TechEd 2008 Session Notes: MOSS Governance: From Chaos to Success in Ten Steps

This is the final set of notes from Tech Ed Orlando 2008. This presentation was given by Joel Oleson and Shane Young (and am I missing a presenter?).

Definition of Governance

Governance uses people, process ,technology, and policies to define a service, resolve ambiguity, and mitigate conflict within an organization.

Or:

People, Process, Technology, Policy!

The 10 Step Plan

1) Executive Sponsor

2) Governance Plan: Clear Goals, Vision, Mission, and Metrics: Reduce TCO, encourage standards & consistency, provide service and solution.

3) Skilled Teams:

Tip: Try to avoid having Jack of All Trades manage the portal. Even 2 half positions is better than 1 FTR (full time resource).

SharePoint specialist skills:

1. SharePoint Business Analyst – high level of understanding of SharePoint.
2. Creative Designer – often outsourced.
3. Trainer: Often outsourced.
4. Infrastructure Specialist – DB, OS, understands web world. Needs to know SQL issues and optimization of DB. Network understanding helps.
5. SharePoint Developer – knows .NET. SharePoint Architect – has to compile roadmap for services & platform, must be willing to follow the KISS principle.

Forrester organization defines these roles:

1. Executive Sponsor – CXO Evangelist, active participant in the process.
2. Program Driver – Communicator, unbiased, coordinator of all stewards.
3. Business Stewards – IT savvy, strong communicators, educator across the business.
4. IT Stewards – business savvy, educators across IT.

4) Training and Resources:

Site collection admin training – champs, pros, gurus (1 day).

Train key IT pros, dev, and designers – up to 1 week + offer certification incentive.

TIP: Brown bag and informal internal training for end users to help learn business processes.

Service offering site – should have online resources.

End User Training Kit for SharePoint should be available to everybody.

5) Service Definition and Model: Tiered model for site collections, sites, web apps, and farms. Options for things like quotas, user self-provisioning, archiving, listing in site directories, help disk provisioning etc, expiration of documents.

6) Information Architecture

7) Standards & Policies

8) Change, Configuration, and Release Management Processes (ITIL/ MOF) . Policies for release management, configuration management, operations monitoring, security and patch management

9) Culture and adoption. Enterprise search = easy win. Gravity: people gravitate to where their data resides. Don’t cut corners.

10) KISS

Examples of How Deployments Fail

• Cutting corners – “my devs are my admins!”
• “Production is test and dev, and where I introduce my service packs!”
• “SharePoint is a simple install!”
• “Let’s just deploy it and then worry about governance!”