Governance around SharePoint and Microsoft Teams
Let’s consider that someone in your organisation wants to create a new SharePoint site or Team.
Can they do it themselves? If not, who should do it? Is there an approval process? Does it need to follow a consistent look and feel? Does it need to follow a naming convention? Does it need to be communicated?
As you can see, without these questions answered there are lots of potential routes. That’s why setting governance around these tools is crucial. Governance is a set of rules and guidelines to help keep users on the right track and ensures the tool is actively meeting business needs. It helps everyone understand their roles, who’s accountable for what and the process to follow.
The alternative is to handle each request in an ad-hoc way, which increases the burden on your resources and may not be sustainable. It can also lead to unnecessary Teams and SharePoint sprawl and inconsistencies.
So where to start?
First, it’s a great idea to formulate a Governance Committee. This is a group of users who will meet regularly to discuss governance, issues, feedback and updates to the Governance Plan. It should be a mix of users across the business, including hands-on users and not just senior leaders. It’s the responsibility of the committee to communicate best practice to users and keep them informed of any changes.
Once you’ve assembled your committee, you can then get to work on your Governance Plan. This is a formal document which is an official guideline for all the do’s and don’ts in your Microsoft 365 environment.
There’s no one-size-fits- all in terms of Governance Plans. However, at a minimum, most plans should cover key decisions such as:
Purpose of each tool
You need to be clear what the expectations are around using which tool for which purpose in order to help with user adoption. Users must see the advantage of each tool and how it will make their lives easier.
Ownership authority
What can SharePoint site and Team owners do? Are they the users that can manage creation, deletion and membership? Or are they simply the users who can update a link or a logo?
Security
How is access managed? Is there an approval process?
External Sharing
Can users share documents with external users? Can externals be invited into Teams? What is the process for this?
Consider best practice – such as in SharePoint having a totally separate site for external sharing.
Branding or templates
Does each SharePoint site or Team need to follow a particular structure or be created from a pre-determined template?
It is important to consider whether consistency is important to your organisation and your users. Or if you want to empower each department to put their own stamp on things!
Escalation process
Where are the lines of support? At what stage does support get escalated? And to who?
Use of 3rd party tools
Does your organisation want to stick to “Out-of-the-box” features? Or do you want to allow easy access to 3rd party tools? Consider the security implications of this decision also.
Naming conventions
Do you need to establish a naming convention to be followed for creation of new Teams or SharePoint sites?
Lifecycle management
What happens to a Team or SharePoint site that was created for a specific project? Is it archived when the project is finished?
If there’s no process for lifecycle management, Teams and Sites can float around for years unused.
Retention Policies
Are there any legal obligations you need to meet as a business such as records management?
Think about manual or automatic policies you can enforce to meet these.
As you can see, there’s a lot of decisions to be made to ensure that tools are used not only in a consistent way, but to ensure they meet your specific needs as a business. And this planning stage should happen before any implementation of a solution. If it happens post-implementation, it’s too late and users will already be using the tools and forming habits, making it much harder to change their behaviours.
Reach out if you want more support on forming Governance Plans!