sharepoint as a business application, not just a...

SharePoint as a Business Application, Not Just a Collaboration Tool

Products, Projects, Services and Work in One System

Published March, 2013

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Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................2

Common Uses of SharePoint .....................................................................................................3

SharePoint Challenges ...............................................................................................................5

SharePoint Deployment Checklist ..............................................................................................7

Extending SharePoint - Customization .......................................................................................8

SharePoint as an “All Work” Management Platform ...................................................................9

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 12


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Introduction

SharePoint is the most common collaboration tool on the market today. It was common in the early adoption years to see SharePoint implementations that were intended for content management purposes only. Now, IT organizations are thinking outside of the box. If you must do more with less, what better way to protect your current investment and minimize costs then to leverage the same platform to bring Project Management, Product Development, Work Management and Service Management to your IT organization? This white paper will help you understand how to leverage your existing SharePoint investment and extend its capabilities to derive more business value. The following topics will be included in this white paper:

Common Uses of SharePoint

SharePoint Challenges

SharePoint Deployment Checklist

Extending SharePoint – Customization

SharePoint as an “All Work” Management Platform

For additional details about EPM Live and it’s ALL WORK capabilities and features, please visit EPM Live’s website at http://epmlive.com/.

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Common Uses of SharePoint

SharePoint is a rage, yes it’s the biggest hit from Microsoft to date and there are plenty of reasons why it has soared to great heights; two of which are as follows:

Anyone can have it - The basic version is free; however, if you can’t get enough, features are enhanced as you move from version to version i.e. Foundation, Standard & Enterprise

SharePoint is amazingly convenient – From all user perspectives (contributors to administrators), ease of use leads to user buy-in and fast adoption

Let’s take a closer look to understand how SharePoint is adding value to businesses everywhere and millions of users across the world. At a very generic level SharePoint contributes in the following ways:

SharePoint is used as a common location for information storage and access

Beyond a central storage system, SharePoint is used as a basic collaboration tool to collaborate on documentation, links and other shared information

SharePoint helps maintain a single version of truth and supports version control

SharePoint offers an improvement over file shares and local storage

Most of the companies who have made good use of their SharePoint deployment have created team sites to extend document storage and collaboration to task collaboration, list collaboration and further communication

All said and done, it is well-known that businesses AREN’T utilizing SharePoint to its full potential.

To derive more value from SharePoint you need to extend its capabilities. Extend usage of SharePoint from a secure repository, ad hoc process and basic collaboration tool to a business process, business application system and an integration tool that integrates with legacy systems. Like every great thing in the world it doesn’t come easy, it requires effort, time and cost commitments. Let’s take a deep dive to understand the basic usages of SharePoint and how you can extend them.

SharePoint as a Secure Repository

- A central and secure place to store information and access when required

- Very easy to deploy and very easy to use

- Features available with all versions, including a free one

SharePoint for Basic Collaboration

- Team site creation for basic collaboration

- Assign users and permissions


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- Small involvement of process; mostly using preconfigured templates and workflows

- Communicate with teams

- Low barrier to entry, as far as configuration and usage is concerned

Now let’s take a look at extending your SharePoint deployment to a comprehensive business application.

SharePoint for Business Processes

- Map current business processes to SharePoint by customizing SharePoint workflow, leveraging forms and/or leveraging 3rd party applications with workflow capabilities

- Standardize SharePoint processes by leveraging best practice templates, standardizing SharePoint tools and utilizing pre-built solutions specific to your business needs. There are many SharePoint add-ons in the market today that can help you add value and reduce the time to market for needed solutions

- Maximize the use of SharePoint by offering business tools for all work (Projects, Products, Services, etc.) across your organization for even more efficient work management and to further return on your SharePoint investment

SharePoint for the Enterprise

- This is the most optimized stage of any SharePoint deployment where you not only use SharePoint to the best of its capabilities but also bring in critical information from other applications via integration to form a centralized hub for all business critical data, or

- Retire legacy systems to reduce costs and enforce standards. Build a path to one business platform for all users, all work and every business need while bringing all data into one centralized location

- Leverage SharePoint to implement business applications needed by the Enterprise such as project management, time management, service management and application development

To conclude, extending SharePoint capabilities will come out of efforts that are proactive and aimed towards a deeper and broader usage of the SharePoint platform. As with any new technology, there must be a positive ROI; to obtain this, SharePoint must be planned and deployed in the right way.


