Using SharePoint, organizations should to be leveraging every
asset they have as effectively as possible. This means investing
time and resources to make sure users are fully utilizing the
functions made available to them; especially the capabilities that
can help them more productive and meets their objectives.

As a SharePoint evangelist and creator of ‘platform governance’,
it will be impossible to get individuals to embrace the technology
without their buy-in and support. User Adoption starts and
continues with communication, training leading to governance
policies relating to platform governance; in other words, creating
effective service delivery of SharePoint solutions that are
available to the users.

Therefore, a great way to get things started is to enlist aid
from the business – and I will call them SharePoint Champions.

SharePoint champions are great “middlemen” between end users and
IT Support. By providing them with more training and educating them
on how to fix common issues, we can reduce the amount of help
needed by IT and allow common problems to be solved at the
department level. This will drive adoption within departments, and
bring organizations closer to achieving the goals that drove their
investment in SharePoint.

These individuals understand how the organization operates, what
kind of information challenges are prevalent in their respective
functions and key pain points of their peers. They are not gurus in
SharePoint; they are not technical, rather, they are prepared to
discuss, propose and help make decisions concerning the future of
SharePoint sites. Therefore, a SharePoint Champion is an individual
who sees the advantage of using SharePoint and finds ways to use
SharePoint in new and advanced ways in order to produce better
results and help move the organization forward.

Some points about being a SharePoint Champion:

• They understand business operations, are not SharePoint
  technical gurus!
• They come from various facets of the organization. It’s great
  to have a group of different areas of the company together who are
  themselves end-users.
• Are aware of the overall basic strategy, support and evangelize
  SharePoint best practice for the organization.
• They are ‘elected’ by their line managers to be a SharePoint
  Champion based on the above; this immediately plants the seeds for
  user adoption.
• Have the benefit of increased SharePoint knowledge; this will
  benefit all SharePoint information workers in making them
  continually productive when working in SharePoint.

Grown into the organization, SharePoint Champions can
additionally be seen as responsible figures; acting as initial
points of contact with the user; and aiding communication of issues
to the helpdesk. They could cover an area of ‘content on a site’
best practice and governance. This means that could be assigned
general admin rights sites content.

• Administration of content
• Manage users; what roles should users have and how to secure
  information
• Manage of respositories and sites
• Basic branding and customization of repositories
• Basic understanding of user profile information and areas My
  Site areas concerning tagging, notes, organization charts
• Design using a business process through basic wireframing and
  documenting user ideas.
• Cascade training of their peers; provision of training
  information relevant to the sites they cover.

Creating SharePoint Champions begins with your SharePoint
sponsors helping you identify them, then getting buy-in from their
line managers through workshops with their teams.

Managing SharePoint Champions is a continual event which
requires that they meet regularly to confer with each other, bring
up points of interest, business issues that require a SharePoint
solution (which are linked to the overall strategy). Consider also
setting up a centralised site for SharePoint Champions which should
include training materials, information concerning enterprise tools
which they have access to and links to policies concerning
Governance, Acceptable Use, and Statements of Operations, etc.

User Adoption in SharePoint is not a given. The successful
development and implementation of User Adoption in SharePoint
requires the intersection of several factors, namely the business
and organizational changes, the compatibility between the desired
tasks and the tasks, and the appeal to the users. SharePoint
Champions can be a very useful method of helping obtain those
goals.

Nb. This and more information concerning the method of building
a SharePoint champion forum is in my forthcoming book, more to
follow!

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