SharePoint in a Crisis

There will always be surprises. While some are pleasant, others can be downright nasty, and it can take a group effort to handle them. Managing a crisis effectively entails internal and external communication, sound policy, group support, and an easy-to-use communication platform that can reach everyone.

Hey, guess what? I recommend SharePoint. I've gone on and on about certain features before, but this time I want to bring them together for a particular purpose. Here's a recipe for emergency management with SharePoint. First, there's a lot of prep work. Your organization should already have an emergency website with policies, procedures, internal contact info, friendly media contacts, first responder information, etc. Of course, you are already subscribed to the RSS feed for any important changes. What? You don't have this? Hmmm... OK, there's your first step.

Set up a site template for a discrete crisis. Make sure you have the features you want and everything is placed in line with your users' expectations. When a crisis occurs, launch a new site under your emergency site using the crisis template. Then you can assign a crisis manager and assistants, fill out forms, collaborate on press statements, make internal announcements, all within SharePoint. For the thumb-typers out there, SharePoint has a mobile version so people in the field can get the same info. Just append "/m" to the URL.

When the crisis is resolved, archive the site. If a new one occurs, launch another one. SharePoint may not save a life or a building, but if you provide good communication on a reliable platform, you just might.

P.S. Put your SharePoint server in the cloud so a location threat doesn't knock out a valuable piece of your global communications.

Oh, Bother

I just did the math. During the workday, I get an email every 10 minutes that matters to me. Those emails are links to news articles, file attachments, tasks, questions, reminders, alerts, and read receipts. I get calendar invitations to meetings, conference calls, webinars, lunches. I also get phone calls, voice messages, walk-ins, and snail mail. Every time I turn around, somebody wants me to do something or read something, so I've stopped turning around. In the old days, it was common for powerful executives like myself to have an assistant. That person would be the gatekeeper: he or she would open the mail, take the phone call, write the letter I would sign, handle my schedule, etc. Now, all but the top echelons in the biggest organizations must manage their own communication and schedule. The PDA or "virtual assistant" is more a nag than a help. It can be difficult to focus on the task at hand with all of these paralyzing distractions. As a result, I think more than a few of us are suffering from overload.

So we're missing that buffer layer that used to separate a manager from employers, employees, and customers. Short of paying a fat salary and sacrificing office space for a professional administrative assistant, what can we do about it? Here's where a combination of psychology, trust, email management, and SharePoint come into play.

First, the psychology. I understand that managers like to seem on top of things. Is getting an email that a file was uploaded really their job? The daily minutiae of a project should be handled by team members, not the manager. That includes acting as interpreter between the customer and the team. Managers should et them communicate directly and wait for the regular report. The team is reporting their activity, right?

That brings us to trust. If team members have to be watched all the time, it's time to get a different team. Managers should support the team, which includes giving them opportunities for both success and failure. OK, no one likes failure, but I've learned more from my failures than my successes. The trick is to fail in small ways and have a backup plan.

There are hundreds of experts on email management, and this blog is not supposed to be book-length, despite my best efforts. All I will say is that project emails are usually better off as content in a collaboration system. Discussion groups, wikis, blogs, lists, project calendars, and other features are often better containers of project information than email because different types of data are handled different ways. Email just puts stuff in the inbox, no matter what it is.

Last, but not least, is SharePoint. Chances are that most folks reading this blog already have it or something like it. Managers should show the project team how to use it specifically for collaboration and communication on the project before them. This could mean using announcements for team updates, a blog for reporting, and a project wiki to pool decisions made or lessons learned. Then it's time for the manager to set alerts. No phone calls, no emails, no endless conference calls. For long-term projects, I set my alerts to get a weekly email summary of activity. Shorter term, I like a daily summary. I don't want to see the 10 emails it took to decide on a background color; I just want to know if the client is happy. As a project nears completion, I will reset my alerts to "immediate" to make sure the rollout is going smoothly.

The key to combating information overload is getting only the information I need. Through a combination of back-to-basics management and SharePoint technology, I think I've tamed the beast for now.

The App Heard 'Round the World

Email is pretty easy. With a few clicks and a little typing, I can communicate with anyone around the world. Email is also pretty fast. In a few seconds, the email I send is waiting in the other person's inbox for viewing. Email is pretty convenient; I can attach files, include hyperlinks, and contact many people at once. In the communication toolbox, email is as handy and necessary as a screwdriver. In the global collaboration toolbox, however, email is more like a sledgehammer -- good for specific tasks, but destructive if overused.

