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SMB Business Transformation Best Practices

Taking your Organization to the Next level using Office 365

Initial Customer Briefing and Intake Worksheet

Copyright © 2013 SP Marketplace

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

ABOUT SP MARKETPLACE www.spmarketplace.comSP Marketplace (SharePoint Marketplace) is a provider of software applications that drives higher organizational productivity using Microsoft SharePoint. SP Marketplace offers application templates, web parts and branding solutions designed for SharePoint on premise and Office 365 SharePoint Online Cloud implementations. These templates include IT Help Desk, CRM, Intranet Portal, Project and Employee Self Service applications.

SP Marketplace, through its unique “Application Provisioning” approach offers a cost effective business solution approach for small to medium businesses who wish to use the SharePoint platform.

Microsoft Office 365™ and SharePoint™ are registered trademarks Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.All other brand, company, and product names are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks that are the sole property of their respective owners.

Any comments relating to the material contained in this document may be submitted to:SP Marketplace17319 Penn Valley DrivePenn Valley, CA 95946

or by email to: [email protected]

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Contents

INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................................2

INTRANET DESIGN STRUCTURE IN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR ORGANIZATION................4Best Practice 1: Leverage Re-Usable Templates “As-Is” as much as possible....................................5Best Practice 2: Single Platform, Single Sign-on, Consistent User Interface and Processes...............5Best Practice 3: An Intranet structure in the context of the organization.........................................7Best Practice 4: Intranet Home Page Design Principles.....................................................................8Best Practice 5: Centralize Employee Self-Service & Request Handling............................................9Best Practice 6: Deploy a consistent department site design.........................................................10Best Practice 7: Apply the right resources; create a Virtual Team..................................................11Best Practice 8: Understand Limitations of SharePoint, Customizations, and Team.......................13Best Practice 9: Ongoing content and function to the project........................................................13

SP MARKETPLACE BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION SERVICES – DELIVERING BEST PRACTICES.................................................................................................................................................14

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Introduction

Congratulations on your decision to take your organization to the next step in Cloud-based computing with “Integrated Business Automation” provided by SP Marketplace Business Suite - that builds on and extends Microsoft SharePoint and Office-365 from “simple office automation” to “business process automation and collaboration across your organization”.

SP Business Suite is all about leveraging the Microsoft Office platform and SharePoint (in the cloud or on premise) as a common platform which makes it easier and more intuitive for your employees to collaborate and access internal services within the organization. The process of implementation is about digitizing and placing your “live and ever changing” corporate info, knowledge, documents, and processes into a central structure for fast, consistent, and easy access by your employees in order to:

Increase Employee and Partner satisfaction, effectiveness, and productivity by allowing them to spend more time on core business activities and less on internal administrative activities.

Help the company overcome natural obstacles to growth that require more effective ways of sharing and finding information related to a series of common and core activities central to: IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, Projects, Training, etc.

Take your company to the next level of secure, role-based shared organization that satisfies legal, regulatory, quality control, or even customer satisfaction requirements.

As such, this transformation typically involves reviewing previously manual information dissemination, informal business processes, disparate storage and application silo’s and mapping them into a central business automation platform resource that makes it far easier for employee’s (and partners, etc) to find secure information when/where they need it and to interact with each other and various internal service organizations without any hiccups. This enables the company to scale up gracefully in size and across many offices and geographies.

Ironically, this option was too cost prohibitive to be within the reach of many small to medium businesses – at the time when they need it most. Until now – with the advent of Office-365’s per-User cloud pricing and the advent of SMB targeted business application suites such as ours. It’s an exciting time to blow the roof off your competition and growth limitations without breaking the bank (via IT + software + hardware costs)!

Having the technology in hand, however, is only 1 part out of 3 essential components for your successful company rollout.

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The other two: namely, process capture (mapping from manual to automated SharePoint workflows) and people (by getting your team on board with a new way of thinking about and interacting with business information “assets”) are probably even more essential to TRANSFORM your business velocity, reach, and potential.

This document is designed to set the tone, set expectations, and provide you a brief outline of what to expect going forward to achieve these aims. It also is used to gather initial information to use for our first meeting.

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Intranet Design Structure in the context of your organization

It probably comes as no surprise that many organizations share the same drivers for having an internal employee intranet that are not unique to your organization. The most common drivers for having an intranet include (but are not limited to) these:

Intranet DriversImage credit: Worldwide Intranet Challenge website

Because of this, you can leverage many of the best practice features and structure with a cost-saving template approach – as found with SP Marketplace Business Suite - to laying out an intranet structure that works for your organization.

