As a treat before I head on holiday, and because I promised it at my recent Effective SharePoint Requirements Gathering workshop in Amsterdam, please download, use and feedback to me the 5 Pillars A4 posts along with the much sort after 5 pillars activity spreadsheet.

21apps Pillars of Governance A4 Poster

5 pillars of Governance Activity Mapping spreadsheet

Please use, share and update as you see fit.  If you make any useful updates please share them and let me know.

Enjoy

Andrew

To demonstrate the benefit of the community my session on Whats new in 2013 was an eclectic mix of end users, it pro and developer focused content to give people a quick look at 2013 and introduce some of the areas for future discussion.

Rather than using PowerPoint I decided to use OneNote – so people can download it and continue their own journey of discovery.  But more importantly to demonstrate the vast amount of great content available.

SUGUK West Midlands.

Too many people to thank for the great content,  please do check out the links as you will find the full content along with a wealth of other great content.

Look out for details of the next events coming soon.

If you’ve missed my previous posts on Gamification the are worth reading for some background on my journey to discover more about the ideas of Gamification and how they can be used in SharePoint projects.

What’s already out there

Before I lay claim to anything new or ground breaking I thought it worth doing a quick search for ‘SharePoint Motivation’.  Surprisingly little shows up but what does very much aligns to my views on SharePoint adoption to date summarized in my post The missing link in all SharePoint projects.

Most make reference to Dan Pink and his great TED talk – the surprising truth about what motivates us. Dan Pinks talk and book is closely linked to the work of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan’s Self Determination Theory.  Which also forms the basis on which much of the Gamification Design is based.

Erica Toelle posted her thoughts on Dans video and the application to SharePoint sounds very much like the work I’ve been doing to define what a SharePoint Centre of Excellence is, how it works and why you need one. I’m not sure I agree with the Time Grant approach, but the rest makes complete sense and is live and kicking in a number of places today.

Toni Frankola take a more dev inspired lead from Steve McConnell.  If your not a developer your unlikely to have heard of Steve McConnell – if you are a developer then you will almost certainly hold him up in very high esteem. I do like how Toni has reviewed the classic mistakes from software development and related them to SharePoint – all as relevant today as they were in 2008 when Toni posted this.

Mark Miller at EndUserSharePoint.com has a couple of posts, most notable is the dinner enlightenment he had.

“The incentive to use a new system has to be greater than the incentive to keep doing what you’re doing.” Not earth shattering, but a very crystalizing thought for me. What am I providing in my SharePoint site that will be so enticing, so useful, so exciting, that my potential audience HAS to use my site or they feel they are missing something. What is the incentive for them to use SharePoint?

I like the simplicity of this statement,  but it doesn’t really help people solve this very real and challenging problem.  How do we make the incentive to use the new system greater?  Gamification is one answer

The one that didn’t show up in the search results that really should have is Rob Bogue, SharePoint MVP and owner of Thor Projects.  If you have seen Rob talk or read his blog posts then you will have had some exposure to the Psychology behind SharePoint adoption. I should probably point him to some SEO site, but the fact he’s using an almost vanilla SharePoint site for his blog – I’ll leave it :S

What is Motivation

In a previous post in this series I gave an insight into what is Fun to help build some foundation to why people do things.  In this post I’m going to follow the lectures and look to build on that knowledge and provide some of the understanding behind what motivates us.

What is motivation?

It’s actually quite hard to define, in simple terms its “when you have a feeling – you are moved to do something”.

Its also complicated by the fact that people are motivated by different things.

I’ll ask a question at this point, which I think is very relevant to the way companies today look to motivate people but often fail.

Do you have a staff incentive / bonus scheme that rewards you with money or prizes based on doing something?

Most companies (and its much more common in larger companies) have some form of tangible recognition or reward system. The idea being that if we reward people for particular behaviour they will be motivated to do more of it.

Heck, wouldn’t it be good to be able to reward people for using SharePoint better?   Perhaps some money for the member of the team that visits the site most?

The problem is that these extrinsic motivations have limits and often result in less motivation – the exact opposite to what was expected or wanted.

Behaviourism

Behaviourism looks at the external factors,  called extrinsic motivation.  In simple terms it’s what goes in and out of the brain – but not what happens inside.