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SharePoint Challenges

Along with any new technology come new challenges. If these challenges are considered up front and addressed throughout the implementation, the chances of success will be greater. Usability is a must so adoption is key. Keep in mind the following deployment challenges as you plan your SharePoint implementation:

1. Lack of SharePoint Expertise- As stated above, most SharePoint infrastructures are underused primarily due to the lack of SharePoint expertise. If you don’t have a SharePoint champion who understands the power of SharePoint, its features and capabilities, and how it can benefit your overall organization, you will be destined to fail before you even get out of the gate. You must understand the potential and how the system can benefit every user in your organization. How will you know how to address business pain points if you don’t understand its capabilities? If all pain points aren’t addressed, well, what’s the point? Following implementation, there must also be experts in place to answer end-user questions, help them adopt to the toolset and prevent the fear of the unknown.

2. Missing Stakeholders- One of the most common mistakes made in SharePoint deployments is the inability to define all stakeholders, their challenges, their current tools and processes. Depending on their work focus, end user maturity levels can also come into play (example: Project Management). An effective SharePoint strategy addresses all of these areas. Overall, knowing and understanding your target audience will undoubtedly result in higher user adoption, leading to overall acceptance and maximized ROI.

3. Lack of Governance- SharePoint can easily get out of control without the proper governance in place to manage the environment. There must be standards and best practices in place to ensure compliance and organization of the data within the platform. The fact is all users work differently, follow different leaders and have different work processes. The benefits of the system must be clearly defined as well as the use cases. The users must understand how they are expected to use the system and should be properly trained on those scenarios. Again, adoption is key. Disorganized and unstructured data can lead to user frustration and eventually they could potentially abandon the solution. Make sure the users know how to use the tool and make sure the data is organized and easy to find. In addition, have the appropriate security in place to prevent data chaos and to ensure users that their content is secure.

4. Lack of Planning- In 2012, Gartner reported that SharePoint inquiries were up by 50%. More than half of those inquiries were related to expanding the depth and scope of SharePoint. It is very common for SharePoint collaboration features and functions to fall short of meeting comprehensive business requirements, yet SharePoint capabilities are limitless if leveraged in the right way. In order to expand an underutilized SharePoint environment, organizations must look at in-house customizations, third party add-ons or solutions and other integration tools that can help them extend their SharePoint environment. Once SharePoint functions are expanded, most


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organizations fail to plan accordingly for additional costs and risks involved in migrating to future SharePoint versions. In addition, other planning considerations include: user locations, expected usage volume, storage and access needs, and complexity and navigation.

5. Lack of Training- As with any Enterprise system, training is critical. In fact, it’s mentioned in several of the other challenges above and rightfully so. If the users don’t know how to use the system and clearly understand how the tool will benefit them in their everyday work initiatives, how can you expect them to adopt? The answer is simple, you can’t! Training and communication is critical in all deployments. A business productivity system is only as good as the data going in, especially if the SharePoint environment will be extended to meet other business needs such as project management, service management and product development. In order to get the data, the tool must be fully used by all targeted users. In order for users to use the tool, it must provide benefit to them. Using the tool is one thing; properly using the tool is another and can only come with training. As users are trained they will feel more comfortable using the tool increasing user adoption and overall productivity. It also ensures that everyone is moving in the same direction which can only come from a shared understanding of the business. An investment has been made into SharePoint; make sure you are protecting that investment by providing the proper tools needed for training and communication that will in return increase adoption. It is also essential that a proper support plan be put in place to continue support throughout the life cycle of your SharePoint deployment.

Don’t overlook any of these challenges prior to planning your SharePoint implementation. EPM Live has been involved in hundreds of SharePoint deployments and more often than not, the challenges above are present. I’m a true believer that uncertainties can’t be prevented, take an Agile approach and have a game plan ahead of time to mitigate any risks that may arise throughout the process.


