Yesterday I had the opportunity to say something I could have only dreamt about as recently as a year ago: “beginning 2nd quarter 2011, the K: drive will be read-only!” I can’t tell you how good that felt. What felt even better was the fact that nobody in the room complained. I had just finished explaining how our new process for tracking, processing and storing engineering reports is going to work, and a room full of engineers seemed to be on-board. Why is that? Well, it might be because I have been threatening to do this for several years. It might be because they don’t care, but I hope it’s because I listened and I got it right.
Listened to them – What the engineers like about a share-drive is that it is an easy to grasp metaphor for the way they store documents manually (that is, unless you look at their desks). In addition, accessing the drive is easy, uploading and downloading files is fast and throughout our company’s history, there seems to be no upper limit to how much they can store. If I want them to use SharePoint, I know that I have to do all the above, and I have to give them more. I have to make their lives easier, and I can do that. I can change the metaphor from a filing cabinet to a shoebox. Just put the stuff in, set a few bits of metadata and you can sort, filter and FIND everything. I can build workflows to update key bits of metadata automatically as the reporting process plays out. When the documents are complete, other workflows can create PDF copies of their document and to distribute those PDFs to a Records Center and to a library we set up for the customer. I can make their lives easier on the front-end and down the line.
Listened to AIIM – I actually paid attention when I was getting that ECMm and ERMm tacked onto my name. I learned about governance; the importance of understanding requirements; the importance of planning, testing, training and documentation. I learned about and I have already scheduled a Post-Implementation Review, and I will make changes based on that review process.
Listened to my boss – His message was a lot more straight-forward: get this place ready for my retirement, his retirement and the eventual retirement of everyone in our generation. “Make it work without our special knowledge!”
A lot of work and planning went into this project, but beginning in January it looks like it will start to pay off!
#sharedrives #AIIM #sharepoint
#planning #SharePoint