Share Conference April 2013 in Atlanta: Why you should go…

Hi there…

In a couple of weeks from now, I will be heading to the US for the only time this year – to participate in the Share conference in Atlanta. This will be my first US SharePoint conference since early 2011 and I’ll be delivering one of the keynote talks as well as a 1 day workshop.

The Share conference is always a great event, for both its focus (business users and key decision makers) and its execution (via the highly experienced eventful group). There is always a great line-up of speakers and this year, the key topic areas include user adoption, governance, envisioning and developing roadmaps, business process automation, information architecture, training, change management and upgrade planning.

My keynote is on Friday morning and is called SharePoint Governance Home Truths. The synopsis for the talk is:

You might think that after a decade of SharePoint deployments there would be a yellow brick road of best practices that we could follow that would lead to success. Yet for many organizations, SharePoint governance does not exist, or is enshrined in 100-page monster manuals that weigh as much as a door stop, and that no-one will ever read, let alone understand.

While we persist in methods that deliver sub-optimal results, we will continue to deliver those results! You can have all the documentation and process in the world, but will your users adopt your solution? If Information Architecture for SharePoint was as easy as putting together SharePoint building blocks the right way, then why doesn’t Microsoft publish the obvious best practices? Why is success so difficult to achieve, even if your system is rock-solid, stable, well-documented, and processes-defined?

The secret sauce to a successful SharePoint project is an area that governance documentation barely touches. In fact, documentation is rarely the answer, because SharePoint projects typically have certain characteristics that are different than most other IT projects. Therefore, to understand SharePoint governance, one has to understand the nature of the problems SharePoint is deployed to solve, why traditional delivery approaches often fail, and what to do about it.

Lessons:

• The top five reasons SharePoint governance efforts fail
• The reality of how we actually solve new or novel problems
• The one best practice you need before you consider any other SharePoint best practice

I am also really excited to be able to facilitate a pre conference workshop called Aligning SharePoint to Business Goals: Don’t Just Say It, Do It!. I have had a lot of requests to bring more classes to the US, but living in far flung Australia, makes this difficult. So this is your one chance to participate in one of my workshops in the US this year. The synopsis for this workshop is:

It is common to hear consultants wax lyrical about how we have to align SharePoint to business goals. While this and other popular cliches like ‘obtain executive support or ‘obtain user buy-in’ are easy to say, in practice they are much harder to do. After all, if this was not the case, then business goal alignment would not be near the top of the list of SharePoint challenges.

In this workshop, Paul will offer practical guidance, tools, and methods for taming this complex problem. This in-depth workshop will build upon the presentation on ‘SharePoint Governance Home Truths’ and provide a deeper, more detailed focus. Paul will demonstrate how to guarantee that all aspects of SharePoint delivery clearly align to organizational aspirations, ensuring all stakeholder needs are considered and at the same time, creating the understanding and commitment via an inclusive, collaborative approach.

• Why SharePoint belongs to a class of problems that are inherently hard to solve 
• Why aligning organizational goals is hard 
• What to do when organizational goals are unclear 
• How to avoid chasing platitudes 
• Tapping into the wisdom of crowds 
• Structuring and running a great goal alignment workshop 
• Creating a walking deck 
• Building on foundations – next steps

Now if that wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, then how about a discount! If you register for the conference online and use discount code DELEGATE10 to save $300!

Hope to see you there…

Paul