Selling collaboration services and development services within an organization? – Art Gelwicks recently posted this as a question in the SharePoint Users Group on LinkedIn, and I found myself writing more than would fit in a discussion forum. So here it is.
Are you selling ‘bottom up’ by putting SharePoint out there and letting people use it spontaneously, or are you selling ‘top down’ by finding a sponsor with a requirement and using SharePoint to fulfil it?
There are pros and cons to both. The keys to working out these pros and cons for your organisation are
- culture
- use cases and
- champions
Culture
How your organisation takes to SharePoint depends in part on the culture. Some cultures are enthusiastic about collaboration tools like Instant Messaging, Live Meeting and SharePoint, and others see these sorts of tools as time-wasters. Here’s how to work out which one yours is.
Goffee and Jones do a great 2×2 for the culture of an organisation. They say that the glue that enables a team (department, company) to work together is either sociability or solidarity; organisations with high sociability scores are ‘networked’ and organisations with high solidarity scores are ‘mercenary’. There’s more to it than that, their book is very readable and includes diagnostic tools.
I have seen people in departments where the glue has been sociability take well to the collaborative features of SharePoint like discussion forums, alerts, review workflows and MySites. I’ve not tested this, but if your organisation is networked (and read Goffee and Jones to decide if it is) then a bottom up approach would probably work well. Look out to see whether the people are already comfortable with tools like Instant Messaging and LiveMeeting, whether they are active on Twitter, LinkedIn and FaceBook, and whether Monday mornings start with a chat about the weekend. This isn’t about people who are early adopters of technology, it’s about people who like technology because it is a social and work enabler.
By contrast I have seen people in ‘mercenary’ organisations who are so busily focussed on deliver-deliver-deliver that they don’t have time to ‘waste’ learning how to use a new tool like SharePoint. In an organisation that’s mercenary (again read Goffee and Jones – they mean it in a particular way) you need a sponsor and a project. Work out what your sponsor’s driver is and fulfil it. They may want to cut down storage costs, or improve a specific set of working practices, or control the published versions of training material.
Find a sponsor with a specific need and fulfil that need.
Rinse and repeat.
This brings us on to:
Use Cases
One of the problems with SharePoint is that it’s a swiss army knife of a tool – useful for such a large number of things that it’s hard to stay focused on just one or two. In a ‘mercenary’ organisation the problem is handled for you – your sponsor has a specific task and you focus on that. The challenge is in the ‘networked’ organisations where everyone who comes across SharePoint wants to play with it all, now, as soon as possible, shiny, shiny, new, cool.
Rolling out the whole of SharePoint across the whole of the organisation is a distraction for them and a management nightmare for you. You need to identify a single use-case, but it is much harder because there isn’t a single obvious business requirement and there may not be a single sponsor. Worse, you may have a sponsor who has a vague vision like ‘collaboration’ or an unrealistic one like ‘getting everyone to use their My Site like an internal FaceBook profile’.
If you are going bottom-up you need to roll out solutions to one or a maximum of two use-cases at a time. To find out which one, put together a survey and ask what stops people collaborating well right now. Word it terms of how they work, not in terms of the SharePoint features so:
- full mail-boxes – not – emailing urls
- ‘shared’ drives you can’t share – not –local control of permissions
- documents you don’t know are out of date – not – control over the full document life-cycle
- keeping track of document sign-offs – not – workflows
Pick one of the popular ones, create a simple solution, and run with it.
Let’s read that again.
Pick one. Not a couple because they’re similar. Not three or four because Internal Communications want them (that’s your sponsor-and-project scenario and a very nice place it is to be too). Not two or three variants to cover all the bases. Just one.
Create a simple solution. Yes, there are half a dozen different ways to build and display a discussion forum in SharePoint. If you can’t tell which one works best, then put together one that works well and stick to it.
Then run with it. Get it out there. Get it used. Get comments and feedback. Improve it.
Only then move on to the next one. Bite size chunks. Could be as close to a month apart, but bite size chunks for you and your users.
The subtext here is simplicity. Turn off the ability to make subsites, remove most of the templates, switch off the themes. Lock it down. Shut it down. SharePoint is a casket of magical delights. You can always open a lid you’ve kept shut, but it is much harder to shut down a lid on something you’ve left open. SharePoint baffles new users and new organisations with choice. Lead them step by step through those choices.
And finally:
Champions
People like SharePoint. They really like SharePoint. Not everyone, but enough.
These people who like SharePoint are your friends. They are natural evangelists, experimenters and testers. They’ll pester you for the features that you’ve turned off, and they’ll come up with workarounds that’ll have you blessing and cursing them by turns. But they’ll promote it and provide free consultancy to their co-workers and come up with solutions to problems you didn’t know existed.
Really work your champions. Create a user forum and refuse to answer questions unless they are posted there. You’ll feel very prissy, but your Champions will gravitate there and get to know each other and do half your support work for you. Invite them to do in-house webinars on cool things in SharePoint, (20 minutes demo, 10 minutes Q&A). Create a SharePoint community of pratice with these people at its core. Take their advice on how to move your service forward.
So, how to sell collaboration services?
They key is asking the right question; in this case not ‘how do you roll-out SharePoint’ but ‘what does your organisation want to use SharePoint for?’
Oh, and bite size chunks.
Always bite size chunks.
Aphra Behn - danger of eclectic shock 
Be careful for what you wish for.
Once, a very long time ago, I was pondering in my role and a business development manager, how would it be possible to get people to work better together. I jotted down a few ideas. But, as usual things moved on and I forgot about those notes.
A few years later I heard os SharePoint, and on reading about this new software, and spending a little time on the Microsoft website thought that a significant breakthrough was possible for the learning organisation (a semi mythological beast once commonly found in business books, and Radio 4’s In Business).
Times moves on, and I found myself recently working for a client who had implemented SharePoint some time ago, and sadly picking up the pieces. Like a growth of bindweed, there had been an unmanaged and uncoordinated and disinterested (from senior management) approach that had twisted and hid the key asset – up to date information and knowledge.
Their was already a guerilla movement of anti-SharePointers established and they were hunting down and eliminating their opponents who had been so enthusiastic and dogmatic in their views that SharePoint was the answer.
In effect, they had taken the blue pill, and found out there was no easy way back out of the rabbit hole.
I am sure many readers already know, or have an opinion at least, on how to stop good things going wrong in SharePoint, but do be aware sometimes they do go wrong, and I know as I have seen it.
If there is one piece of learning to pass on, from this unfortunate experience, it is to make sure that the relative ease and low cost of these learning and collaboration tools, does not circumvent the need for significant involvement for OD professionals and culture change.
I recognise that tale, though not the site in question. Wise words indeed.
Good to see you here, and thanks for commenting.
I feel like this line was written just for me 🙂
everyone who comes across SharePoint wants to play with it all, now, as soon as possible, shiny, shiny, new, cool.
I love sharepoint but my new company have it so locked down its crazy so used to just being able to do what I wanted with it!
Well, hopefully the benefit is that it’s lovely and stable, Brian. And hopefully – as Craig points out – they’ve got a strategy.
Have fun with it anyway.
Of course a strategy helps…
Indeed. Oh indeed, indeed, indeed, Craig.
Though Art’s comment was about ‘selling’ the service not ‘introducing’ it. A strategy presupposes a sponsor and a vision and – oh – a reason other than ”all the other companies are doing it”.
Thanks for dropping by and commenting.