadmap can help organizations
–  Quantify the budget, resources and effectiveness of SharePoint
–  Allows priorities to be set
–  Specifies what solutions are going to be deployed
•  Iterative releases can provide immediate visibility
–  Lower risk compared to big bang approach
•  Tip: Successful delivery of high profile solution gets you
brownie points
–  Quick wins are essential for better buy-in and adoption

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Roadmap Example

•  Phase 1: Proof of concept or Pilot
•  Phase 2: Replace intranet and file shares to improve
collaboration
•  Phase 3: Deploy value point solutions for HR, Operations
and Finance
•  Phase 4: Train users to build their own SharePoint solutions
•  Phase 5: Integrate CRM and third party reporting platform
•  See how EasyJet did it: http://bit.ly/74XwKH

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Chapter 3: Establish Project Success Criteria


•  Why is SharePoint Being Implemented?
•  Identify Key Stakeholders
•  Establish Rules of Engagement
•  Define Project Objectives

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Why is SharePoint being implemented
in your organization?

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Platform vs Point Solution

•  SharePoint as a Platform
–  Utilized for core collaboration needs of the organization
•  SharePoint as a Point Solution
–  Utilized for a specific application like events management system,
ticketing system, etc.

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What’s Important?

•  Project constraints are limits that must
be met regarding
–  Time
–  Cost
–  Functionality or scope
•  We must identify the relative priority of
all of the constraints
Time

–  To enable planning decisions to be made
when we run the project

Quality

Cost
Scope

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Workshop 3.1: Identify Your Project

•  As a group, decide on what SharePoint project that you
would like to use as a case study for your team
•  Identify the priority of the project (T/C/S), why?
•  Record the project and priority on an easel pad

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Who Are The Key Players?

•  Customer
–  Management
–  Business Departments
–  End Users
–  IT
•  Project Team
•  It is critical to find out who has
–  Influence
–  Interest
•  What are their needs?

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Executive Sponsorship

•  It is essential to the project have a committed sponsor
•  Educating the sponsor
–  Explain why the project is important
–  Provide a comprehensive list of the resources it will take to do the
project
–  Don’t just list features—really show how your company will benefit
–  Ensure that there is a clear understanding of what they are getting
into

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Set the Project Culture

•  Defining ground rules for the project early on can set the
expectations accordingly
•  Communications
–  Roles and Responsibilities
–  Task Delegation
–  Status Meetings
–  Reports
•  Project Metrics
•  Change Management

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Eat The SharePoint Dog Food

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Define Project Goal

•  A clear, quantifiable statement of project intent
–  Why is the project being undertaken?
–  What will the project achieve?
–  Who is the customer?
–  When is the deadline?
–  Where will the project be implemented?
–  Any constraints?

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Example: Project Goal

The current SharePoint 2007 intranet will be upgraded to
SharePoint 2010 throughout the university in order to increase
adoption and reduce IT support requirements.

The upgrade should be completed a month before Fall
semester begins.

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Identify Relevant Deliverables

•  Apart from the end product, what are the essential project
artifacts and or milestones that needs to be completed?
•  For example:
–  Governance Plan
–  Training
–  Content Migration
–  SharePoint 2010 Installation and Configuration

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Workshop 3.2: Define Project Objectives

•  Based on the project you’ve selected, formulate your project
goal statement by identifying the 5 W’s and if applicable,
constraints
•  Identify 5 project deliverables
•  Record project goal statement and deliverables in an easel
pad

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Chapter 4: Develop Project Plan

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Develop a Project Plan

•  Effective Requirements Development
•  Designing the SharePoint Solution
•  Structuring the Work
•  Estimating Work
•  Task Sequencing and Scheduling
•  Project Resourcing

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What is a Requirement?

