Last week when I was consulting one of my clients I came across a situation that felt to me like a Déjà-vu. The "usual  suspect", someone within an organization with sufficient management influence gets convinced by some Microsoft marketing campaign or other coincidental event that SharePoint and/or ProjectServer is the solution for all problems regarding project and content management within organizations. Licenses are bought and someone from the internal IT installs the software according to some installation manual found in the web. Now, according to Microsoft's marketing campaign the magic should happen! But - nothing happens, no Harry Potter, no Houdini act - just the same usual problems as every time. Congratulations, you just installed another software that will never be used.

Facing the problem
This is a common situation that I face while investigating organization's SharePoint environments. The question I always ask during the analysis phase is: "What is your perfect picture of a work environment?" The answers are always really frightening, because most of the organizations can't describe their dream environment, they only address current problems. This does not surprise me at all, since I realized that the vision of most organizations does not go beyond uploading a file so it can be accessed with acceptable speed by another person within the same organization, neglecting the collaboration and other advanced features that SharePoint and/or Project Server offer. They simply do not know how effective collaboration can be, because they never worked with such an environment before.

Let's face it, the typical employee and manager knows how to work with Excel and is very hesitant to try out anything beyond that.

Solving the problem
As SharePoint and its Ecosystem have tons of functionalities, dropping it at an organization at once mostly results in confusion and refusal. Users prefer to stay with the good, (but) old Outlook-Attachment-Collaboration. This is the moment when intensive consultancy is necessary, to convince the organization of the advantages of SharePoint. It is a real challenge to resell the idea of SharePoint and its benefit for organizations after getting rid of the "auto-magical" features from the SharePoint marketing campaigns. If a SharePoint project fails, one of the main reasons is the incorrect mapping of business needs onto SharePoint features. It requires excellent SharePoint-know-how and - this is really difficult to learn - a quick understanding of how an organization works and what the real problems are that need to be fixed.

Step by step
Just using a small portion of SharePoint like a "Document Library" with its very basic functionality might cover all expectations of the customer at the very beginning. Introducing SharePoint piece by piece to an organization and at the same time prioritizing the "right" pieces from organization's perspective depicts one of the top skills of a SharePoint consultation.
Below you can see a pyramid build out of the different SharePoint features and the time needed to fully grasp how to use them in everyday business scenarios. It is important to introduce every stage step by step. Depending on the organization size it might take a year to fully introduce the out of the box features. And of course not all features are suitable for every organization.

Tell me about the experiences you gained, during the introduction of SharePoint to organizations. Comments are welcome.

I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Author: Michal Sobotkiewicz, SharePoint Specialist - Senior Consultant, PASS Consulting Group

About PASS Consulting Group
Founded in 1981, PASS Consulting Group employs 675 people and has built up a highly respected high growth IT consulting business based on strong project management and integration skills. This means a competitive advantage in terms of productivity.
We strive to improve our customers' competitive strength and productivity by implementing effective business solutions based on the most appropriate new technologies. Our main vertical markets are in the Financial Services, Insurance, Tourism & Travel, Logistics, Telecommunications, Government and IT.
 Our professional working methodology is focused on IT Strategy Consulting as well as the complete set of Integrated Consulting Services: We encompass the entire implementation process and project lifecycle - ranging from studies & analysis, over the development of complete business models to the implementation of individual IT-applications and their introduction to the market.
More information about PASS Consulting Group: www.pass-consulting.com.

Press Contact:
PASS Consulting Group
Jasmin Heim
Junior Marketing Manager
Schwalbenrainweg 24
63741 Aschaffenburg
Germany
Phone 0049 (0) 6021 - 3881 - 231
Jasmin.Heim@pass-consulting.com
www.pass-consulting.com

Pass Consulting Group were Sliver Exhibitors at the European SharePoint Conference 2011. Stay tuned for more information on the next European SharePoint Conference event and keep a look out for more content by joining our community or by following us on twitter or facebook.