SharePoint Governance – people teams, roles and responsibilities
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SharePoint Teams?
We've talked about introducing SharePoint Governance and now we want to focus on the people part. The nature of any dynamic environment is a mixture between short terms (day-to-day) and long terms (strategy and vision). There should be a clear separation between strategical actions (where to go) and Tactical actions (How to do). SharePoint environments will be managed by two teams: a strategy team and a tactical team. Regardless of what name we ascribe to these teams, they will play distinct roles and have distinct responsibilities. For the purposes of this governance plan, the teams are defined as shown below.
Strategy Team
This team consists of appropriate business owners willing to provide strategic insight and direction for the portal, and able to drive strategic initiatives into their respective organizations. Resources represent a good balance between business and IT, and also centralized control vs. decentralized empowerment. This team is a small, living team reconstructed on a quarterly basis with new volunteers to maintain a fresh perspective on the business and exploit the collective wisdom of the company.
They would seek answers to the following:
- How do we improve business processes and how do we deliver on that?
- What structures need to be in place to deliver this value?
- What areas of the business offer the most opportunity for growth?
- How can we align our activities with the goals of the business?
- Are there synergies that can be created between divisions and departments?
- What groups are doing similar initiatives and how can we help?
- What ways can we reduce inefficiencies and duplication?
Tactical Team
The tactical team consists of three sub teams all charged with supporting the directives of the strategy team: Operations, Support, and Development. The figure below shows the relationship between the operation and the solution building handover. This will help to understand what are the reasons of dividing the teams into these three teams.
Operations Team
Infrastructure (IT) resources provide operational support for the system as they help to ensure the enforcement of the governance plan and manage the more routine maintenance of the system by performing nightly backups, usage monitoring and analysis, scheduled task validation, and keeping the system current with security releases and system upgrades.
This team will be responsible for:
Backup: This will include SharePoint, IIS and SQL.
Monitoring: System and Services
Security and System Updates: such as service packs and SharePoint cumulative updates.s
Software Installations and Deployment: such as I-filters, adapters, and drivers.
Support Team
SharePoint site owners, plant system administrators, help desk personnel, and other various support resources create an effective support system with proper channels of escalation for end users of the SharePoint environments. This team handles application questions, bugs, and other problems requiring issue resolution.
Development Team
Technically talented people both willing and able to customize, personalize, and use SharePoint in a manner that fulfils the business opportunities as identified by the strategy team. This team is a loosely-knit community of developers with varying degrees of proficiency in software development. Members can range from highly skilled programmers to technically savvy end users in charge of personalizing departmental team sites. Skilled developers will handle large change requests, new features, and program management while ensuring adherence to standards.
Read next: about SharePoint Governance - Individual Roles and Responsibilities