A well know example of behaviourism is Pavlov’s salivating dog, where Pavlov noted that the dog would start salivating when the lab technician arrived as it knew it would get food.  This is an example of classical conditioning – I do this, this happens – and relies on rewards.

Back to the staff incentive question – are the incentives provided based on the I do this I get that classical conditioning?   for example,  I get a customer feedback of above 80% and I get a bonus.

Another type of behaviourism is Operant Conditioning where the objective is to get someone or something to learn to do a particular activity using rewards and punishment to encourage the desired behaviour.

Again back to the staff incentive – do you regularly receive a reward as a matter of course?  For example we get pizza on Wednesday if we’re meeting our targets.  And for the pizza to be cancelled if you miss it?  

Feeling motivated when the Wednesday pizza gets cancelled?

Gamification relies heavily on behaviourism, which means if it’s designed badly the results can actually produce negative effectives.  Therefore before designing or introducing any gamified activities into your company you need to understand how to approach the different aspects from reward types to the schedule and the limitations inherent from over justification to completely missing the reason why.

And how missing the intrinsic motivation, the most powerful motivation, is not a good thing.

Cognitive Bias – Intrinsic Motivation

When something is worthwhile and motivating in and of itself.

One of the things that I look for in great SharePoint Centre of Excellence people is the enthusiasm and enjoyment they get from helping people to do something better. When people enjoy what they do, they see value in it and are motivated by it you will have a much more productive and motivated team than one that needs extrinsic rewards to get them to help people.

Common areas that I have always recommended people look at are

Web applications

• keep the numbers low
• use when security is important
• apply quotas
• good content database allocation
• split you applications types (collaboration, my sites and social, publishing)

Site collections

• good content database allocation
• use managed paths to aid information grouping (projects, communities, apps)

In your on premises deployment this all makes sense and the numbers allowed are often much greater than you are likely to use – for example the site collection limits

Software boundaries and limits for 2013

Site collection limits

The following table lists the recommended guidelines for site collections.

But looking at SharePoint Online for Enterprise Customers we get very different limits

SharePoint Online for enterprises

The following table describes software boundaries and limits for SharePoint Online for Enterprises in Office 365.

UPDATE: 4th March 2013 – Microsoft have corrected the post which now states 3,000 site collections.

A few numbers that stand out as a possible challenge to way we have been configuring our sites on premises.

Number of site collection = 300  3000  Updated post 4th March

Site collection storage quote = 100GB

I do express some concern by this shift, and it will mean some careful thought and planning to ensure that we can achieve some of the basic information governance controls like

• Ownership of site collection and its content
• Ensuring users know where to put things
• The lifecycle of the site collection
• Not building huge site collection depth and complexity

I personally have always looked at trying to encourage the creation, use and disposal of site collections based on well defined use cases.  A good example of this is a project.

In the project you have a well defined owner, membership, content structure, purpose and lifecycle.

If based on the numbers above we have to move back to managing this more at the sub site level I can see challenges around management.

For example

• can the project manager be given rights to invite new people to his project site if its just a sub site?
• where does a project site get created if it has to be a sub site?

There are lots more questions and that need to be worked through.  Perhaps the answer is to allow enterprise customers to have multiple tenancies – but that I believe will bring in many more issues.

I would be interested in people experience with this?  Are the numbers accurate – i.e. for a larger enterprise can they get more – or do they do a dedicated offering.

It appears that the social network helps keep us on track and hi-lights any issues / duplications.  This being a prime example

There are a few key roles that make up a SharePoint Centre of Excellence.

• Team Leader
• Technical Authority
• Subject Matter Expert
• Change Agent

Team Leader

Don’t confuse the role of a team leader with a project or line manager.  The team leader should be the inspiration for the team, provide direction, support when things get difficult and promote the team and way of working.

A good team leader does not allocate work and tasks, they support and protect the team helping them to achieve and exceed their goals.  They should be seen as a mentor by the team members, someone they respect and trust and who they can share challenges and problems with.