The trick, however, is to make all this information and feature set conveniently available to all employees. By following a few well established “Best Practices” in Design and Structure, we can more easily and quickly achieve just that – which naturally drives high user adoption – the key to gaining the most return for your investment.

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Best Practice 1: Leverage Re-Usable Templates “As-Is” as much as possible

Our business suite is based on re-usable templates that have been designed with the objective of meeting most of the requirement of organizations with 50 – 2000 employees. Remember that they are not designed to meet every one of your requirements, rather to accelerate your deployment by delivering 80-95% of the functionality and allowing you to add the other 5-20%.

By having carefully reviewed requirements of hundreds of organizations like yours already, we have identified the most commonly asked for lists and document libraries organized into “bite-sized” feature rich sites backed by simple business process automation that is easy to setup (by our team) and manage (by your team). This means you will get a lot of generally useful functionality and form (user interface and sites) out of the box at a significant cost and time savings that have already been fine-tuned with lots of real-world user experience already. Also, each module uses a consistent design for site and portal layout, and common processes such as service request management and management approvals. So you start with a standard design and architecture that will make use more intuitive for your employees.

Therefore, our advice to you is to try to adopt as much of the modules out-of-box functionality matched to your organizational (department) needs as possible. This will speed deployment customizations and maximize the risk of problems down the road.

It also gives your organization exposure time to adapt to the more streamlined “out-of-the-box” business process solutions early on, allowing you to gauge its usefulness “as-is” before deciding how you want to tweak it later (possibly with more consulting help).

The core templates offer initial approval workflows that work for many organizations most of the time. The approvers are typically looked up in departmental lists, so that the approvers can be changed over time. The workflow logic and columns of data captured during the workflow process can be altered to accommodate your particular requirements.

Then, when your employees and managers get familiar with the existing processes, you can take the time to try more advanced changes to the process to fit your particular company needs later on.

Best Practice 2: Single Platform, Single Sign-on, Consistent User Interface and Processes

Many organizations tend to ignore the employee challenges of using corporate services. This occurs by allowing departments to grow their systems organically - letting each department choose their service application(s) independently of other departments. This produces a silo’ed application nightmare - with each employee needing to learn and sign-in separately to access the each application that the organization has to offer.

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Employee View of Many Silo’ed Departmental Applications

Try to remember the employee challenges when interacting with this model; each department tends to have different:

Applications with different types of sign-ons and passwords Ways to request services (help desk) Business Processes/approval-chains to handle requests/processes Communicate announcements, alerts and procedures Documents and ways to store, structure, and find them

But, by replacing or wrapping many silo’ed applications with a single platform, SharePoint and Office-365 as the shared platform of choice, together with a single, common intranet portal website with common service request links and common processes and response lookups, you make it much easier for your employees to find, learn, and conduct business with the many facets of your organization. Also, their managers can also consolidate approval processes rather than having to use multiple systems.

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A Single Point-of-Entry & Platform for Employee Information and Services(with a consistent interface carry over from familiar MS-Office look and feel)

One advantage of moving towards a more integrated module architecture is that employees can easily bridge from information and process in one module (department) to another. For instance, linking data across applications like CRM and Project Management allows sales organizations to see all projects by Account, and share service staff scheduling across the team. Contracts, proposals and other documents can be attached to Opportunities and Customer Accounts. Support or service cases can be linked to Accounts so your reps will never be surprised by bad news again when walking into an account. Or HR can track required certifications across to the training site. Additionally, when employees access department portals, or service portals, the portal layout and general content types is consistent across departments.

Furthermore, when the time comes to consider linking SharePoint applications with external systems such as accounting, payroll systems or other back office application – it can be done in a reasonable timeframe with third party solutions.

Thus, the whole solution provides greater value for your users than the sum of the individual parts.

Best Practice 3: An Intranet structure in the context of the organization

By modeling the website structure and service layers in the context organization that it seeks to serve and providing user-relevant navigation and views, employees find it intuitive and natural to locate information and services relevant to their job. Often we walk into organizations that have tried to setup their Intranet Structure only to find little user adoption. This is often because the structure is based on

the old department approach requiring each employee to traverse from department to department team site to find what they are looking for.

Intranet and Employee Services modeled after Organization Structure

(with user relevant navigation choices)

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We have found that if you design the structure in service layers – a home page as the gateway, employee central services and then departments, it is more intuitive for employees and managers. Often in department centric organizations, employee and there managers are forced to go to different department sites to make a request or perform a business process. This structure also forces the employee’s manager who is often an approver to also get to multiple department sites to approve requests. Using the service layer approach an Employee Services Portal houses all of the frequently used business processes (example: Time-off, Expenses, Purchase Requests etc), approval workflows and manager approval screens. Also it contains a central help desk function to allow employees to request (and see status) of services to any department in a central portal.

