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Building Your Steering Committee

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Previously the V51 blog has referenced the use of steering committee to help guide the development of intranet programs. This entry hopes to answer some of the common questions we encounter regarding the roles, responsibilities and structure of the typical steering committee.

 

What is a Steering Committee?

A steering committee is a group of specifically chosen individuals that collectively develop a mandate for, and guide the creation of, an intranet program. Most commonly they serve to help recruit departmental resources, approve and structure funding, review and keep on target project deliverables and work to resolve conflict; defusing any political issues that may arise between stakeholders. They may also provide valuable assistance in:

·         identifying project participants, experts and test groups

·         collecting and communicating employee feedback

·         ensuring all business groups are fairly represented

·         reviewing proposed and on-going initiatives

·         identifying governance models, strategies and policies

Remember, your steering committee members should be the champions of your intranet program.

 

Who’s on it?

Steering committees commonly have 6-8 participants which normally include members from various business units and levels of management. Seats are filled based on the requirements of the project and may be rotated as required. It is recommended you include a member from internal marketing, IT and an HR representative. Although difficult, it is highly beneficial to include an officer whenever possible; executive sponsorship helps on-board key people in your enterprise and ensures commitment to the project. Additionally, officers are able to provide a clear understanding of the organization’s strategic plan including previously undisclosed information including where the organization may be heading. Reliable foresight is invaluable when developing your intranet project. The ideal scenario is to engage an officer to serve as Chair of the committee but as scheduling normally makes this impossible it is best, at a minimum, to involve them in all high level decision making.

Particularly where larger organizations are concerned, project management by steering committee is the only truly reliable strategy to avoid many of the missteps organizations take during the development of their intranet programs.

 

Need Help?

For more information on building your steering committee or to speak to an intranet consultant contact us here at V51.

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Getting Social with SharePoint

Friday, November 4th, 2011

Microsoft’s heavy hitting web application platform, SharePoint has taken business communities by storm and continues to dominate the market. Since its release in 2001, SharePoint has evolved as a sort of jack-of-all-trades in the industry, helping businesses with document and content management issues as well as clearing out long standing communication challenges common before the existence of such a powerful platform. SharePoint has made business collaboration beyond easy, but does it have the capacity to help employees connect on a social level? It sure does.

There is no denying the world has been taken by storm by social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These amazingly successful sites have been putting people in touch and connecting folks with like interests globally for years now, but does this sort of social networking have a place in business communities? Absolutely.

Strengthening relationships and making personal connections in the workplace helps push business results; it’s why the last decade has seen an increase in team building activities – people tend to work better when they feel they belong to a bigger community, contributing to common goals. The trouble is,  how do you build these relationships when your company houses five thousand employees or the nature of your business content is too sensitive to risk being  put on a third party social networking site? What you do is use SharePoint.

SharePoint has a plethora of built in functionality for social networking. HR training and good governance are a must but outside that getting started is simple and the great thing about SharePoint’s social networking capabilities is that it uses skill sets that most people already possess. SharePoint has integrated feeds like Facebook, personal profile pages like LinkedIn and status messages with a Twitter format feel. These easy to use features are important when onboarding employees to an internal social networking experience because the bottom line is social networking only works if most everyone can and will use it.

Some features to look forward to in your SharePoint social networking experience:

My Site Profile – Each SharePoint user gets their own My Site page to tell a little about themselves, their work, skills, and current projects.

My Newsfeed – From your site you can create status messages to keep colleagues updated.

Tag and Like Profile Pages – Each user has the capability to tag and like other pages, which are then displayed in a cloud on your site and in colleagues activity feeds.

Blog – SharePoint provides rich blogging functionality for both internal and external posts.

More of a visual learner? Check out this video on how you can make SharePoint’s social networking capabilities work for you http://bit.ly/uLrcgE

Is your SharePoint social networking experience missing something? Contact us here at V51 Consulting and see what a SharePoint Architect can do for you.

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