One person cannot successfully deploy SharePoint enterprise-wide. This is not an opinion – it is a fact, because unlike other software that may be released with the push of a button, SharePoint is a collaborative platform that requires more than one person’s involvement to be successfully implemented.
If you are considering SharePoint for your enterprise, organization, or department, you will need to involve many people across several teams. You’ll need to involve IT at some point, so a developer (DBA) or SQL Architect should be included in the planning (depending on if you’re choosing on-premises, online only, or a hybrid platform). You will need a sponsor for SharePoint implementation to act as a cheerleader for the project, and a project lead to work through the taxonomy, governance strategy, etc.
Every SharePoint site needs a designer or administrator to set up the branding and templates, and to keep the big picture in mind. They will work with the business analysts for other teams (more people who should be identified early in the process) to ensure new user requests and business requirements don’t break agreed-upon processes. If there is existing data to be ported to the new SharePoint site, a content owner for migrations should be identified, to ensure obsolete or duplicate material isn’t uploaded. Those content owners should also be subject matter experts, or know whom to speak with if they have content-related questions. That’s even more people to include!
Speaking of questions, users will have quite a few, so you’ll need to identify who will manage end user training! Also consider if those trainers will be responsible for continuing SharePoint related Q&A, or if long-term coaches will need to be identified. I promise, there will be ongoing questions, because end users will not intuitively understand how to use SharePoint. It’s not meant to be highly intuitive, as I’ve said before.
So, assuming you’ve identified all those people to involve and you aren’t trying to manage it all by yourself, there’s still one more group to consider before rolling out the SharePoint site. Users. Users who are broken into the default SharePoint groups of site owners, members, and viewers. If you don’t have users actually engaging with your SharePoint site (again, and I can’t stress this enough, a collaborative platform), then it’s a failure from the start – and no one wants that. SharePoint implementation is a team effort, not something one superhero can manage on their own.
Not even you.