Department specific resources (documents, forms, procedures and knowledgebase) can reside at the department portal level.

Best Practice 4: Intranet Home Page Design Principles

Your gateway to the new structure is your Home page. It is important that it is intuitive and provides the right level of information and resources in the right place. Trying to jam everything into one page can be overwhelming. Or putting too little content that does not change can be just as bad.

Use the Intranet Home page to bring fresh, changing information to the forefront that is worthy of employees attention.

Utilize the real-estate of space effectively without clutter. Put the changing content like news feeds, announcements, events or discussions in center

with sides providing one-click links to the most useful services and information for the employee (employee directory, policies, FAQ etc.)

Add informational links and widgets that help the employee with useful and interesting information like weather, stock ticker, polls etc.

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Let it be the single click gateway to the rest of the structure through well designed navigation.

Also, a very important part of the intranet is look and feel. The home page as well as the rest of the sites in the structure need to reflect the branding of the organization. The logo, and brand colors should be applied. We recommend against using the standard SharePoint look, but rather apply a template which makes it feel closer to a website than a platform.

An important note on the Intranet Home page is to remember it is targeted at internal employees, not your customers. Therefore while it needs to look good, the main focus is access to content and resources not creating the most beautiful website in the world. Often when marketing people are put in charge of the Intranet, they miss this point!

Best Practice 5: Centralize Employee Self-Service & Request Handling

By providing one place for the employee to go to find and send new requests, and by providing a common place to see the status and results of those requests with common look and feel, the employee can more quickly find, interact with, and get results – all translating into job satisfaction and productivity.

First provide a “Help Central” portal where employees can request services of any department in a consistent way, and see the status of existing requests. That will cut down on time consuming phone calls and follow-ups. Whether the request is of IT, HR or Marketing, the employee can be confident the request is being addressed and tracked.

Second, provide a service portal for frequently used business processes. And a consistent way for approval processing by managers to take place. The most frequently used requests belong in the ESS (Employee Self Service) – for such things as:

Time-off Requests

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Expense Report submissions, Time Sheets Room & Resource reservation, etc

Finally use common approaches to managing approvals. Try to standardize management approval approaches as much as possible. This will make it easier and more intuitive for managers to approve requests.

Best Practice 6: Deploy a consistent department site design

Design department sites and portals with a common layout, consistent interface and functions. Start with a consistent template which includes:

A service request (help desk) function Site design that separates the department staff and confidential department content from

employees. Team resources like a team calendar, schedule, discussion board, task tracking and

document libraries Add Department specific lists, libraries and dashboard (some modules like IT and HR already

have these) An employee portal that provides access to their (filtered to the employee) content, and

generally available reference documents, forms and links.

Each department has a site template design which provides two views; one for the employee visiting the department for resources and services, and one for the department staff to conduct their internal department business. This design allows a department to provide self-service to the employee, while allowing department staff a secure confidential area for internal department content. Access is controlled with a redirect to the appropriate site depending on your role – employee or department staff.

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If the employee is in a group role that pegs them as a service staff employee for that particular department (HR in this case) they would see a screen with many more options to service the request and access the common site resources and team collaborations to assist them:

Best Practice 7: Apply the right resources; create a Virtual Team

A major pre-requisite to success is to appoint someone to be responsible or an owner for the application. Obviously this is not a full time job, but just someone to focus on learning the platform (SharePoint) and the application. This person does not have to be a skilled IT technician, just a tech savvy business user. The level of knowledge is that of a business power user. We have a free curriculum available on our site that can train you in a matter of hours - go to http://www.spmarketplace.com/power-user-training.html.

After over 400 implementations we have found this to be the single defining factor between success and failure. Even if you are an IT veteran (the “I know databases, this should be easy!”), know that SharePoint is not like a database, not a program, it is very different, so take the short amount of time to learn it. Once you do you will be amazed at what it can do.

To reiterate the point above, SMBs don’t have the luxury of hiring a team to build and manage an intranet. So as in most challenges, they need to be creative. What we have found to work is to create a virtual Intranet Team with representatives from multiple areas of the company.

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This team not only guides the development of the Intranet, but also ongoing management. As in most SMBs these team members probably already where multiple hats in their roles, and this is another. We suggest the following part-time (not their main job) roles for this team:

Executive Sponsor – a senior executive who has responsibility for internal services such as IT, HR, Accounting, etc. Titles include CFO, COO or CIO.

Application Administrator – not a techie, but preferably a business analyst type. They should be trained as a SharePoint Power Business User (see our suggested curriculum). In the event of not being available or not adequate training, you can lean on the services of the SP Best Practice Business consultant to span the gap of this resource while mentoring someone in your organization to carry the project beyond the initial implementation and rollout.

