A: This workshop's findings will need to be discussed with other senior management to determine who will be the ultimate budget and resource approvers. For post-workshop conversations, the deployment roadmap approach figure at the beginning of the chapter provides a visual description of the roadmap for management's understanding, as well as a Gap Analysis. This tool identifies where your organization currently is with its SharePoint deployment, and defined future steps. The following figure is a typical Gap Analysis that shows the current and future states that relate to the organization's technology, people, and processes. It asks two core questions: "Where are we?" and "Where do we want to be?" By asking these questions, management has the opportunity to allocate resources to projects and initiatives, and to identify the gaps between goals and resource allocations.
This tool does involve determining, documenting, and approving the variance between business requirements and current capabilities.
If you wish, the Gap Analysis tool can be used to benchmark your goals with other companies and other assessments. Once the general expectation of performance in the industry is understood, it is possible to compare that expectation with the company's current level of performance.
Another post-workshop tool is a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). The following figure is a SWOT analysis diagram that identifies the four components of the analysis: