Those of us in the SharePoint world know that the management of a SharePoint implementation requires a strategic mix of both business and technology. While firms have created specific implementation methodologies for SharePoint, what’s left to the project team’s discretion is how to manage the actual project itself. Elements of control, division of labor and performance metrics are, in some cases, left to the decision of the project team and stakeholders who are ill-prepared to draw a line in the sand.

Like many system integrators, eMark has developed a SharePoint implementation methodology to ensure that the features of SharePoint are maximized while assisting organizations with taxonomy, managing content, offering portals for collaboration, and helping direct process workflows from one user to the next. We have also created an implementation handbook to provide additional assistance specific to project management.

Let’s walk through excerpts of that handbook, offering five things to know when managing a SharePoint project for your organization.

1. Measure: SharePoint is a balancing act that takes skill and precision to be completed correctly. Adhering to the saying that “If it’s not measured, it’s not done,” we recommend that a clear set of performance metrics are set up and put in place before beginning the project.

Once in place, a communication plan for those goals will help the team envision their success in the end product.

2. Involve: When working on your requirements phase, make sure that involvement from all levels of the business is obtained, including Stakeholders, Senior Management, End Users and the Project Team. This will ensure that your goals and objectives are defined. Once defined, performance metrics can be created for your defined objectives.
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3. Manage: Dividing the project work into manageable components is always difficult. For example, who is to say that a developer can create X number of pages in Y days?

Communication is key; asking direct questions about timelines and sharing the information with the project team will allow for an open environment where team members can collaborate, share information and assist one another in getting tasks completed on time.

4. Empower: We always a recommend that a SharePoint team portal is set up for the implementation team itself. How better to manage a project than through some of the out-of-the-box features? The team portal will become the central repository for project data and is a great place to boast about your successes as a team. It can also be migrated to your live environment when appropriate.

5. Control: Set up a governance structure early in your project life cycle. Creating a governance structure for content and sites is an important step on the road to project success. Have conversations about who will have access to what content, who will create content and who will control it with your entire project team. This information can then be detailed in both your governance strategy and communication plan, which should be distributed to your project team and business end users.

okay so the bio text thing is this: Eric Riz s the Founder and CEO of eMark Consulting, Ltd., a strategy and systems integration firm based in Toronto. Eric will be presenting in Boston at SPTechCon on June 3; check out www.sptechcon.com for details on his sessions and topics.