Department Managers – These are managers who are responsible for the business operation of a department or group. They should have knowledge of the business processes the department uses and are the key to department site deployment. They will make decisions about what functionality is used or needed in their portal/site.

Department Content Administrators – These are staff who are responsible for the content on the site, announcements, event calendars, etc. You should plan to have one for the top Intranet Portal, and one for each department. These may be administrative personnel.

Technical Resource (IT Admin) – typically someone from IT, perhaps the same person responsible for the Office 365 platform administration. This role will perform technical work such as data migration, permissions management, etc.

On an ongoing basis the most important role above, is the Application Administrator. They should play the “owner” role, responsible for making sure there is ongoing work being done to keep the Intranet “fresh.” Most important is for the Administrator to have at least a power user knowledge of SharePoint Online. We are not talking about deep knowledge, but rather the level of knowledge an Excel power use might have. Here is an example curriculum for a SharePoint Power User training. The Intranet Administrator should have a good overall picture of the status of the different sites, and should coordinate the virtual team.

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The second key role is that of the Content Administrator(s). The biggest reason for Intranet Failure is stale content. This is where this role plays and it can be overwhelming if you don’t break up the responsibilities into departments or sub sites. Each department probably has an employee portal which needs to have the latest announcements, documents, links, etc. By delegating content responsibility to each department, then chances are content will be kept up to date across the entire site collection.

The team itself should meet at least monthly to review activity, user acceptance and issues with the Intranet. Also, the team can plan new phases of features/functions which can be implemented over time. The executive sponsor should play a key role in setting organization expectations and planning around budget. Finally the technical resource should keep the team updated on new opportunities to use technology to the organizations advantage in the Intranet Portal.

By using a virtual team your Intranet Portal can be a success during implementation and ongoing.

Best Practice 8: Understand Limitations of SharePoint, Customizations, and Team

As part of the preliminary expectations of this project, you should understand what SharePoint can and cannot do. Like any platform it has its limitations. If you work within those limitations, you will succeed. But remember, it runs on the web, but it is not your typical HTML site. It is not a database.

When managing your SharePoint environment it is important to consider constraints on volume for SharePoint lists and libraries. For SharePoint Online users, it becomes even more important as SharePoint Online does not offer the same control as SharePoint On-Premises (i.e., Query Throttling).

Once the number of items in a list is over a few thousand the performance of not only that list, but the entire site can be affected. It is at this point that you may want to consider using column-based indexing to speed up particular view queries (see Microsoft SharePoint documentation online).

Likewise, there is default view limit for SharePoint lists and libraries that should be observed. Once this limit has been reached you can face filtered views failing, as well as other risks.

And finally, it should be recognized that your employees and staff can only endure so much change at any one time – so it is prudent to limit the number of new process changes that you expect them to adapt to at one time. It is best to move existing manual processes into SharePoint as a first step before replacing them all with highly advanced processes all in one fell swoop.

Best Practice 9: Ongoing content and function to the project

Implementing an Intranet structure is very different from your external website. After over 300 implementations of our SP Intranet Portal, we have gained some insight on success factors. With an Intranet, there should never be an emphasis on marketing, PR, and over glorious graphics. Its

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mission is much different—to facilitate the quickest possible access to information, collaboration and tools to help your employees do their job.

As we have covered in previous articles in this series, a successful Intranet implementation may start with the right technology platform (example: Office 365) and the right structural design, but its ongoing success relies on a commitment from the organization for staff resources to keep it running. In small to medium businesses this can be a challenge. These organizations do not have the budgets or staff available to commit exclusively to the Intranet.

To realize the return on investment from an Intranet implementation, you need to:

Have executive support for the ongoing project Keep the content updated and create new content on a regular basis at all levels continuously review and add new business automation processes Make sure you are taking advantage of new software releases, plug-ins, best practices (read the SP Marketplace Newsletter for any update information)

Quite simply you can put all the work in initially only to see diminishing returns through lack of attention.

SP Marketplace Business Transformation Services – Delivering Best Practices

SP Marketplace Business Transformation Services, provide your organization with the Road-map, Implementation Plan, and SMB Best Practices to realize the full potential of the Office 365 Platform using SP Business Suite. After over 300 implementations we have learned what works and what does not in transforming your business to realize the full potential of the cloud. Putting in SP Business Suite templates is not the solution, but really is the accelerated start of realizing the productivity from leveraging Office 365 fully.

Learn more about SP Marketplace Business Transformation Services at: http://www.spmarketplace.com/business-consulting.html

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