I recently participated in the Australian and New Zealand community SharePoint conferences and had a blast. First up, I was given the opportunity to keynote the Australian conference on day 2, where I spoke about SharePoint Governance home truths. It received very positive feedback and I was told by a lot of people that it really made them rethink their governance approach. In fact, in the New Zealand session, as I was going through some of the common mistakes people make, I could see people cringing as they knew they were guilty as charged. One attendee buried her head in her hands when I started talking about the “buffet of platitudes” (what is the “buffet of platitudes” you ask? Come to my class to find out!

The community challenge in Australia was a real highlight. This was a new addition to the conference where a group of conference attendees delivered a SharePoint solution for a not for profit organisation. WorkVentures was the organisation selected and the challenge progressed over three sessions, facilitated by SharePoint community leaders. Session one (Define and Design), was a business session which aimed to work through the high level requirements that WorkVentures had for an intranet, their aims for what they hope it would achieve and what they wanted included.  

This post was written on the assumption that you are familiar with some of Seven Sigma’s methods. If not, then we suggest you stop and read a couple of foundational posts first – especially if these maps do not mean much to you.

The Importance of Goal Alignment…

Nick Hadlee was supposed to chair this define and design session, but was unable to get to the Australian conference due to the earthquake events in Christchurch. As a result, I ended up inheriting this role, so I roped in Andrew Jolly to help me on this, because we have a lot in common and work in a similar way. User surveys had been conducted with WorkVentures staff and management, which gave some insights into potential focus areas for SharePoint. Even so, I had no way of knowing whether those potential focus areas made strategic sense. To resolve this issue, we examined WorkVentures 2009 Annual Report to understand their core purpose and strategic focus areas and various business units. After all, it is all well and good to develop some SharePoint functionality, but if you can’t see how that component helps achieve strategic objectives, how do you know it is the right thing to do?

The annual report proved to be a goldmine. It stated that WorkVentures had embarked on an enterprise improvement strategy prior to SharePoint and the community challenge being on the radar. This enterprise improvement plan, incorporating quality management, IT, HR and business strategy development, provided us the context to focus SharePoint as an enabler that fitted within the plan.

Andrew wasn’t due to fly into Sydney until the evening before the conference. So the day before the conference, Debbie Ireland and I visited WorkVentures on-site, meeting with the CEO, CFO and Marketing Director. The purpose of this visit was to ensure a shared understanding among us all of the alignment of the SharePoint community challenge outputs to the WorkVentures vision, purpose and strategic focus areas. From this conversation, which I mapped, some really interesting stories enabled them to pinpoint one of the key success factors for any SharePoint implementation at WorkVentures – “Bridging Silos”.

Ultimately, we identified four key areas of strategic focus for SharePoint that aligned to WorkVentures strategic goals. Below is a screenshot of the end-to-end alignment in map format . This map was used during the “define and design” conference session to help focus attendees on the purpose of SharePoint for this organisation, as well as noting the key areas that we would have to do well, to consider SharePoint a success.

Stories that led to the goal

Lawrence Luk – the CFO of WorkVentures told Debbie and I several captivating stories that surfaced the bridging silos area of focus. One interesting facet of WorkVentures was that staff from the whole organisation came together once per year – at the Christmas party. This is because each WorkVentures “division” or “business unit” is in effect a separate mini-company, with different goals, customers, vertical markets and regulatory requirements. Thus the problem of silos isn’t a negative one in the sense where dysfunctional “culture” is blamed as such. More that it was the simple fact that each business unit didn’t have a lot in common with other business units. The silo effect was a by-product and it was not driven by negative behaviours.

A great example of this was one particular business unit, Connect IT. It solicits organisations to donate old PC’s, which provides opportunities for skills development for disadvantaged people by teaching them how to refurbish these PC’s. These refurbished PC’s are then sold at low cost. A KPI for this program is the number of organisations donating old PC’s to WorkVentures to sustain ConnectIT. Lawrence had the experience where WorkVentures financial auditors, who had been doing the books for two years prior, asked him why they hadn’t been approached to donate PC’s as they had some. Lawrence realised that he almost missed a great opportunity to help the ConnectIT division achieve one of their key KPI’s. Furthermore, the auditor should never have had to ask themselves. Instead all WorkVentures staff should have this core KPI instilled and internalised so that they could proactively seek out these opportunities to help the other business units.