•  A requirement is something wanted or needed
–  Formally documented and written statements
–  Capabilities needed to solve a problem
–  Conditions of a delivered system, services, product, or process
–  Constraints on the system, service, product, or process
•  Requirements are not
–  Verbal, informal statements or conversations in the hallways
–  Solutions that state how to solve the problem or meet the objectives
–  Characteristics of other systems, services, products or processes

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Requirements Focus

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Example: Defining Business Needs

•  In a recent study, information workers today spend 45 mins/
day searching for information
–  In a team of 20 people, that’s 900 mins/day
–  In 3 months, that’s 54000 mins or about 37 person days
•  How much does this cost in time & money?
•  What if search productivity can be increased by 15%?
–  That’s gaining 7 mins back from the 45 mins lost

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Example: Defining SharePoint Requirements

•  Business requirements
–  SharePoint shall increase user productivity by 15 percent
•  User requirements
–  The user shall be able to retrieve search results within five seconds of
submitting a search request that can support a maximum of 10,000
simultaneous search requests
•  System requirements
–  SharePoint server shall have two web front ends and a dedicated SQL
Server which has at least dual processors

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How Do You Develop Requirements?

•  Requirements development is iterative
–  Business
–  User
–  System
•  Key Steps
–  Requirements Elicitation
–  Analyzing Requirements
–  Validating Requirements
–  Documenting Requirements

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Information Architecture

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Usability

•  Navigation
–  Quick Launch
–  Top Link
–  Bread Crumb
–  Link List
–  Custom ASP.NET Navigation
•  Search
–  Content Sources
–  Indexing
–  IFilters
–  Additional metadata with custom columns
–  FAST

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Custom Branding

•  Apples are not the same as oranges
–  Branding SharePoint sites IS NOT the same as traditional web
development
–  Specialized skillsets are necessary
•  Is it truly a priority?

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Technology Considerations

•  Identify technology needs based on SharePoint solutions
–  Hardware
–  Software
–  Infrastructure
•  On-Premise
•  Cloud
•  In addition, formulate strategy for
–  Upgrades
–  Maintenance and Support
–  Disaster Recovery
–  Release Management

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Define the Work Needed

SharePoint
2010
Upgrade

Content
Install
&

Governance
Training

MigraAon
Conﬁgure

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#sptechcon @meetdux

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What Are You Estimating For?

Dura4on
Work
Resource

AIend
SPTECHCON

Paint
This
Room

Install
SharePoint
2010

on
Single
Server

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Relevant Estimates are Vital

•  Duration: how long the task will take in hours/days/weeks
–  Elapsed time to complete the task
–  Calendar time defined as working days
•  Work: how much the task will take to complete in work
hours/days
–  Cost of doing the work
–  Labor content of the task
•  Resource units: how resources are to be used to complete
the task
–  The number of people or units assigned to the task
–  Proportions of each resource used on a task
•  Work = Duration × Resource Units

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Sequencing Tasks

•  Tasks are sequenced to determine the project schedule
•  Determine all of the predecessors and successors to each
task
•  Define task dependency and sequence
–  Which tasks must be done in sequence and do any require delays?
–  Which tasks can be done in parallel?
–  Which tasks enable others and which are dependent on others?
•  Once sequencing is completed, a network diagram is
created

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Create Network Diagram

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Define Schedule

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What are the resources necessary
to successfully deliver SharePoint?

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Staff Your Project Realistically

Committed Sponsor
+
Project Manager

IT
group

•  SharePoint
developer

•  SharePoint
infrastructure
specialist
Business
group

•  SharePoint
architect
•  SharePoint
business
analyst

•  SharePoint
trainer

•  SharePoint
designer

#sptechcon @meetdux

Chapter 5: Finalize Project Plan

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•  Define Governance Strategy
•  Create Adoption Plan
•  Setting the Baseline

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What is SharePoint Governance

•  Set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes to guide,
direct, and control how SharePoint is used to accomplish
business goals
–  Effective governance anticipates the needs and goals of both your
organization’s IT teams and its’ business divisions
•  What are the benefits of having SharePoint governance?

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Implementation Continuum

Draconian IT Governed
Wild Wild
Control
Empowerment
West Chaos

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Really?

“ It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to
carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to
handle than to initiate a new order of things. ”

—Niccolò Machiavelli,
Italian statesman and philosopher

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Establish Sustainable Adoption Program

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SHARE
2012
|
74

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How Can We Get Buy-In?

