SharePoint-ing the Finger for Better Business Process Management

The topic of business process management (BPM) is particularly timely given the need for clarifying process structures and their improvements. Not much emphasis has been placed on the relationships among BPM methodologies and the techniques and tools used to support BPM.

Business process is the skeleton of business activity. IT is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal. BPM is a systematic approach to improving those processes. The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), a non-profit corporation, empowers companies of all sizes, across all industries, to develop and operate business processes that span multiple applications and business partners, behind the firewall and over the Internet. To this end, the has developed the Business Process Modeling Language, an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based meta-language for modeling business processes.

The main motive in outsourcing a modeling business process is to allow the business to invest most of their time, financial, and human resources into core activities and focus on building effective strategies, which will fuel the growth of the company.

Since the global marketplace is fast-changing and highly-competitive, are concentrating on improving productivity while trimming down unnecessary costs. Non-core business processes are being outsourced since the tasks involved in these processes consumes time, essential resources, and energy. Thus, outsourcing these non-core business processes will help you achieve a cost-efficient system. One such organization to help organizations with their needs, offering project portfolio management, program management and business analysis solutions is Minneapolis, MN based Project Consulting Group, (PCG). More recently touted for its Project Delivery On-Demand solutions, PCG is finding that many organizations today are trying to get more value from their existing technology investments, such as optimizing Sharepoint applications, and have helped numerous companies to do just that by delivering to them a strategic framework that integrates people, process, technology and culture

According to Jamie Fragola, founder and Co-Chairman of Project Consulting Group, “Organizations today need greater visibility, increased collaboration and flexible frameworks to tackle more work without killing the budget. Organizations we have been working with have made huge strides in harnessing the power of their existing Sharepoint applications for example, and building upon Sharepoint as a platform to achieve company goals faster through already made technology investments. In fact, there are many organizations that aren’t even aware they have certain capabilities they can turn on with very minimal resources.” According to Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, ”driven by the need to better manage unstructured information for business benefit and risk mitigation, collaboration platforms like Microsoft's SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes are uniquely positioned to help information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals build collaboration applications.”

PCG describes knowledge management as a system that integrates people, process and technology and culture for sustainable results by increasing performance through learning. Sustained results require learning to be integrated in every activity but done so in a manner that embraces an organizations corporate culture. This is where there needs to be investment in order to create long-term intellectual capital.

Although it would have been true 10 years ago that growing businesses did not have many alternatives to SharePoint, the landscape is much changed now. Modern day technologies and approaches have spurned a new breed of solutions which open incredible online collaboration possibilities even while offering a much better cost-benefit deal. Moreover, many such solutions are targeted specifically towards the hitherto neglected small to mid sized business segment.

For instance, with SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), the costs and complexities are simply too much for most small and mid sized customers to bear. It requires expensive hardware, multiple SharePoint Server licenses, and "SharePoint experts" to install and maintain it. Costs often run into tens of thousands of dollars, and implementation runs into months.

How you measure the success of any SharePoint project is open to much debate. According to Pej Javaheri, Senior Product Manager at SharePoint., “There have been some recent developments regarding SharePoint’s Business Intelligence strategy that is very exciting. Microsoft’s vision for Business Intelligence has always been about pervasive access to information. Having more people access the right information enables smarter, timelier decisions, stronger collaboration on projects, facilitates accountability throughout the organization, and propels the company forward.”

In today’s economy, having the right information is more critical than ever.An organization’s typical tangible metrics center around how a particular project has performed in terms of Time, Money, Quality, and Culture. How the team collaborates is still a main area and is what most organizations focus on upon to gauge their ultimate success. This is irrespective of whether or not the true ‘measures of success’’ in deploying a SharePoint application isn’t actually felt by the business until long after the project team has completed the project and moved on to other things. But with the introduction and importantly adoption of SharePoint into many organizations growing exponentially over time, it brings with it a number of challenges to say the least. The delivery of Microsoft’s premier collaborative platform, SharePoint, will put under pressure one or more of these metrics during the project life cycle, as any novice or experienced SharePoint, traditional infrastructure or software project managers whom take on the management and delivery of these projects, will tell you.

Project Consulting Group for instance, has spent the last several years leading successful bid teams to win the deployments of SharePoint into large and small businesses, spread across several industry sectors, (and in several cases to help organizations ‘recover’ failed projects). Project Consulting Group has evaluated how SharePoint projects can and do go awry. More importantly the group is creatively putting their expertise to work for its clients. PCG has significant investment into engineering a Shared Risk service delivery model which effectively mitigates investment risk to insure clients get the business outcome they expect. The process entails a clearly defined matrix on deliverables that most project management consulting groups avoid.

Project Consulting Group has been brought into some sizable organizations that had experienced challenges in effectively leveraging SharePoint on various process improvement initiatives, and like any other IT project, they fall under the following headlines Project Consulting Group has well documented.

• Providing a clearly defined scope • Establishing an inherent project culture within the business • Create Management buy-in • Institute project governance • Develop project management skills • Verify planning for the project and beyond once it has been deployed) • Ascertain proper change, risk identification and management.

