Engage Leadership: It is nearly impossible to drive a major change in the organization, without engaging the leadership. Change will be difficult even for the ones who are positive about this initiative. To drive a successful SharePoint adoption plan, it is imperative to reach out to the leaders and seek their help to drive this change. When leaders will talk to people and communicate the value that this adoption can drive, they will be more likely to adapt to the change.
Bring People Together For a Goal: A SharePoint adoption plan needs to be communicated well, to drive its adoption. Bring people together for this goal, communicate its benefits and how it will make their lives easy. This should be a solution-centric conversation, revolving around improving the whole work process of regular work, sharing content and ideas, discovering information, getting organized, streamlining of business processes, or connecting to line of business systems—SharePoint can enable a number of critical business solutions. People want to make their lives easy; they will adopt the idea when they will know its full extent.
Simplify and Take Support: While SharePoint is built to address a multitude of challenges for the users, the fact about SharePoint is that it is complex right to the root. While people adopt it afterm administrator’s efforts, they will begin to drift in absence of a legit tech support. A multitude of SharePoint support tools are available in the market that will simplify work, adding efficiency, accuracy, and speed hugely. As people move towards SharePoint, help them simplify work through support from SharePoint software such as: QuickApps (helps you build quick web applications through pre-built templates), Site Administrator (helps you administer your SharePoint by giving to insight and access to its environment), and Recovery Manager (helps you recover data lost on SharePoint).
Start with Smaller Engagement and Then Broaden Up: Starting with a small group of people and then expanding gradually is the best way to carry out this SharePoint implementation plan. A small group of people is easy to convince, track, and train. Besides, you can selectively pick those people who are excited about this technology. After working on SharePoint with your small, well-choosen group, take feedback from them and expand the adoption. This way, it will there will be lesser on stake, minimal risk and chances of damage. Moreover, spread out the success stories related to its adoption, to build a way of SharePoint adoption.
SharePoint Governance: As we begin to use SharePoint, its environment begins to grow into a huge unmanageable jungle of chaos. Reason behind this is that Microsoft frequently releases upgrades to this platform, to make it all the more powerful and ready to address your challenges. While these upgrades are good, they can also lead to chaos. Only way to deal with this threat is a powerful governance plan, which needs a complete understanding of its environment. Instead of struggling with its environment, take support from Site Administrator tool and get an in-depth understanding and access to its functioning.
Associate Director – Product Development
Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com