A good team leader will have:

• A deep and wide understanding of SharePoint is essential
• Experience deploying SharePoint into multiple organisations
  • this gives them essential tacit knowledge and experience
• Previous experience, or good understanding, of the infrastructure and deployment options for SharePoint
• Any development experience is a bonus, they should as a minimum understand good practice around the platform and how it can be extended
  • Experience of working in an Agile development team and being a scrum master make for a good team leader
• Ability to talk at all levels of the organisation from C level to end users and for the users to feel an equal

The team leader will set the tone for the team, if they are open, honest and hardworking this will be seen in the team.  If they are in it for themselves, divisive, manipulative or not really bought into the value of the platform and how change can really make a difference the team will eventually fail.

Technical Authority

Ideally this role can will be covered by the team lead, they should have the depth of knowledge and experience to be able to guide and advise the team and the business on the best use of SharePoint. They may look to build a group of trusted advisors or be able to validate any of the decisions with peers or via a relationship with Microsoft.

• Deep and wide knowledge of the platform
• Analytical and problem solving skills
• Able to talk confidently and with authority to infrastructure teams
• Able to provide consultancy and guidance to development teams
• Ability to articulate technical aspects to less technical people in the team and across the wider business

Subject Matter Expert

This area of the team provide the opportunity for diversity in both skills, experience and interests.  The vast array of features and functions in SharePoint mean that you will have a range of SMEs, with very different interests and skills.

All subject matter experts should have

• A passion for SharePoint and its roll in changing the way an organisation works
• A desire to learn more, active community members are ideal
  • If someone is willing to give up a Saturday of their own time to learn more about SharePoint then they almost certainly have that little extra passion
• Ability to communicate with users
  • This is essential, most of the time they will be supporting and encouraging users, working through difficult changes and being able to work well with users will pay dividends
• A feeling of being part of the team and wanting to be successful

The skills of any one SME will vary depending on their experience or interests.  This is anything from a passion for doing the basics well, through tools like InfoPath and SharePoint Designer and into wider fields like information architecture and governance.

A successful team will have a mix of SMEs allowing them to offer both a breath of expertise combined with a depth of knowledge.

There will always be people outside of the team that know more about a particular subject, a good SME will look to support and encourage those people as a way to extend the capabilities of the team.

Change Agents

This is not something you will see in the traditional skills matrix for SharePoint but is probably one of the most important skills needed to ensure a successful return on investment.

The change agents will be less technically competent, or even interested, but have softer skills that are essential.

• Requirements gathering and understanding the business need
  • I will write a lot more on this subject in future posts – check out Effective SharePoint Requirements gathering workshop for an idea of what this involves
• Marketing and communications
  • The ability to promote the services of the SharePoint Centre of Excellence
  • Sell the success across the business
  • Promote the work at senior level
• Build community
  • Arrange events and workshops
  • Keeping the community going and active
  • Finding new members
• Organisation change
  • Interest in the psychology behind effective organisation change
  • Understanding / interest in enabling the social enterprise

Where do we find them?

The creation of the initial team may be difficult, the team leader role is crucial and probably the hardest to fill.  You may have to go external to your company to recruit a good team leader.  Disclaimer – 21apps provide people with for this role.

Subject matter experts will likely come from within.  If you already have SharePoint in the business then you will have a few candidates who have put themselves forward as ‘The SharePoint Guy’ – court these people as they are the ones you need to work in the SharePoint Centre of Excellence.

Change agents can come from a variety of backgrounds, I often find that people who are currently on fast track or career stretching activities make good resources here as they have already shown a commitment to improving the way they work and a willingness to learn.

New starters, people straight from university or school, are great additions to the team.  They are untainted by the way the business works, have a passion and desire to learn and today have an in built propensity to using technology to get things done.

You have to be very careful who you get on the team, aim as high as possible, ensure every team member brings something to the team and do not allow the team to be dragged down by underperforming people.

What mix of people?

In typical SharePoint consultant speak – it depends!

If your organisation is new to collaborative tools, have a long history of old technology and an aging workforce then the needs for the SharePoint Centre of Excellence are less around technical skills and more around changing the way people work.  In this environment there is a need to focus more on the change agents and helping get more from the basics.

If your organisation has kept up to data with technology and have used collaboration and social tools before then you will be looking to build solutions that push the platform.  In this scenario you will be looking at more capacity in the subject matter experts, but with a focus for the change agents on building community.

A successful SharePoint Centre of Excellence is not a place for a journey man employee, be very weary of people overselling someone’s ability in order to get them to move into your team and away from their business – if they were that good they would fight to keep them.  The team will be small and focused and there is no room for people who don’t carry their weight

How many people?