For example, think of eight people in different offices around the globe working on a project plan. They don't know each other, but a senior manager has put them together for this task. Naturally, each person has different expertise and opinions. They work on the plan and send out emails to the team. Draft after draft is distributed, copied, edited, split, and recombined. In the end, the team spends as much time piecing the final plan together as they spent drafting it in the first place.

Next time, they could use an actual collaboration tool, rather than a messaging tool. My preferred tool is SharePoint, though there are a few of them out there. SharePoint provides the necessary architecture out of the box, and there are a number of qualified independent vendors who can to build it to spec. With a little training, workers can take advantage of features like personal profiles and social networking features so they can get to know their teammates on the other side of the world or down the hall.

There are plenty of task-specific features as well. Document workspaces leverage check in/check out and versioning functionality so the team never has to wonder about the latest changes or accidentally editing an old version. Alerts via email or RSS feed automatically notify the team when new drafts are available for review. Personally, one of the features I like the most is threaded discussion groups. My team can keep track of ideas this way, and it really saves on the conference calls and note-taking. Another huge advantage of SharePoint is having a platform to keep senior management informed by giving them read-only rights to the collaboration site.

I know today's entry reads like a sell sheet, but whatever tool your organization chooses, I hope they make a sincere effort to transition out of email. It's just not the right tool.

Expose Your Knowledge, Avoid the Competence Crisis

It happens in any organization: people leave. Sometimes there is a great loss to the organization when folks move on. The career administrator who "knows where all the bodies are buried" also knows in detail how the organization runs and why. The new hire may be schooled in all the latest techniques and technology but doesn't know the organization like the old hand. Circumstances often dictate little or no transition period with both employees on board, and a wealth of institutional knowledge can be lost. Just about everything the newbie needs to know is locked in a file cabinet or five, and it's a big task just to figure out what's there. The alternative is to spend months re-integrating the team, and no one wants that.

There's a two-stage process to resolve this dilemma. Stage one is to dust off those file cabinets and scan everything. The difficulty here is setting aside the space, time, and personnel to scan. High-speed scanners are expensive and take training; interns have low motivation to produce volume or quality. Since no one is using those files anyway, let a pro cart them off, scan the documents, and destroy the files (or return them if you have to keep them). Scanning will happen in record time, and you don't have to reorganize your office around the activity. Do this yearly if you have to.

Stage two is all SharePoint. Upload the searchable files and let the administrator tag the ones that are important. Let the whole team loose if you want to. Add in electronic files like emails and Word docs, and you'll start to paint a complete picture. Then submit cross-references and comments about the documents. Do a review of a program as a wiki, linking your files throughout. Now you have a knowledge repository that will bring new people up to speed quickly or crosstrain existing employees. This is an easy way to minimize the disruption of job changes and keep productivity high.

SharePoint Is a Waste of Money, But It Shouldn't Be

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 is an amazing tool. Imagine a project management site, library, supply chain system, and records center coupled with Web 2.0 and social networking. It can't miss, right? Right! The promise of SharePoint has made it a wildly popular implementation in business and government. The practicality of it, however, has made it a hair-pulling experience for many people who are just trying to get some work done. Where's the disconnect?

The biggest challenge seems to be implementation. Typically, SharePoint gets poor treatment by IT people, who view it as a glorified web server or network share. Either way, it's an unknown and therefore a pain. Often, IT folks will spend six months planning the hardware and bandwidth and six hours on the software. Once SharePoint is turned on, the team walks away. It's tough for most employees to create a website from scratch; it's almost impossible for a novice to use SharePoint to its potential. The hardware, licensing, and IT effort are all for naught.

The answer is pretty simple: IT need to listen to the user base. They should find out -- from workers, not their manager -- about their daily work. Engineers can discover with them what features SharePoint can offer that save them some effort. Programmers can go over the use of RSS feeds and alerts for automatic communication. Trainers can school them in the benefits and surface usage. Once they get their feet wet, users will come back to IT for time-saving features that will really demonstrate SharePoint's ROI. Otherwise, SharePoint is just another spike in the five-year budget.

4th Floor -- Results, Organizational Benefits, Objectives, Goals

I gave a seminar on elearning at a federal department this week. It was full of training managers and other human capital experts. They all had the same comment: "This is great information, but it doesn't address what I really need. How do I convince upper management that training is valuable?" As we examined that topic from different angles, a few things became clear. First, many training managers aren't measuring their training beyond a course evaluation. Second, and more shocking, upper management isn't sharing program objectives or organizational goals with the training team.

