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Be Careful What You Wish For

By DANIEL ANTION posted 05-03-2011 17:15

  

A few weeks ago, we went live with a new process that is being managed in SharePoint. One thing we hadn’t planned for was the fact that we were introducing SharePoint to a few people for the first time. The good news is that they seem to like what they are seeing. The other side of that good news is we are getting requests for help, along with requests for additional projects and, of course, we still have a few things to tidy up on the system, as it were, we just turned-up. It certainly is a good problem to have, but managing scarce resources is never fun. All in all, we are in pretty good shape. That’s partly because I have more resources than I have had in the past to tackle the problems. The other reason I feel we can weather the storm of new requests is that we have been through this exercise before. A post-implementation uptick in requests is far from a rare event, and the key to surviving one is to both meet and manage the expectations.

We set the stage for managing some expectations by scheduling a Post-Implementation Review (PIR) several months down the road (see previous post).  That step will give us some breathing room on completing the final implementation details and addressing any questions regarding  how well the design meets the requirements. The other thing that we are being careful to manage is what turns out to be the fine line between training and support. We held pre-implementation meetings, we presented a fairly comprehensive training session, and we are replaying that session for those who missed the first one and anyone who wants a second look. We are doing our fair share of hand-holding, but we are also trying to provide just enough help to move people over the rough spots; we want them to learn how to do this for themselves.

As for the new requests and homegrown activity that seems to be a result of seeing that wonderful thing called SharePoint for the first time, we are taking the same approach but we are being proactive about it. Rather than wait for people to come to us with questions, problems and frustrations, we are trying to keep tabs on what they are developing “on their own”, so we can keep them out of deep trouble. I qualified the degree of trouble, because people should be given the opportunity to try things in SharePoint, even if the first attempt doesn’t yield exactly what they wanted. We want to encourage the attempts. On the other hand, I would like to intervene before too long because the last thing someone wants to hear after building a solution is “oh, you know, this would have been better if…” 



#ECM #SharePoint #sharepoint #training
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