Another couple of interesting contextual facets illustrated that there were other forms of silo that went beyond a purely divisional basis:

• Most backoffice staff had never been to the Campbelltown office, where all of the “coal face” work took place with the community.
• English was a second language to many staff.
• Not all staff had their own PC’s.

These stories catalysed the conversation to many other examples of missed opportunities, where one business unit has the means to make a massive difference to the results of another. On reflection, it was realised that the nature of WorkVentures business units, being so independent of each-other, inevitably had a silo effect. There was a lack of awareness organisation-wide of the core KPI’s of each unit, hence bridging (not breaking) these silos became a key theme. If SharePoint was to have a long lasting, successful legacy, then it had to play a part in addressing this issue.

The define and design session live…

From there, with invaluable help from Andrew Jolly, we planned and then executed the requirements session with a conference audience of around one hundred people. We split the session up into several areas and the map below shows how we structured it.

After Microsoft did their intro, Debbie explained the context of the community challenge via a short PowerPoint presentation. I then took the chair and explained the vision and areas of focus map (the image above) and stressed to the audience that they were going to be participating in this session as well. I also stressed that no matter what solutions or ideas they came up with, they had to justify them against the four key focus areas, which I went through.

Then we got down to business where I dialogue mapped, with Andrew and I co-facilitating. We decided to focus people’s attention to the core goal of bridging silos as a topic area itself, and ask the audience how SharePoint could indeed bridge silos. We utilised three of the examples that Lawrence gave us  and then leveraged the wisdom of the (large) crowd to solicit ideas. Below is the dialogue map that shows the richness of this discussion (click to enlarge). You will see in this map that for each story told to us by Lawrence, we asked the question “How could we mitigate this with SharePoint?”. The purpose of asking the question this way helped the audience to focus on SharePoint as an enabler to a greater end – and not to be a tool looking for a problem to solve.

Given that we only had around 45 minutes to work with, Andrew and I could only spend around 15 minutes on the bridging silos area. But the map above shows that a lot of very valuable rationale from the audience was captured. The real benefit though was focusing the audience onto the broader goals and how SharePoint could enable them. This was critical to do, because now we had to switch focus from the lofty world of goal alignment to focusing on how SharePoint building blocks could be used to achieve specific ends.

We examined how SharePoint could augment the existing newsletter based method for dissemination of information within WorkVentures. We showed the audience what sample WorkVentures newsletter looked like and reviewed some of the key contextual aspects to newsletters within WorkVentures in terms of their creation, management, reach and format.  We reminded the audience about the importance of bridging silos and then called for ideas from the audience as to how SharePoint could improve the dissemination of news. What was particularly great about this session was that audience members began to relate SharePoint ideas against the key focus areas and identify some of the governance aspects that would be required to make it work.

For example, if you look at the map below (click to enlarge), one of the ideas for the newsletter was a fairly technical one: leveraging “word automation services to extract list or story items and create a PDF”. On first glance one might think “wow that’s fairly heavy” (and not to mention quite nerdy), but the justification for this idea was that it would still account for those WorkVentures users who do not have a PC and therefore access to the portal. Another idea was “Have backoffice staff create the content” on the basis that in doing so, they would get a better feel for coal-face issues that they typically do not see normally. When you think about it, this idea is not SharePoint at all, but more of a strategy for how SharePoint should be adopted and accountabilities for doing so (i.e. a governance approach!)

The key point here is that In both of these examples, audience members were clearly relating their ideas back to the previously established goals, which in turn were aligned to the WorkVentures vision, purpose and key strategic focus areas. Not bad for a couple hours work eh?

