Managing Sharepoint Governance At Scale

The Need for Governance

Implementing robust governance processes and controls is critical for organizations rolling out SharePoint across the enterprise. Without governance models in place, SharePoint environments can quickly become fragmented and unmanageable. Key risks include inconsistencies in site provisioning and lifecycle management, lack of oversight on customizations, and improper security models opened up by uncontrolled collaboration. Establishing governance early in the SharePoint journey enables organizations to effectively scale while managing risk.

Why governance is critical for large SharePoint deployments

At an enterprise level, SharePoint governance helps IT teams normalize platforms, content, and data shapes. This consistency and uniformity empowers users to deeply collaborate with confidence that information governance policies are applied appropriately. Governance also streamlines management, ensuring constituent teams have visibility into resource utilization, performance benchmarks, and upcoming projects. With broad visibility, executive sponsors can effectively evaluate ROI and total cost of ownership.

Risks of not having proper governance models in place

Lacking governance, SharePoint environments often succumb to issues around continuity, compliance, and cost-control. Site collections and workloads proliferate without oversight, creating duplicate efforts and orphaned sites. Content types mutate, metadata schemas diverge, and custom fields propagate. Security models drift from corporate standards, exposing information assets to risk. Maintenance costs start accumulating as multiple versions of artefacts require parallel upkeep. Ultimately, the promised benefits of knowledge sharing and collaboration fail to materialize at scale.

Components of a Governance Model

A SharePoint governance model brings together a set of correlated policies, procedures, roles, responsibilities, and tools that collectively ensure the environment meets the needs of the business. The governance framework encodes processes for maintaining business alignment, managing change, developing capabilities, and measuring effectiveness. The core components provide the necessary checks and balances for the SharePoint platform to remain scalable and sustainable over time.

Roles and responsibilities

Stakeholders participating in various governance functions include the sponsor, steering committee, center of excellence leaders, site collection administrators, power users, and end users. Each plays a part maintaining alignment between business priorities and SharePoint capabilities. Collectively, they make platform-related decisions, allocate funding, enact policies, implement new features, govern content, monitor optimizations, and decommission resources. Their active involvement ensures governance rules stay current, with continual adjustments reflecting changing strategic objectives.

Policies and procedures

Documented policies and matching procedures give teeth to the governance model, serving as the basis for collecting requirements, assessing project impact, containing “shadow IT”, enforcing standards, establishing site lifecycles, maintaining security, measuring consumption, and administering platforms/workloads. They provide specific guidelines for delegating administrative privileges, developing solutions, migrating content, publishing reports, and handling exceptions. By codifying these rules, organizations can efficiently onboard new workloads while avoiding redundancy and waste.

Change control processes

The SharePoint environment needs established change management processes enabling modifications, upgrades, migrations and new capability integration without disruption. These technology change processes work in conjunction with content lifecycle workflows for reliably managing artefacts hosted on the platform. All changes require impact assessments, documented test approaches, backout procedures and structured approval mechanisms before deployment to staging and production environments. Change control is fundamental for continuity of operations.

Education and adoption planning

Driving SharePoint adoption at scale requires getting stakeholders to internalize governance rules and processes. Making governance part of new user orientation and platform certification curricula helps establish basic fluency. Advanced training builds deeper skills for managing site lifecycles, optimizing page layouts, developing customizations, configuring security, importing artefacts, transitioning content, and decommissioning sites. Embedding educational opportunities raises overall platform maturity, allowing organizations to activate and control advanced capabilities.

Establishing a Center of Excellence

A Center of Excellence (CoE) team specializing in SharePoint underpins complex governance implementations across global enterprises. Tasked with maintaining platform integrity and business alignment, the CoE drives architecture decisions, implementation standards, capability integration, change control, and adoption. It serves as an ongoing body for governing deployment activities and operations.

Responsibilities of a SharePoint Center of Excellence team

The CoE governs the complete lifecycle for the SharePoint platform, providing direction, oversight, support and coordination. Responsibilities include establishing reference architectures, authoring governance plans, controlling enterprise deployments, optimizing infrastructure, implementing capabilities, creating template artefacts, enforcing standards, measuring consumption, operating service desks, evaluating new features, assessing impact of changes, maintaining regulatory compliance, calculating total cost of ownership, mapping technology roadmaps, driving adoption and retiring platforms. They serve as custodians enabling business outcomes through SharePoint.

Staffing and structure considerations

CoEs are cross functional teams bringing together business analysts, solution architects, development leads, infrastructure engineers, and administrators into a virtual team reporting into application portfolio management. They serve as design authorities composing integrated capabilities from multiple platforms. Beyond core technical skills, soft skills enabling stakeholder interactions, presentation proficiencies and executive engagement help align priorities. Organizationally, CoEs thrive with influential leadership covering technology and lines of business.

