A: The business and IT department need to meet and discuss objectives and capabilities. This will take more than an hour. Depending on how large the organization is, the strategy meeting would take at least a day, perhaps two and it would be beneficial to have an outside person with SharePoint expertise facilitate the discussions.
Note
Before embarking on an IT strategy specific to SharePoint, it would be a good idea to understand the capabilities of this technology. Before scheduling any strategy meetings, it's important to understand, at least at a high level, the value that SharePoint brings to an organization, what it takes to achieve this value in terms of time, money, and resources, and also what SharePoint will not solve or fix (such as bad business methodologies).
A typical strategy workshop should cover the following agenda:
Typical agenda for the day would be:
It will cover the following points:
Introductions and objectives
Workshop methodology
It will cover the following points:
Company size and background.
Business drivers — people, processes, and business.
Imperatives and priorities.
How is IT challenged? Are there legal implications and would the legal department need to be involved?
It will cover the following points:
This discussion will cover the following points:
Overview
Availability
Performance
Security
Compliance
Mobility
Application categories
Ownership and control
The following points will be covered:
Projects/initiatives and applications
Cloud
Third parties
Application categories
IT priorities
Risks — security, compliance, performance, availability
Overall profile
Typical agenda for the day would be:
It will cover the following points:
It will cover:
Risks
Budget
Adoption — IT, users, and business units
Political wins
Mapping SharePoint to business needs
Third-party tools and customization
Maximizing impact (cost versus value versus number of people impacted)
Day 2 complete at 5:00 p.m.
During day 2, the group will identify in-scope applications that could be moved to the SharePoint platform, or determine whether to build them or not. This is logged on the priorities register.
Note
During these two days, discussions and actions occur. If decisions cannot be made during these days, they need to be made shortly after this strategy session. If this is a large company, maybe extra days are required.
The result of this could be:
The results of the ranking of the priority register is illustrated in the previous figure and the methodology of the business impact ranking process is illustrated as follows:
Typical agenda for the day would be:
It will cover:
Strategy plan (strategy deployment approach figure)
Table of actions
The following points will be covered:
Overall findings
Outputs
Action plan for 90-day actions
Day 3 complete at 4:00 p.m.
Your SharePoint IT strategy will also need to work in tandem with other existing IT strategies and resources, so it is important that they are synchronized with this strategy session. In addition, the strategy should be shared with other groups within the business such as infrastructure, sales, and marketing, such that they are on the same page in understanding the requirements and potential competing resources.