With the little time that we had left, we also looked at site navigation and structure, where the audience resolved that WorkVentures would be best served by a hybrid navigation model that was functionally driven primarily (i.e. task based navigation), but then divided into divisional areas. (As opposed to a purely organisational structure driven navigation model).

As you can see below, we made a point of always showing the four areas of focus for SharePoint overall, to ensure that decisions made were informed by them.

Conclusion

I have to say that given the timeframe and constraints, I think we did a great job of developing a shared vision for SharePoint, how it fitted into WorkVentures organisational and strategic context, and then focusing a diverse audience into looking at SharePoint building blocks through that lens. The dialogue maps were very rich, with some terrific ideas, and WorkVentures staff were thrilled to see the alignment of SharePoint to their strategic goals.

I use similar methods to this for non IT projects too, and I think that if we had a week to work on WorkVentures, we would have created something really special. Nevertheless, from my point of view, I think that the community challenge is an terrific idea, I enjoyed being a part of it, and I have to offer special thanks to Debbie and Andrew in particular for helping to make this into a really great mini-engagement. Hopefully we can do it all again next year.

Paul Culmsee

SEVEN SIGMA PROUD TO BE PART OF SHARE2010…THE FIRST OF ITS KIND!

Share2010, produced by Eventful Management, is not your regular annual SharePoint event.

You will not find any level 400, technology laden “deep dives” into the guts of SharePoint architecture, development and deployment. Instead you have a conference aimed squarely at business users, managers and teams.

Share2010 is all about the holistic view of SharePoint, and how to ensure success beyond the installation.

The structure for this conference was created by running dozens of round table interviews with real world sharepoint customers across a wide variety of organisations around Australia and New Zealand. Feedback from this research became the basis of the Share2010 program.

Seven Sigmas’ focus on governance, goal alignment and user engagement, and information architecure complemented perfectly with Share2010′s program. Seven Sigma was thus invited to conduct the Jumpstart Session 1: SharePoint Governance Home Truths. This will be happening on Sunday 28th November, eve of the conference.

Seven Sigma is also proud to announce that Paul Culmsee will be running a workshop on Wednesday 1st December. Our ‘SharePoint Governance f-Laws: Handy Hints for those who question business as usual’ workshop will be  one of only two workshops running during the Share2010 conference. Attendees of this workshop will be returning home with a CD containing end-to-end governance artefacts ranging from IBIS maps, goal alignment and performance framework outputs, envisioning workshop sample outputs, Information Architecture mind-maps, BPMN diagrams, wireframes, user engagement tools, ROI calculations and more.

For more information and reasons why you should attend this exciting event, visit Share2010.

Finally …. after 12 years in the IT industry a course which covers some of the fundamental issues governing project success.   This course is a real eye opener and a must for any IT professional involved in project planning and delivery. Stephen McWilliams Solutions Architect, Auckland SWS WCM Team

When I was asked to attend this course as part of the Elite partner program in New Zealand, I had impressions that we would be covering how to design and use SharePoint features to build and information architecture which would just be a repeat of my daily work but got instead a wealth of information, techniques and knowledge on how to successfully implement a SharePoint project based around Information Architecture …I would recommend attending this course if you are undertaking SharePoint projects in the capacity of a BA, PM, SharePoint Architect or Information architect. Alan Marshall

I just came back from the best technology training I have had in years: a world-first Microsoft SharePoint Elite Information Architecture course designed and delivered by Paul Culmsee. It has taught me a great deal across ALL facets of the day-to-day work that I do as a SharePoint architect. 

