What
Change Management
Change Management is sometimes considered the soft stuff. The soft stuff is how to entice, encourage or drag your people into the collaboration groove. To get them talking, sharing, and using the tools. And enjoying the payoffs. We all know the soft stuff is the hard stuff.
Our most successful customers recognise that user adoption of a new system doesn’t happen by accident. A systematic approach to change management has been an integral part of their journey. Your users – and all stakeholders – need the ‘what’s in it for me?’ answered. The change management effort has many facets: the right sponsorship, local change agents, training, communication, incentives and more. We’ve helped many clients with change management for new intranets, portals, and systems for workflow, reporting, social networking and more. We use leading change management methodologies, and our own experience of what work has worked well, and what hasn’t.
Training
Training almost always features in a good change management plan. We offer a range of training-related services, tailored for your needs, including:
- On-site training for technical or non-technical administrators.
- “Train the Trainer” sessions – to give your trainers the knowledge and skills to offer wider training across your organisation
- Development of training resources – such as Quick Reference Guides and User Manuals
- Development of video tutorials – usually short ‘how to’ videos for common functions of the system, or for key user groups. A great way to train many users spread across many sites, without major impact to work schedule or costly travel expenses.
Governance
Information governance is not so easy, and no so soft. You need to understand the value and risk of all the types of content within your organization, define your information management policies, and develop the procedures and guidelines needed to support the policies. And often hardest of all – who owns this information? And the system in which its stored? Who is responsible for decision making?
SharePoint governance is particularly challenging, as SharePoint empowers so many business users. There’s no shortage of stories about SharePoint sites spreading like wildfire, often leaving IT departments wondering why they didn’t tackle the governance challenge earlier. Or why they didn’t define roles and responsibilities before a contentious issue arose.
Our clients ask us:
- Who should be the ultimate owner of SharePoint within our organisation?
- Who should lead the SharePoint strategy, including decisions on enhancements, integration, and use of 3rd party applications? What about branding, information architecture and the homepage?
- What responsibilities should site owners and content owners have? How can we ensure they understand these responsibilities?
- What if I want to invite an external user to my site? What should the policy and process be?
- What backup and archiving procedures should I have in place?
- How do I balance local – or departmental – needs with global – or enterprise -needs?
- Which responsibilities sit with the business, vs with IT?
And more recently…with enterprise 2.0 tools providing a new way for users to create and share many different types of content, client want to know:
- What policies should I have in place when introducing social networking tools to the organisation?
- With so many sites, repositories and systems, how should I define what content belongs where?
- With so many content types, technologies, repositories, how do I manage risk and compliance?
Need help with a more effective approach to information governance, a SharePoint governance plan, and all the supporting policies and processes? Let’s talk.
