- Posted by Prashant on August 16, 2009
Someone recently asked: "If you could summarize the top 3 or 4 risks while implementing an enterprise portal/ECM, their impacts and the mitigation strategies for a Sharepoint based initiative. What would they be?".
I thought this answer was relevant to a lot of enterprises, who are struggling to find the missing link that separates a solution from the one that is widely accepted and adopted. I always say this about being an expert: "You are not an expert because you know how to work with something. You are an expert when you know it's limitations and know how to work around it. The former is something you can learn from the books. The latter comes to you only with experience!". There are a lot of blogs about the technical limitations of Sharepoint as a true enterprise platform and how they should always be accounted for in any effective strategy. I tried to come up with some real life non-technical challenges that we have faced, which have been equally crucial if not more crucial than the technical ones. Here is what i think:
|
Potential Risk
|
Risk Impact |
Risk Mitigation |
| Stakeholder participation right from the beginning of the project. |
Poor adoption. Just another technology implementation that did not make any difference. |
Ensure stakeholder participation by providing them stakes in the project. Ensure their buy in and regular feedback by targeting their immediate pain points. It might not be possible to bring in all the stakeholders at the beginning and they might not provide good feedback right at the beginning. Here it might be a useful approach to go for prototyping, to showcase them the possibilities and giving them enough ideas to help them contribute relevant ideas to the projects. |
| Underestimating Training |
Stakeholder frustration, resulting in poor adoption. Also this result in the wrong use of the tool set provided, hence defeating all the document management, records management, taxonomy, governance and etc… standards and processes planned. |
Phased execution and roll out. Involving stakeholders during the planning and planning training sessions with and before each major release. Also planning for overlapping periods of using new and existing tool set (if any). |
| Migration Strategies. Migrating of data, documents, records, web pages from existing systems to the proposed Microsoft office SharePoint platform. |
Delays. Absence of Unstructured data mapping strategies to new structured storage might lead to poor organization and inefficient search, document and content management system. |
Indentify right sets of tools. Identify the data to be migrated. Identify and plan for all the redundancies by involving right stakeholders and analyzing them appropriately. |
| Technology & Integration Strategy. |
Extensibility issues. Integration with Line of business systems (i.e. BI, Reporting, Single Sing On, Project and Portfolio Management and etc…) |
Work closely with technology strategy committee to provide regular inputs on future technology platform choices and understand goals for future. Also identify all the solutions, applications and tools needed to integrate with ECM platform and account for them in the planning. |
| Costing & Effort Estimations. |
Delays, cost overruns and project failure. |
Ensure stakeholder resource dependencies and tasks are clearly outlined and communicated. Account for technical tools besides the business software and tools needed to promote governance, operational management, disaster recovery, build management and etc… Microsoft Sharepoint Product suite does not provide a lot of these out of the box. Custom development, buying third party tools and using good community tools should be a part of overall planning and effort estimation for success of the project. |