Annelize Jonck from Nedbank in South Africa is talking about overcoming collaboration challenges by inspiring ownership and training end users. Annelize was only invited last Wednesday to speak today at the conference – so a lot has happened in the past week for her!

Key points:

• Nedbank is 28,000 people, with 8000 in Nedbank Corporate.
• IT at Nedbank chose SharePoint and “put it out there” – hoping that all would be well.
• Some problems were in existence – poor training materials (working with academics with no real-world experience), poor applicability (“what our IT department wanted to give us was not what users needed”), poor communication, SharePoint cowboys, non-existent buy-in from the users (they didn’t know the product or what to expect).
• To fix these problems – Annelize developed new training, working with Veronique Palmer from Let’s Collaborate. They developed both customized and centralized training, with high quality, delivered onsite.
• Needed to develop buy-in. Steps – created evangelism sites (put everything related to SharePoint, where to go for help, etc.), created a new SharePoint-specific “help desk” (approached power users in each business group asking if they would provide support – people would log an issue through the Evangelism Site, and the appropriate power user would help). Some of these people were also invited to become part of a Governance Forum.
• Annelize ran a monthly workshop called “SharePoint for Dummies” – where people could share what was working, what was not working, could ask questions, and more. Worked very well.
• Steps to fix the problems – got site management under control (deleted a bunch of out-dated sites), primary focus is not SharePoint but better collaboration between people, spreading SharePoint capability throughout business departments, using road shows to evangelise the rollout of SharePoint 2010 throughout 2011 (so people know what to expect, so they are ready).

Questions
1. People mean different things for the term “governance” (business vs. technical). What are the major sections in your governance plan? What people have to do (taxonomy), What people may do (you may have a site once you have done training), what people can not do.

2. For training, was their resistance to training? The training worked, but everyone wanted more and more training. Administering it was really hard – 8 people per session, different locations, etc.

3. What assessments did you have in the Evangelism Sites? Got people to fill out assessments on SharePoint before allowing people to jump to the next level of training. It’s like a test they have to pass.

4. Who decided the business requirements for the site? We had to (Annelize) because no one else would do it. Now we have the Governance Forum to help.

5. What format was the training? Live classroom training, maximum with 8 people at time.