It is important to understand the reasons behind why SharePoint projects fail to live up to expectations and to address such issues with powerful project methodologies and proven strategies in order to increase the likelihood of success of varied complex SharePoint applications. Most importantly, organizations need to stop underestimating the scope of the project deliverables

In particular for the medium to large organizations, there is an increase in companies failing to plan and budget properly for the enormity of the project deliverables. These are often in areas such as:

• Operational business practices • SharePoint Governance • Project Team Resources and skills • Planning and Design (in particular around those that demand re-branding of SharePoint interface) • Infrastructure Development (to support both internal and collaborative working externally) • Application Delivery, Build and Test (In particular for deployment with bespoke elements) • Migration of content or documents from file shares, existing intranet(s) and other line of business applications, (databases, etc) • Release & • User Adoption going forward • IT Helpdesk and User support following Go-Live.

Often businesses forgot to include in their planning, enhancements to the intranet that could give it the ‘wow’ factor when the business first starts to use it. The wow factor can be relatively minor to achieve in effort, but tremendously valuable when staff try to gain momentum and secure support from the wider. They are more aligned to a different way of working for the business which should be one of the strategic objectives is much more than this and are key to business adoption.

Such ‘quick wins’ should be identified earlier on and planned into a release program following the launch of the initial project to ensure the deployment of SharePoint is a success not just at the beginning, but as it is further utilized and deployed within the business.

With short term planning, comes long term pain. Businesses often forget to include the long term planning within the initial phase at the beginning, especially around the underlying architecture to support potential changes in the future. Thus potentially needing to re-invest in significant infrastructure costs later on when, for example, you wish to introduce an extranet facility or include another business units’ content following a business buyout.

It is critical you consider those changes planned for the future now within the SharePoint underlying architecture & infrastructure. This will save money and pain later on.

It is important to assess the amount of SharePoint experience in any given project team. The team could involve the use of a SharePoint Developer, SharePoint Consultant, SharePoint Architect, Business Analysts, Web Designer or an experienced SharePoint Project Manager. For many larger projects, all of these resources are needed and getting this wrong in terms of the mix of roles and experience of resources is one of the major reasons why projects will fail, as project planning around resourcing is badly managed and underestimated by the team at the beginning. The product feature set is vast and all too often project teams are poorly equipped in terms of the relevant team members experience of the product core features, including the underlying infrastructure to support the larger implementations. It is critical organizations understand the challenges here and ensure they get the right resources on board and consider carefully whether or not to use a single developer/consultant resource in hopes of getting the experience needed for success.

A contributing factor to achieving a successful implementation is having SharePoint project management delivery experience. Often overlooked, but good solid experience of managing SharePoint related projects is worth its weight in gold. Often, IT departments and outside consultancies will assume it is like every other Microsoft infrastructure related project, which it is not! Nor is it like any other traditional software related project either.

It is more like something in between, which is why SharePoint proves challenging for IT management and existing Project Managers in either camp to get their heads around the issues and challenges. This is both at the beginning in terms of planning, in the middle in terms of day to day management and towards the end when you are ready to go live and you have underestimated all the activities that need to happen to make it visible and importantly adopted by your users both from launch day and beyond.

An area often overlooked, but be warned a little forethought here can save a lot of money and effort. As the SharePoint product spans across intranet, extranets and now public facing web sites, the right infrastructure supporting SharePoint users is crucial for successful delivery and operation.

The end to end design of a SharePoint technical architecture will often need to touch on other technologies such as networks, firewalls, Proxy Servers, ISA servers, anti-virus software and database clustering to name but a few. In addition, capacity planning for hardware is also important as quite often the organization will need to potentially plan for every 1MB of user storage, over 3mb (yes 3!) of storage space for the whole environment.

Together with a relatively, complicated, and costly licensing model from Microsoft, it is important organizations’ investigate this area before they commit budgets and start a project.

MOSS/WSS are very pervasive technologies and being able to support the environments both from launch to decommissioning/migration is key. The MOSS/WSS feature set is huge, hence understanding what can be done out of the box with the product is difficult, if not impossible for one individual resource to know. But that doesn’t mean an organization should turn to custom development rather it would be more advantageous to, bring in the right skills and experience of those that do understand how to get the most out of the platform’s array of features.

Custom development definitely has its place however, but do not underestimate the effort it takes for even an organization’s best developers come up to speed with the inner workings of SharePoint.

In terms of Project Consulting Group’s methodology around people and culture, it makes sense because there is little point in designing and deploying the ‘best’, most detailed SharePoint solution if, from launch date, very few users can access it, those that can can’t seem to find information or use it very well and those that can’t access it that eventually do, don’t go on to then use it nor reap the benefits of SharePoint’s collaborative environment.

Planning for ‘Launch and User Adoption’ and the results of this are key to the ‘perceived’ success of the project more so than just the usual time/quality/money metrics. It revolves around planning, stakeholder management and user awareness, be that in form of training or briefing them of the new ways in which to enhance and improve how they work and make their jobs easier.

Organizations should have a longer engagement plan of objectives, deliverables, budgets and milestones for enhancements to the solution following the initial launch. Such long term planning is often missed.

In conclusion, the bottom line is that organization planning on any SharePoint deployment should plan, plan and plan some more, review their approach carefully and seek the knowledge and wisdom of others whom have done it before. It is helpful to know the pitfalls and the lessons learned before any commit to resources.

Finally, it’s worth considering getting expert advice from the outset from those that have been there before and can help an organization through a period of change and reap the full benefits of using Microsoft’s SharePoint collaborative platform.