If Results Don't Matter, Neither Do You

I am always envious of the failed CEOs, general managers, and chairs of the big corporations. Over the past ten years, I watched the dot-com guys turn to vapor, real estate magnets go under water, and profitable banks turn on a dime. My wish is always the same, "Please give me that job! I could ruin your company for 10% of what the last guy made!" At the highest levels, it might be OK to pay a bloated salary for terrible performance, but for the rest of us, results matter.

So when I look at SharePoint, I see something similar. Some big-name company is getting paid huge amounts of cash to do a SharePoint implementation. That part I don't mind; what gets me is how poorly SharePoint performs for its user base. Somebody got a big paycheck, but where are the results? I could do a terrible job on that implementation for a fraction of the cost.

The biggest challenge is goals. SharePoint is designed to do certain things very well, but it has no purpose of its own. The organization has to give it a purpose. The goal is not to use SharePoint; the goal should be to increase productivity, decrease costs, improve quality, that sort of thing. Then it's time to explain how SharePoint can help the organization get there -- those are the strategic objectives. Every site, every feature, every web part needs to align with those objectives in some way. Otherwise, the launch will be a mess of frustration and fingerpointing.

The other big challenge is metrics. They should be concrete and actually measureable. Want to reduce the average size of email? Measure it before the implementation and set a goal number, like 20% less. Reduce production time for a document? Find out how long it takes now; set a goal number. Whatever the improvement is, compare before and after, and three months out, and six months out, etc. Not everyone will jump into SharePoint at once, and it's a good idea to check metrics over time, anyway.

An unrelated point about implementations. Don't let IT circumvent the core functionality of SharePoint. If you have security or policy that bars some core functions, please use something else. It is very frustrating to be denied a basic feature that comes out of the box, like multiple file upload to a library.