Debbie is the Managing Director of EnvisionIT, a specialist SharePoint consultancy in New Zealand. The focus will be on the use of SharePoint for project management, team collaboration, and document management.

Challenges at the DHB:
– people … culture, knowledge sharing, difficulty in finding information, the intranet isn’t ideal
– process … many methodologies in use, many different workflows, departmental-centric classifications
– infrastructure … multiple locations, 1 million files over 100,000 folders, support for remote users

Key drivers for the DHB:
– improved operational performance … more efficient processes, better decisions
– content management … more than document management, central classification, better standards compliance and following methodology
– accountability … auditable, controllable, compliance

The project was more than electronic document management … change of culture and process, but also giving some project management capabilities. The new project management system was the largest system upgrade in 17 years … from character-based input to a Web-based system. A project team of 48 people. Users spread across different locations, 85 training sessions, stakeholder communication and management.

All through the implementation project, Debbie and the team used SharePoint to help manage with team collaboration. “It was all in one place, and I couldn’t have done it without SharePoint” said Debbie.

Debbie showed some videos of how they used SharePoint to support parts of the project:
– team collaboration
– meetings
– task management
– issue tracking, which enabled assignment of issues to people onsite and offsite.
– surveys, eg, for post-implementation reviews, easy reporting
– document management … team site specific lists and libraries, with Content Types used to aggregate “contracts” or “HR Docs” or “Finance Docs” across all of these sites.

Found pretty good adoption of SharePoint within the team; some carrots and sticks (eg, no shared file drives were allowed).

Wanted to encourage people to start creating a document where it was going to be saved back to. Eg, create the document directly in a SharePoint Document Library, rather than opening Word or Excel first and then saving to the document library.

Governance pilot … a trial of the Records Repository within SharePoint. Looking to include email (upload and classification from within Outlook), physical records, etc.

Implementation
Keys:
– pilots
– senior management buy-in
– ongoing business process improvement

Managing change:
– people … buy in, training, changing roles, upskilling, education, communication
– process … incremental and short term changes, workflow
– infrastructure … architecture, enabling projects (eg, Active Directory, Office 2007, Vista or XP), IT process and people change