•  If you’ve identified the pain points
–  That means you would have engaged the users from the get-go
–  Having them involved from the start will likely contribute to a
successful adoption
•  Proper requirements gathering is key
•  Remember, people can change if
–  The change is worthwhile
–  It would bring great benefits, primarily at a personal level and then
at the organizational level

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Engage Evangelists

•  It’s critical to have decision makers committed
–  Top-down support
–  High visibility
•  Run a SharePoint pilot deployment
for an influential business group
–  IT
–  PMO
–  HR

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Relevant Training

•  Showcase SharePoint solutions, not features
–  Share case studies
–  Even better, success of pilot program
•  Group users based on training needs
–  IT
•  Administrators
•  Developers
•  Analysts
–  Super users
–  End users
–  Executives
–  Vendors/customers

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Provide Support

•  Self-service support
–  Create a SharePoint FAQ site for basic how-tos
–  Include external references for advanced topics
–  Make sure it’s accessible to the entire user community
–  Removes most of the support bottleneck
•  IT help-desk support
–  Create a SharePoint help-desk site
–  Intended for higher-level support

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Gather Feedback

•  To be successful, continuous improvement is necessary
–  Provide a way to allow the user community to post feedback
•  What should the feedback mechanism have?
–  Feedback on features that users like in the SharePoint
implementation
–  Improvement suggestions
–  Feedback on irrelevant content
–  Requests for future features
–  Acknowledgment of and response to feedback

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Baseline Plan

•  This is the contract placed on the project team
–  By the customer
–  By the organization management
–  With all stakeholders
•  Revising the baseline requires buy-in from all stakeholders
–  Minor revisions may be approved by the local project manager
–  Major revisions require all stakeholder approval

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Chapter 6: Executing the Project

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How Do You Track Progress?

“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took
my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest
went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit
me. “

— George Bernard Shaw,
Essayist and Nobel laureate

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SharePoint Project Tracking

•  Making time to gather intelligence about the progress of
the project is a significant priority for the project manager
•  What critical elements of a project do you track?
–  Schedule
–  Risks
–  Changes
–  _____________________
–  _____________________
•  Tracking with percentages doesn’t mean jack squat

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Key Steps in Tracking

•  Monitor Progress
•  Analyze Status
•  Correct the Schedule
•  Manage Changes

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Example: Tracking with MS Project

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Controlling Change

•  Change control is a set of procedures that defines how
changes would be addressed in a project
•  Tracking change involves
–  The number of requests
–  The person or group requesting the change
–  What needs to be changed
–  Impact of the changed
–  Approval or rejection

The
change-‐control
procedure
must
force
management

to
assess
the
total
impact
of
a
change
and

agree
to
the
cost
before
ordering
it
to
be
implemented.

#sptechcon @meetdux

Example: Change Control Process

Proposed

change

Inform

Do
now

Log
details

originator

Impact

analysis

and

Schedule

priority
Yes

Management
Log

Gather
info

decision
No

Log
and

Later
schedule

review

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Chapter 7: Project Closing

Getting Ready for the Next Release

•  Most likely this is not the last SharePoint solution that you’ll
deploy
–  Review the business priorities defined during early planning
–  Monitor user feedback
•  Start planning/scheduling for the next SharePoint solution

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Post Project Review

•  Objective is to learn from experience, and not to blame
•  Include key project players, stakeholders
•  Identify project and organization issues separately
•  This is a key part of process-improvement program
•  Example—lessons learned:
–  Obtain sign-off on all changes, no matter how small or trivial at first
glance

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Lessons Learned

•  Mandatory part of project manager duties
–  Archive them for the benefit of other projects
•  All project team members should set time aside to ponder
lessons learned
–  Should be done soon after project completion while information is
still fresh
•  The project manager should review his or her own lessons
learned
–  Process
–  Techniques
–  People

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Workshop 7.1: Lessons Learned

•  Review another groups’ project management issues drawing
from the first day
•  Based on what you have learned, identify ways to address
those issues

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Questions

#sptechcon @meetdux

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Dux Raymond Sy
@meetdux
dux.sy@innovative-e.com

48

Tutorial: How to Effectively Plan, Manage and Control SharePoint Projects by Dux Ray…

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