I liked the big legible font in the written course material. More importantly, I like the fact that it’s written in a tone that reads like a series of friendly, personal, enlightening advice all the way through and not like a manual or brochureware. It makes me actually want to read it over and over again – and also recommend to other people.  Jess Kim

If you think that the way to a successful SharePoint implementation is applying more best practices and governance to the project, I got the perfect course to recommend you. Through the course, Paul explains why best practices and governance is not the end all of SharePoint implementations and strictly following them might be detrimental to the implementation. The course (in my view) is also beneficial to people who are involved in SharePoint implementations other than Information Architects, as it succinctly points out the cognitive bias each member brings to the project and why the way forward is for everyone to acknowledge and have a shared understanding of the issues that plague SharePoint implementations. Jeff Chionn, Datacom

You can tell that the instructor is a natural as he can adapt to the audience’s needs.  Even though the course is well structured and thought-out, the instructor made sure that we were all on the same page by tailoring the focus of the course to our experience.  There was a healthy balance between the theory and technical modules, as well as the interactive hands-on-labs.  The content was cutting edge, informative, interesting and included real world examples that illustrated concepts and were often humorous, keeping us all engaged throughout the course.  I have recommended this course to many of my work-mates and look forward to using the knowledge and skills I have gained.  Ryan Harte, Intergen

Last week, Paul Culmsee spent 4 days in Wellington, New Zealand delivering the Seven Sigma SharePoint Governance & Information Architecture courseware as part of the NZ SharePoint Elite Training for its Gold Partners. The program was run by 3grow, a New Zealand training company specialising in SharePoint training.

This course went extremely well, with all attendees giving both the course and its trainer (Paul) very positive feedback. Attendees have still to sit the exam (which is scheduled for August 27th) so come exam day, they might be cursing and change their glowing reviews . So get crackin’ on that  780-odd page course manual.

On the last day, Paul was asked by Darryl Burling (NZ Microsoft Product Manager) to give a 15-minute presenting on his SP Governance f-Laws to attendees of the SP End-User Engagement course. This quick impromptu presentation was well received by this group.

Seven Sigma will be presenting this course in New Zealand in the near future, with plans to run this also in Australia and London.

For those who are interested in this course, please contact us.

Welcome home, Paul. Congratulations on a well developed and well run course.

Towards a shared understanding and shared commitment

in conjunction with 

Friday will be SharePoint Workshop day and Seven Sigma’s Paul Culmsee will be conducting his SharePoint Governance workshop. Be sure to register for this session quickly as places are filling up.

Paul will also be holding the same Workshop the week after at the Sydney conference. This workshop looks like it will be a sellout as places are also filling up.

Seven Sigma is also one of the Silver Sponsors at the Sydney conference. Paul and Chris will be the booth babes for the two days so be sure to drop by our booth for a friendly but informative chat. The boys will be holding live demonstrations on the wonders of IBIS.

So catch you all at the Seven Sigma booth.

Come join Paul and demystify wicked problems within your SharePoint world.

After the success of the SharePoint Saturdays in the US, the free educational SharePoint Saturday event has finally arrived in sunny Perth. Seven Sigma has sponsored the production of the showbags for this event.

It will be a full day with speakers from US and interstate as well as local and ending with the famous SharePint. Free breakfast and lunch will be provided for the day. A Speaker Dinner has also been organised.

The event contains 24 sessions divided into 3 streams:

• 200 – IT Pro
• 300 – Information Worker
• 400 – Developer

Seven Sigma’s experienced Peter Chow and Paul Culmsee will be up on the podium to impart pearls of wisdom to all.

Peter will be presenting Integrating SharePoint With Real Time Performance Data in the IT Pro stream. Peter will present an approach to integrating real-time performance data from OSIsoft’s PI system with an ITIL inspired IT Portal using SQL Server Reporting Services.

Paul’s presentation will be in the Information Worker stream and is titled Wicked Problems & SharePoint. This session introduces the concept and characteristics of wicked problems, why SharePoint projects are predisposed to falling foul of them and why traditional project management and governance approaches can in fact make the situation far worse. The session will also reveal the *one* best-practice that should be adopted before any other best-practice, with a simple, yet practical method to do so.

Courtesy of Seven Sigma, Paul and Peter will be giving away spot prizes during their presentation. So make sure you attend.