If you do things well the demand for the time from the SharePoint Centre of Excellence will always outstrip the resources available.  The challenge is building team that is big enough to support the rate of change the organisation is comfortable with.  Too many people and it will feel like SharePoint is being oversold, too few and people will go elsewhere for support or just do things badly.

You need a base team of between 2-3 people to provide some diversity and mix of skills needed to form the basic SharePoint Centre of Excellence.  As the size of the organisation grows, the demand for engagements and support increases so will the demands on the team.  A rule of thumb would be 2 people for every 1000 active users – e.g. for a 5000 person organisation with 2000 knowledge workers this would be a team of 4.

In the next post I will discuss ways of working and how the SharePoint Centre of Excellence support the adoption of SharePoint.

 “SharePoint – the operating system for the enterprise”

The breadth of features and functions available in SharePoint today is vast, everything from simple discussion boards, records management, search, web content management, business intelligence, the list goes on.

The challenge is often not what SharePoint can do, but what do you as a business need from the platform. The words ‘it depends’ is never far away, and with good reason. When rolling out a platform on the scale of SharePoint you need to be asking Why?
Being able to answer this question will enable every decision to align and help you achieve a measureable return on your investment.

The problem most orgisations have is that there is no one in the organisation asking these questions and ensuring they are reflected in everything that happens with the platform. That is why I promote the creation of a SharePoint Centre of Excellence team as a best practice.

SharePoint Centre of Excellence

A team of high performing, empowered, diverse and capable people who are able to inspire change within your organisation, build community, align your use of SharePoint to business needs and provide the practical application of governance needed to ensure success.

Why

To promote, educate and ensure there is a shared understanding of the way SharePoint will be used within the business. The team act as a single point of contact for all SharePoint activities – a team who know the answers or the people who do.
Providing every area of the business from the C level executives to the guy who mans the support desk with the information, support and confidence needed to make SharePoint a success.

What

I will go into more detail on the typical activities a SharePoint Centre of Excellence should undertake in a future post, however the team will typically cover the following areas

Support

Not the break fix type of support that already exists in organisations, but support for users who are looking to understand how to do something, if they are allowed to do something or what is the best way to achieve something.
Support will typically be via a community site and discussion board which is moderated by the SharePoint Centre of Excellence but open for other users to contribute to. The SharePoint Centre of Excellence will leverage the platform to provide a support via FAQs and regular blog posts. They will also provide proactive role in demonstrating good practice, running face to face clinics and brown bag sessions to educate users.
The team will also work with IT on support issues, investigation, service pack recommendations and testing. Anything that impacts the platform should include representation from the SharePoint Centre of Excellence.

Engagements

Any team within the business looking to make use of SharePoint, from simple site requests to full blow business process management should engage with the SharePoint Centre of Excellence. The SharePoint Centre of Excellence will be the 1st team to help the business explore their requirements helping to discover common challenges, define measurable outcomes and prioritise new ways of working.
The team will look to leverage out of the box features and functions, working with the power tools available in their deployment to solve the business needs. Only if the needs require coded solutions will they support the business in engaging with a delivery team, providing consultancy and support through the creation, deployment and use of the developed solutions.

Community

Without an active community of SharePoint champions any meaningful business change will struggle. You will have pockets of success but business wide adoption and exploitation will be limited and the cost of change will be significantly higher and take much longer.
The SharePoint Centre of Excellence are responsible for the creation of, running, promotion, support and success of a SharePoint Champions community within the business.

Learning

A key activity for any SharePoint Centre of Excellence is to ensure they continue to build their knowledge of the platform, where it works well and where it falls short. Having an awareness of the wider vendor community offerings is essential. The team should look to become active in their local SharePoint communities, attend conferences and events.
Building time into every team member’s weekly activities is essential to becoming a high performing team able to support the organisation and demonstrate measureable benefits.

Who

The team need diversity in order to be successful. As a successful agile development team works best with developers, testers, designers and product owners working together. The same is true for the SharePoint Centre of Excellence which needs a diverse mix of skills in the platform, the business working as change agents, community creators, marketing and support people.
Not every member has to be a technical expert, but they should grok the value of the platform and how successful adoption can really make a difference.