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SharePoint Deployment Checklist

Now what? Well, let’s assume that you have considered all challenges above and are ready to move forward with your plan. Before you do, use the following high-level list of deployment tasks as a checklist to ensure your deployment is destined to succeed:

Complete Deployment Task List

Identify SharePoint Champion

Identify All Stakeholders

Establish Roles and Responsibilities

Define Governance Structure

Define Current Business Pain Points (Review Current Infrastructure)

Understand Current Business Processes

Define Implementation Objectives

Define Requirements (Use Cases- All Users, Integrations, Processes, etc.)

Define SharePoint Taxonomy

Establish Project Plan

Build Roadmap for Implementation (Iterations, Releases, etc.)

Establish Change Control Plan

Establish Communication Plan (What, How, Why)

Establish Training Plan

Execute

It is highly likely that you may not be able to cover all the bases with your current staff on hand. Maybe you don’t have a SharePoint expert; maybe you don’t have the bandwidth to implement SharePoint with your current resources. My recommendation, get help! Don’t skip any of the steps above because you are resource constrained. Plan ahead and ensure you have the right resources with the right skill sets to ensure your implementation is a success.


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Extending SharePoint - Customization

Most likely, in order to meet all business requirements, organizations must look at customization to ensure the SharePoint infrastructure is leveraged to its full potential. Organizations are struggling with this area due to the high maintenance costs that can be associated to costly third party add-ons and solutions. This is a common trend due to the fact stated earlier…..most SharePoint collaboration features fall short of meeting comprehensive businesses requirements. Strategic business applications can exist in SharePoint and should if you want to get the most out of your investment and ensure end-user adoption. Augmenting and extending functions is a common need within SharePoint implementations but they must be planned ahead to prevent risks. The following questions should be asked prior to moving forward with SharePoint customization:

1. What business requirements do we have that are outside the scope of SharePoint’s out of box collaboration and content management features?

2. Should we customize our SharePoint solution or leverage third party tools and applications to meet these needs?

3. What actions need to be taken to ensure these solutions (customized or pre-built) don’t negatively impact our requirement to upgrade to later SharePoint versions in the future?

In many cases, developing customizations in-house can cause a maintenance nightmare moving forward when looking to upgrade or when troubleshooting SharePoint issues in general. There are several reasons for this:

- SharePoint expert/developer is no longer available so continuity and knowledge of the original customizations may not exist

- Customizations may not be compatible with future upgrades

- Customizations may not be supported leading to a potential roadblock when system bugs are identified and troubleshooted

- Development costs and time to market requirements may exceed expectations and allowances

These same problems can arise on the other side as well. How can you prevent these problems moving forward?

- Limit yourself to one third party vendor that can accommodate most if not all of your customization needs

- Ensure third party tools and applications are fully supported and will continue to be supported by the vendor as each new version of SharePoint is released

- Seek out add-ons, applications and solutions that can be easily installed, prevent costly deployments and minimize risks of end user rejection by aligning with best practice implementations

- Revisit original SharePoint requirements in 6 month intervals to ensure that the implementation isn’t becoming too large, too fast and that it is being properly governed to accommodate all changes moving forward. As users adapt to SharePoint, business requirements will grow rapidly and this growth must be properly supported


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SharePoint as an “All Work” Management Platform

EPM Live is focused on deriving value from your SharePoint implementation by increasing revenue, reducing costs or better yet, a hybrid of both. Deployment outcomes may include:

Improved time to market

Maximized resource utilization

Cost reduction

A decrease in redundant or disconnected systems

Best practice implementations and standardization across work processes

SharePoint is undoubtedly the most popular Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform on the market. Unleash the power of SharePoint by extending the primary uses of SharePoint into an all work management platform. EPM Live can help your organization accomplish this goal. Why choose EPM Live you may ask, let’s take a look:

1. All Work, One Platform

In Gartner’s latest research for the PPM (Project Portfolio Management) Magic Quadrant, Gartner mentioned that today’s PPM platforms must accommodate integrations with other platforms such as NPD (New Product Development), Service Management and ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) in order to have a competitive advantage. EPM Live is the only SharePoint-based PPM platform that not only integrates with these systems but offers all these solutions in one offering.

EPM Live is designed to manage all work in the truest sense. Organizations can now manage their projects, their products and their services as well as all other work in one platform without the need for integration. Because all of this work is managed differently, EPM Live has SharePoint solution apps that allow each department/team the right tools they need to manage any type of work.