Special thanks to:

• Dux Raymond Sy and O’Reilly for donating 10 ‘SharePoint for Project Management’ books as giveaway prizes
• Michael Sampson and Apress for donating 10 ‘SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration” books as giveaway prizes and discount vouchers for the book and workshop
• Brett Lonsdale and Manning Publications for donating 5 ‘Developers Guide to the Business Data Catalog’ and discount vouchers for all Lightning Tools’ products
• Bjorn Furuknap for his first issue of SP2010, a compilation of a series of 6 issues, FREE.

For more information on SharePoint Saturday Perth check out http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/perth

•  Event: New Zealand SharePoint Conference
• Date: 9th – 10th June, 2010
• Venue: Duxton Hotel, 170 Wakefield Street, Wellington, 6110, New Zealand
• Cost: $600 + GST (I think this is in $NZ!)

This will be New Zealand’s biggest SharePoint event for 2010 so register fast! You will learn about SP 2007 as well as the 2010 version.

There will be local New Zealand and international speakers, including Seven Sigma’s own PAUL CULMSEE. This will be Paul’s second time round at the NZ SP conference as a speaker. He wowed attendees with his talk last year and this time Paul plans to have more to add to keep things interesting.

Sessions will be grouped into three different streams:

• Business
• Technical
• Voice of the Customer

and further grouped into experience level:

• No previous experience expected
• Some previous experience or knowledge of concepts expected
• Technical experience expected

This Conference will contain SharePoint information for all and some of the roles covered are:

• Business Roles: For examples End Users, Business Champions, Power Users and Business Managers
• Information Architects, Record and Information Managers
• IT Managers, CIO and Decision Makers
• Technical Roles including Developers, IT Pro, Systems Administration and DBA’s

Technologies to be covered will include:

• WSS 3.0 (Windows SharePoint Services)
• MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server)
• SharePoint Foundation 2010
• SharePoint Server 2010
• SSharePoint Designer 2007 and 2010
• Intergration with Office 2007 and 2010, including InfoPath, Excel, Access and Visio
• Intergration with 3rd Party products enhancing SharePoint functionality

Visit http://www.sharepointconference.co.nz for more information and registrationn.

For those who don’t mind a bit of travelling in their work, the SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference will be the place to be in April.

This 3 day conference will be hosted by Combined Knowledge and boasts of 75 breakout sessions, all of which will be recorded and dvds sent out post conference. It promises not to be a rehash of the Las Vegas conference and definitely will contain new content. So fear not, SharePoint experts, you will not be sitting through endless hours of Las Vegas regurgitations.

As the name suggests, it is dedicated to SharePoint with 55 expert speakers from Microssoft and other well known companies, one of which is Seven Sigma.

Seven Sigma’s very own Paul Culmsee, now a seasoned presenter, made a great impression on the SharePoint community with his successful presentations last year in San Diego, Washington DC, Wellington, New Zealand, Perth SharePoint User Group and the Business Analysts World Conference in Perth. His “How to Avoid SharePoint Becoming a Wicked Problem” and “Think Like a CFO: Techniques to Quantify SharePoint ROI”; “Governance – The Other 90%” co-presented with Ruven Gotz, and “SharePoint for the Really Really Really Going Looking” co-presented with Peter, were all very well received.

Next year, at the 2010 Evolution conference in London, Paul has decided to join the crowd and attend as many sessions as possible as well as presenting a session.

If you’ve attended Paul’s wicked problem sessions before and are thinking to yourself “I’ve seen Paul perform and I’ve downloaded his demo slides, not to mention nominated his slide for Slideshare Zeitgeist 2009 Community Awards, so I’ll give his session a rest this time.” Think again! You will do yourself an injustice with that kind of thinking.

Paul, as you know, is very passionate when it comes to SharePoint and wicked problems, collectively and separately. This passion leads him, not to rest on his laurels, but to always finding ways to better improve his work (in this case, his presentation) with more information, more scenarios of real world application, more thought provoking titbits, etc, etc, for you all to digest.

For those who are still undecided on whether “to attend or not to attend” this conference – register now. You will be meeting great SharePoint minds to better assist you in your work. Click on http://www.sharepointevolutionconference.com  for more reasons why you should attend this conference.

Meet you all at the SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference in April

Cheers