To grok is to intimately and completely share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity

How

Do not underestimate the value of senior stakeholder support. This is support for the team, the work and providing them with the autonomy and authority to get things done.
As a team they will also report into, and influence, a governance board for strategic decisions, but they must have a line to a stakeholder that understands the value of the team. If they end up having to report up via a traditional project or support management structure they will become impotent and unable to make the changes needed.
I like to think a successful SharePoint Centre of Excellence is akin to a Skunkworks but without the secrecy.

Skunkworks: A skunkworks project often operates with a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy

How do you get started?

Attend my session at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday 3:15-4:30pm South Pacific Ballroom E. #SPC214

I also plan to walk through the areas above in more detail in future posts and follow this with guidance and advise on how to get your SharePoint Centre of Excellence started – the first steps to creating a team that will ensure success in your SharePoint projects not only today but into the future.

The 1st step will be to recognise the need and value of  SharePoint Centre of Excellence.

This session may not sound the most exciting, but you will not be disappointed – gain an invaluable insight into what it takes apply governance, build community and help drive the business change you can only dream of.

SharePoint Centre of Excellence: Why you need one

Time Slot: Tuesday, November 13 2012 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM

Room: South Pacific Ballroom E

Audience: Business Decision Maker

Abstract

SharePoint is a feature rich enterprise ready platform that has the potential to revolutionize your business. Experience shows that without the right team in place to support the adoption, exploitation and promotion of new ways of working you may struggle achieve your expected return on investment!

Setting up an empowered team, with a passion for SharePoint and a clear understanding of the organizations vision and goals you can guarantee your SharePoint deployment exceeds expectations, changes the way your business works and delivers your expected return on investment.

This session provides a detailed look at how to create your SharePoint Center of Excellence, its terms of reference, roles and responsibilities. The role of the team in the practical application of governance, exploitation of the out of the box features, identification of common patterns of use, communication, training and growing a community of SharePoint champions throughout your organization.

Understand why the investment in a SharePoint Center of Excellence will ensure you get value from SharePoint today and into the future.

© Douglas Adams – http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-09-22/

I like to thinks that we have a much better approach to requirements gathering at 21apps with out Requirements Kickstarts and Effective SharePoint Requirements training.

The course is a new form of teaching and learning under the banner of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that attracted over 80,000 students from 150 countries with more than 9,000 completing the course and taking the final exam.  CNN did a small piece on MOOC – and yes that is me with the headphones on J

This document is my submission for the final written assignment and hopefully gives you an insight into what the course taught.

The benefit and focus for me was “How do I apply gamification techniques, in the right way, to help change the way people work”

It provided a foundation of academic rigor to the concepts that I had already started to explore and a framework for approaching these in the future.  This is an example of the framework applied to the scenario:

Screnario

You are approached by Cheyenne Kendrick, the CEO of Go Digital Press (GDP), a global publisher of electronic books for devices such as the Kindle, Nook, and iPad.  She knows you are one of the top experts on gamification, which she has heard can revolutionize publishing.  She asks you to present a proposal for a gamified system to take her business to the next level.

GDP concentrates on the trade segment of the book market, i.e. non-fiction publications that would traditionally appear in bookstores, rather than mass-market paperbacks. Approximately 50% of its titles are targeted at business professionals; 25% are educational resources on technical topics such as computer programming; and the remainder address a variety of different subjects.

As a pioneer in e-book publishing, GDP faces the challenge that many users, even in the U.S., do not yet own reader devices.  As of April 2012, only 21% of American adults reported that they had read an e-book in the past year, although those numbers are increasing rapidly.  Kendrick tells you that another concern is that the device manufacturers and their associated distribution platforms control the sales process, making it difficult for publishers such as GDP to obtain data or develop direct customer relationships.  On the positive side, an e-book is a flexible digital asset, which can offer interactive features beyond any physical book.  Kendrick asks you to propose a way to gamify the distribution or consumption of e-books, or both.

Using Issue Mapping

I have been using dialog mapping throughout the course and used a similar approach for this assignment.  The challenge is to think through all of the elements of the Game Design Framework and map out the issues and challenges around each area in order to make sense of the problem.  From this map I was then able to write the assignment (think real world this would form the basis for the Gamfication report/recommendations).

View the issue map to explore the thought process

Read the report/assignment below