So this post is going to be sort of a rant for me. I’ve been using SharePoint since about 2005ish. I’ve been lucky that I’ve landed in a situation where I had the opportunity to try and leverage SharePoint functionality across different team needs. I started this road while working in the Global Public Health arena. Although still applicable, I’ve always thought about SharePoint as a tool for teams that were close to each other. Of course it can support remote teams, but most SharePoint implementations exist within a single company environment. So before I get off topic… I noticed that one of the major problems with remote teams is accountability and accessibility to information. I’m not talking about people slacking and not doing their work – but more about not being able to tell who has done what. The other concern problem is storing all of the relevant information.
How many of you have tried to coordinate a team activity using outlook or your gmail accounts? How often do people use their gmail accounts to store documents? What about details? How often have we saved a conversation in our email just so that we could track it. What about managing of versions of the files? I’m sure we’ve all done this – saving a file with letters and dates at the end of the file name so that you can tell what version it is and who’s worked on it. What about share drives? They are always started with the best of intentions, but they quickly devolve into a nightmare of thousands of disorganized folders with random things. Before you know it reports and baby photos suddenly occupy the same space.
Share drives, using email accounts, file name nomenclatures…….All of these things are steps that people take to try and get real collaboration solutions. What SharePoint gives you is a place to house all of your information. This includes calendar data, agendas, minutes, documents, discussions, photos, decision points from meetings, results of reviews, tasks, multiple versions of files, and even information regarding who edited what file and when.
As a task lead or project manager, keeping track of tasks is difficult. It’s hard to remember what you’ve asked people to do and even harder to remember the exact deadlines. Most people think – well I should be using MS project if I need to manage the tasks in my project. But there’s so much more to managing a project than just that. An unfortunate occurrence in teams is the “slacker”. This is the person who procrastinates on tasks, attempts to delegate and passes blame. Far too often there’s no way to pinpoint the procrastination, but simply implementing a task list in SharePoint creates a mechanism for tracking performance and transparent tracking of that performance.
If your project has multiple processes, sometimes it’s useful to know the status of each process. SharePoint can create the platform to design a mechanism for your processes. You can benefit from instant metrics – status updates and being able to pinpoint where a task is within a process instantly. I think my rant can take a break today – but I intend to continue discussing how the nature of business now requires tools like SharePoint to be effective.