The Governance and Taxonomy Workshop is a uniquely effective approach to establishing your SharePoint project's taxonomy and governance plan. Make no mistake, it is a workshop and not a class. Although I do most of the speaking for the first four hours or so, this is only to make sure the workshop participants have a common understanding of the business impact of SharePoint. It is amazing to me how many very skilled and brilliant technical experts are skilled at SharePoint deployment, web part development, and administration but have no real understanding what SharePoint "means" to the organization. If everyone isn't on the same page regarding the business purpose of SharePoint then the project will be a technical success but a business failure, and no one wants that!
After the first few hours, the workshop team gets down to business. Everyone participates and works to create the actual documents your team will use to drive its SharePoint project forward. In order to be able to effectively and gently move your SharePoint project to a successful conclusion, your workshop participants should include no more than 12 people. These 12 people should be evenly selected from the following groups:
- IT Professionals - It is important to make sure that your IT professionals are well represented in the workshop. They are, after all, the ones who will actually have to accomplish what your team agrees to during the workshop.
- Power Users - SharePoint sites are designed to be managed and modified by power users who act as site collection administrators. The governance and taxonomy plan you develop will be designed to describe the information that spans your entire organization. You will want to make sure that the Power Users who act as data and site stewards are strongly represented in your workshop team.
- Powerful Users - These are people who are organizationally very powerful and have policy-setting authority within the organization. Typically we look for "C Level" executives or their designates. SharePoint must ultimately be governed by enterprise business policies and best practices. This means the support and buy-in of the top leadership in the organization.
Taxonomy Development. During the workshop we spend several hours developing a common taxonomy of information categories that are meaningful to the entire organization. We aim for just seven categories (or buckets) to put all the organization's information into. I've seen valid taxonomies with as few as three categories and as many as nine, but we never ever go beyond ten categories. Why not? Because people can't remember more than ten. Everyone must know and understand the ten categories in order for the organization to succeed at managing its information and intellectual property.
Governance Plan. The top level of the taxonomy we develop is pretty much "carved in stone," but below that the taxonomy grows into and merges with the organization's overall information architecture. This requires ongoing management and maintenance by a Governance Team composed of business and IT stakeholders.
Project Charter. Once we have agreed to the informational goals of the SharePoint project and the governance model that will be used to manage it, we capture the information into a project charter for the SharePoint project. This document is usually about 20 pages (an example can be found and downloaded on this site), and includes the project team, business case, budget, milestones, high level requirements and traceability matrix, the top-level taxonomy, and governance plan.
Action Plan. Lastly we develop a list of specific and measurable tasks, their owners and due dates. This list then enables the team to "hit the ground running" on the next day. Planning is vital, but doing is even more vital! So, the focus of the two-day workshop is to drive meaningful and rapid action immediately after the workshop ends.
High-Level Training Plan. Technology will only be as successful as the people who use it. The workshop also helps develop a list of the major skill sets that need to be developed within your organization. My Governance and Technology Workshop (also called an 'Action Plan Workshop') is integrated into Mindsharp's excellent "OnPath" training methodology. for more information about Mindsharp's OnPath methodology, please click here
Imagine how successful your project can be if you walk out of the Governance and Taxonomy Workshop with the above stakeholders in total agreement and in support of the above documents!
It really happens in two short (but intense) days. Believe me this is worth your time.
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