Working with IT and business teams

Centers of Excellence straddle business demand and technology supply. Quoting governance policies, CoEs ensure new IT capabilities align with information management standards. Collaborating with lines of business, they connect emerging digital workplace needs with appropriate SharePoint features. Guiding capability delivery and content strategy, CoEs accelerate business outcomes using technology while containing associated risks and costs. They empower decentralization with guardrails that preserve governance.

Important Governance Areas

SharePoint governance safeguards business alignment through oversight covering platform provisioning, solution development, infrastructure management, dependency mapping, security optimization, content lifecycles, portfolio integrations, change control and capability delivery. Core areas driving policies, standards and procedures relate to content, customizations, performance, security and roadmaps as elaborated below.

Content management

Content governance ensures information hosted in SharePoint aligns with organizational taxonomy and complies with policy requirements around personally identifiable information, financial data and intellectual property. Governance enforces retention schedules, disposal holds, file plan mappings and export controls over documents, records and web content. Appropriate content types, metadata and vocabularies get provisioned to meet regulatory obligations, facilitate discovery and enable data protection.

Customization approval

Customization governance analyzes proposed changes for compliance, reuse potential and total cost of ownership. Solutions get evaluated across multiple dimensions including performance impact on scale, effects on upgrades and patches, platform integration complexities, support durations, licensing considerations, and operational continuity. Approved customizations align with architectural principles while meeting current and near term business requirements with least enterprise risk.

Performance monitoring

Continuous performance monitoring is necessary considering SharePoint’s distributed deployment model across on-premises datacenters and cloud infrastructure. Governance necessitates tracking utilization of storage, network, compute, memory and application usage at server farm level. Data analytics guide appropriate scaling of environment capacity and improve infrastructure provisioning agility. Performance logs enable rapid diagnosis of environment issues before broader business impact.

Security model

Information security governance involves periodic access reviews, vulnerability assessments, patching maintenance, identity management, conditional access policies, traffic inspection and activity monitoring over the SharePoint environment. Security governance helps optimize threat protection, maintain regulatory compliance and respond to incidents through appropriate logging and remediation workflows. Adoption of the security models ties back to organizational data policies.

Roadmap planning

An integrated SharePoint roadmap covering business solutions, infrastructure upgrades and capability integration allows organizations to stay on supported versions while optimizing total cost of ownership. Beyond sustaining platform investments, governance aligned roadmaps reflect strategic priorities, evaluate emerging technologies, guide appropriate adoption and communicate timelines helping lines of business plan information initiatives.

Getting Executive Buy-In

Realizing the promise of enterprise scale SharePoint solutions requires getting executive commitment on governing investments to balance innovation aspirations with risk factors. Governance evangelizing starts with tying policies and processes directly to key business objectives around knowledge sharing, secure collaboration, digital workplaces and intelligent content leverage.

Communicating the benefits of governance

The core value proposition of SharePoint governance includes improved operational continuity through streamlined platform management, reduced risk from existing capability leverage, accelerated time-to-value via templated delivery, and enhanced user experience preserving uniformity. Discussion focuses on protecting existing investments in custom solutions, while allowing them to securely scale to more teams.

Governance touches people, process and technology

Framing governance as an enablement platform spanning technology, processes and people helps executive audiences relate policies to actual business priorities like responsiveness to emergent opportunities, compliance with data regulations and active cost optimization efforts rather than abstract best practice concepts. This linkage accelerates sponsorship.

Start with a pilot governance model

Full governance implementation occurs gradually through incremental foundational development and organizational learning across pilot projects. Starting with a minimal viable model covering basic access policies, content lifecycles and change controls establishes guardrails allowing businesses to launch initial solutions. Incremental expansion occurs through modular charter updates as organizational maturity improves.

Keys to Adoption

Governance processes gain traction through advocacy, reinforcement and continual refinement of policies balancing business needs with operational controls over time. Ultimately success depends entirely on voluntary adherence driving positive outcomes.

Promote governance through training and awareness

Consistent training through multiple learning channels helps stakeholders appreciate the “why” before understanding the “how” of governance policies. Core concepts get introduced when onboarding new platforms along with entry level certifications. Reinforcing governance principles through steady awareness campaigns embeds responsibilities and accountability.

Recognize governance champions

Positive reinforcement of governance wins through internal publications, town halls and informal peer engagements seeds organic propagation of policies throughout the organization. Celebrating the successes of governance contributing teams inspires broader adoption. Knowledge sharing by champions sustains momentum.

Continually refine the governance model

Creating feedback channels allows collecting inputs on enhancements opportunities related to governance policies and procedures. Periodic assessments validate existing controls, identify emerging risks and showcase mitigation approaches. Updates ultimately realign governance to balance new business demands with appropriate constraints. The ability to adapt accelerates compliance at scale.