I recently read an article about the difficulties in implementing SharePoint and thought that I should share some of my experience on what to consider and what I think are the key success factors in a Successful SharePoint implementation.

If you have thoughts and findings on the subject I would love to hear about them.

Think big, start small
I have written about it before, SharePoint is a huge platform with endless of possibilities, but all the possibilities often tends to be SharePoint’s biggest opponent. Don’t try to implement everything at the same time, that will lead to that your project never will be finished. Find out what’s most important, what does the business crave for? What is the most urgent issue? If you can start solving that you will not only take the first step towards a successful deployment but you will also make it easier to get “buy-in” from your end users with your next step in you bigger implementation. So start small and build from there.

Education and Communication
Microsoft are very good at making user friendly application but SharePoint is not that easy to everyone. Maybe your end users can figure out how to upload a document but to really gain anything from you SharePoint implementation you need to educate them with more than just uploading documents. You need to introduce them to the navigation, to views, version history, the importance of metadata, search and what and where to store their information. You should also consider having a role based education since there will be employees with different roles. Some will only contribute and use information, others will be site or site collection owners and need a broader education.

But education is not the only thing that needs to be handled, you also need to put a lot of effort in communicating you implementation. Why, What, Who, When? There are a lot of questions that could lead to resistance among the end users if they are answered. If the end users are not on the same page, understands the importance of the implementation and what is expected from them they will not likely be interested in start using SharePoint.

So, build your education in modules and create a communication plan!

Governance, roles and responsibility
It is probably the biggest buzzword in the SharePoint community right now but there is a reason for why there is so much talk about it. As I mentioned in the first section SharePoint offers a lot of possibilities and SharePoint is built in such a way that much of the customization and in some way the administration are handled by the business itself. If there is no group (Governance) that can close the gap between IT and the business needs, set up roles, responsibilities, best practices and so forth you will end up in chaos.
There is unfortunately no predefined way or magic trick to put up a successful Governance group since every business is unique and has different company structure. But start small, include people from the different business units, IT and the Communication department. You should probably don’t have much more than 10 people, meet often in the beginning to set the framework and go on from there.

Structure, navigation and Taxonomy
If your end users don’t know where to store or find information you probably need to rethink your structure. It has to be easy to find and navigate through your SharePoint Environment. Organizations tend to change over time so prepare for changes in the business structure. Before you start migrating documents into your environment, investigate what kind of information you are using today. From that, build up a taxonomy structure with Content Types and Site Columns. If your company has problems with Office templates not being used correctly or wrongly (or you don’t have any at all), take the opportunity to clean that up and to put templates to your Content Types. When you educate the sales people about how easy it is to start creating a new contract or sales order built on the correct Office Template they will be thrilled! Well, maybe not the sales people but everyone else will…

Architect and create services for you business
SharePoint is vary scalable and I will therefore not talk about how to set up your environment, just make sure that you have room for scaling up or scaling out.
If you have built up an intranet portal maybe the intranet part should be more strictly controlled and then you set up a separate “play ground” for collaboration between teams with team sites and meeting workspaces. You should also consider having this delivered as services to your business units. Maybe they have different demands on up time, availability, security, storage etc. Therefore you might create different SLAs to meet those needs.