2. Pre-built Apps

EPM Live is the only PPM application that offers its own app store concept within the solution to ensure the users always have what they need to scale their SharePoint environment. Our free apps range from full solutions (NPD, AEC, IT Planning and Control) to process definitions (PMBOK, Agile, Prince2), to 3rd party partner apps (Nintex, Yammer, HelpDesk OSP) all the way to individual work plug-ins such as expense reports, invoices, help desk tickets, etc.

An iPhone is a powerful device; however, it is much more powerful due to the endless apps that extend its base functionality. The same goes for EPM Live, the features we offer for SharePoint are award winning and rank among the best with our competition, but our apps in addition to our base is one of our biggest differentiators.

3. Support Offerings

PPM systems are typically not simple and many times resistance follows due to forced processes, change and fear of the unfamiliar. Same goes for SharePoint. EPM Live’s SharePoint base already contributes to less resistance and faster user

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adoption; however, we offer users many support formats to ensure users have what they need to continue to increase productivity with EPM Live.

EPM Live has the following support tools offered to every user:

Live chat

User forums

Access to knowledge base (KB)

Online training

EPM Live University

How to videos

FAQs

Technical blogs

Phone support

Email support

As discussed early in this paper, adoption is key. Providing your users with the tools they need to be successful is absolutely critical.

4. The Power to Choose

Many PPM systems specialize in either online or on-premise solutions. EPM Live offers all deployment methods to support the SharePoint and PPM requirements of all of our customers. EPM Live offers online, hosted and on-premise options as well as a dedicated environment offering.

Large enterprise accounts will often run their POC online to get up and running fast and prove value quickly and then move it in-house later. Deployment option will never be a limitation.

5. All Users, All Maturities

EPM Live specializes in allowing only the functionality required to meet each user’s needs and maturity level. Marketing can leverage the simple task tools to run marketing campaigns while product teams may use more mature agile tools to plan their iterations and releases and IT PMOs can leverage full blown scheduling engines to build out their plans. Regardless of the maturity, the tools are offered in EPM Live. In addition, some teams may simply assign tasks to resources while other teams may need to forecast the resources, match skillsets, perform resource modeling scenarios and then assign a resource that meets the requirements. Each EPM Live capability has various usage scenarios to ensure every user is only using the functionality needed to match their maturity/skillset.

Let’s take a look at the various ways an IT organization can leverage SharePoint across their business with EPM Live’s pre-built applications.

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EPM Live – 100% Built on SharePoint

As you can see from the graphic above, EPM Live has Enterprise Work Capabilities that span across all work processes within your organization. You can now easily extend your SharePoint implementation to accommodate all IT users regardless of work focus. If you are using other critical line of business (LOB) systems, you can easily integrate with EPM Live and your SharePoint environment to bring all information into one centralized location.

Just having the capabilities isn’t enough; EPM Live focuses on delivering these solutions to organizations quickly and with little to no costs. By simply owning EPM Live, you can extend your SharePoint environment to all these areas with a click of a button and with the following cost considerations in mind:

- Will I need additional customizations to the best of breed functionality that EPM Live offers within each application?

- What training requirements will be needed to ensure user adoption throughout the organization?

- Will I need additional SharePoint expertise to help me maintain my SharePoint infrastructure?

- Will I need SharePoint consulting upfront to help me plan out my deployment?

Extending your SharePoint environment with one solution is as easy as 1-2-3.

1. Purchase EPM Live online or install EPM Live in your current SharePoint environment

2. Visit the EPM Live app store and start downloading apps to extend your SharePoint work capabilities

3. Start realizing the benefits from your new all work management platform


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Conclusion

Deploying and extending SharePoint can come with its challenges but the end result, should you do it the right way, is well worth the effort and can result in extreme value for your organization in the long run. To learn more about how EPM Live can turn your SharePoint environment into an all work management platform, please contact EPM Live at [email protected] or visit the EPM Live website at http://epmlive.com.

EPM Live Website

For a sneak peak at all the apps EPM Live has to offer visit our app store at www.market.epmlive.com. Start taking advantage of EPM Live’s full business solutions including:

And many more!!!

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