Let's take the measures first. You're probably familiar with Donald Kirkpatrick's evaluation model. Four levels of training assessment are broken down into a learner's evaluation, a learning assessment, knowledge transfer, and organizational benefit. Each level is measured and builds on the preceding one. It's pretty simple in concept, but it can be difficult to practice.

The training managers had some problems with the level one assessments. One issue was the questions didn't seem to go far enough. It's good to ask a learner how he or she liked the course, but it's better to go a little deeper. Ask how the learner would do it differently or if any information seemed to be missing. Find out how the learner would have survived without the course, and what resources he or she might have used if the course didn't exist. Another big issue was making sure the online evaluations were anonymous in the LMS -- something any good programmer should be able to provide with little difficulty.

At level two, managers seemed to be uncomfortable with the idea of a pretest evaluation of the learning population. They wanted to get on with the training. I sympathize, but it's really important to know how your training changed the learner's knowledge. If you don't know that, it's impossible to know what direct effect your training has had.

Level three, interestingly, was the easiest for training managers to handle. After all, they had numbers to justify that a particular skill was lacking in some way, and it was easy enough to do an additional evaluation to note the change in skill. Since the level two measures were lacking, however, managers could only guess that training was responsible for the change. Increased awareness, marketing, or other factors may have been responsible.

The biggest issue was level four, which is to be expected. Since training managers didn't have the first three levels of measurement on solid footing, and upper management wasn't sharing its objectives (or didn't have any), level four was an impossible climb. We've already looked at some issues with the first three levels, which are generally under the training manager's control. Since organizational goals and program objectives are the purview of higher powers, what can a training manager do?

I think the answer is simple: make something up. Training managers know enough about the organization to understand its mission. They know about the big programs and what they're designed to do. The trick is to tie the course to the program.

Though training managers may not get the news, marketing is all over this stuff. Every press release is peppered with "meeting the executive's goal of..." or "increase operational efficiency" or "reduce our risk exposure." This kind of language is all over an organization's website. Trainers should just pick a goal and march with it. Better yet, pick several. It's not a trick; any good trainer can identify organizational deficiencies instinctively. Trainers know what the organization needs, they just need a little help describing it to the folks with the checkbook.

Training must have a purpose, and that purpose should at least include an organizational benefit. As long as the first three Kirkpatrick levels are solid, it should be easy to show the way to level four.

Spend Your Training Budget, Train No One

Looking over some of my previous posts, I have discovered a common theme: scaling objectives. That is, achieving a goal by building a small but solid foundation and scaling up as needed to meet the goal. Unfortunately, some training program managers choose to spend lots of money on the one elearning component that doesn't directly train anyone: a learning management system. As soon as a training program is launched, some people go running for infrastructure. Don't get me wrong; I'm not against using an LMS. I just don't think that kind of major purchase is Step One.

So what is Step One? Figuring out what Step One is, of course. Look at all the people you serve. What are their duties? Where are the biggest area for improvement? What kind of impact would training make on performance? In other words, make sure you know who you are training and what courses they should have. Then it's time to figure out how.

There are two main directions to go: synchronous and asynchronous. Those are just 50-cent terms for instructor-led and self-directed. Which way to go is mostly based on how many learners you have, how many courses you intend to provide, and the course content, not to mention budget. Synchronous training is LMS-independent; classroom training has existed for centuries. Asynchronous training needs an LMS of some kind, but it doesn't have to cost much.

The essence of an LMS for many organizations is automated reporting. Test scoring, classroom scheduling, and course creation can all be beneficial, but for most trainers they are expensive add-ons. The bad news is that a traditional LMS includes those expensive add-ons and contributes to a huge budget footprint. The good news is that you don't have to have a traditional LMS to do your reporting.

If you have access to an intranet similar to SharePoint, work with a good developer to devise a solution for your internal or OPM reporting needs. The course and reporting can be hosted on your intranet and reporting data can be pushed to an external source as needed. The development will cost a fraction of a full-blown LMS, and there are no recurring costs, since your intranet license is already covered.

So when do you need an LMS? The answer varies with the organization, but here are some rough guidelines.

• Courses have expanded to a curriculum tied to a career path
  
• The learning population is over 200
  
• The number of courses exceeds 50
  
• You really want all the add-on features of a traditional LMS
  

Otherwise, stick with a home-grown reporting tool and use that huge savings to get some courses ready.