I did something stupid today, some might even say idiotic. I registered for Stockholm Marathon 2010! It is part of a long-term plan were NY Marathon is the goal and dream I had for quite some time. I should say that I do run quite much but the longest races has so fare only been a couple half-marathons. I’m quite sure you will here more from be about this and I’m planning to do a “Running for 2010″ thing, where SharePoint 2010 will be a part of the program.
For now, I will post a new Fivelist with 5 things running a marathon and implementing SharePoint has in common.

Decision/Business Case
42 km is quite long and for me it’s a milestone to achieve the NY Marathon. When you start consider to implement SharePoint within your company or organization you should ask yourself why. I know a million reasons were SharePoint can increase productivity and where SharePoint will do good for the Information Workers, but the question is do you. What do you want to achive and I’m not saying this in a negative tone. Start with one thing where you want to use SharePoint and go from there. My goal is not winning the Marathon, your goal should not be using all of the SharePoint functionalities from day one and it simply doesn’t work.
Equipment/Team
At least in Sweden running has become very popular during the last couple of years, this have made the sport more of a equipment sport with lightweight shoes, Gore-tex jackets and GPS watches. Well a GPS-watch will probably not do the implement of SharePoint for you but you certainly need a good team and hardware to do the job. Make sure you have a mixture of people with different knowledge. You will not only have SharePoint knowledge, invite someone from the SQL group, the AD and exchange guys and not to forget, people from the business, someone that knows what the business need.
Exercise/Testing
Running a marathon will not be like running to a meeting. I will probably need to do a +1000 km within the next year to be able to finish within a reasonable time. When you set up a SharePoint environment you will need to do a lot of testing, in most of the cases the setup includes some custom web part or workflow. Test again and again. If you plan for using it on many sites, test on many sites. The result will look the same if you use it on 1000 sites as it does on your small test site. If you have a lot of users you will need to do a lot of performance tests. They say that you never get a second change to make a first impression, well, if you launch day makes the server crash or act slow your installation will be synonym with bad things for a long time.
Preparations/Training
When the marathon (May 30, 2010) is around the corner I will need to plan my weeks, not only with the exercise but with food and sleep. In the same way you need to prepare your end users with training. I have a separate Fivelist regarding end user training. Make sure they know how to use the system, do you have different end user groups like editors and site collection owners make sure they know their responsibility.
Run/Implement
One of the most common mistake people do when running is to start too fast. Plan your run, calculate what time you are aiming for and keep track of you progress through the kilometres. Like the Decision/business case don’t go forward too fast. It takes time to incorporate SharePoint within business and to replace tools earlier used in day-to-day activities, so plan your implementation, talk to the business during the journey and don’t push it to fast, that could cause you to not finish the lap at all.