Once SharePoint has been
successfully deployed on your server, it’s important to identify and delegate
ongoing maintenance tasks to the appropriate end users to avoid a bottleneck
and ensure steady site growth. From daily uploads to data management on
organization-wide sites, these tasks should be clearly defined well in advance
to ensure everything runs smoothly when implemented.
Ongoing
Maintenance vs. Change Requests
Any changes to a SharePoint server
should be handled by change requests which are appropriately processed and
analyzed by systems managers. A change request can come from anyone in the
organization and should be the only way that customizations or changes to any
site are made. Without a good change request process in place, sites would
either stop growing and become less useful to the organization or would spiral
out of control and quickly become unmanageable.
Ongoing maintenance tasks, on
the other hand, are routine tasks that can be performed without a change
request. They are often small tasks that must be performed every day, week or
month and can therefore be scheduled and approved well in advance, reducing the
work load on administrators who must constantly oversee new change requests.
Examples
of Ongoing Maintenance Tasks
An ongoing maintenance task can
be anything that is completed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This
includes the uploading of a weekly memo to a site, deletion of data more than X
months old or adding figures to a chart at the end of each quarter. These tasks
are recurring and therefore built into the plan for a given site and won’t need
approval every time they are completed.
Ongoing maintenance tasks are
what keep each site relevant and useful to the organization and should
therefore be delegated to appropriate end users to ensure they are completed on
a regular basis. They should always be planned well in advance, before
deployment so the workflow can be established before any sites are created.
By planning maintenance tasks
in advance, it is possible to spread responsibility within a department and
reduce the workload on a single person which could slow down nearly everyone
involved and diminish the usefulness of a site. By having multiple people
responsible for small ongoing maintenance tasks, you’ll get the most possible
out of your sites.
Of course, you will want one
individual who oversees the distribution of ongoing maintenance tasks and who
follows up to ensure they are completed on time and accurately, but that person
should not be solely responsible for actually completing these tasks.
Planning
Site Deployment
As you can see, even deployment
of a single site requires careful advance planning. Procedures must be put in
place to manage and process change requests, while simultaneously recognizing
ongoing maintenance tasks that can be delegated to end users.
When done properly, this allows
a site to continue growing and stay true to its original purpose. While not the
only detail that needs to be planned in advance, the delegation of ongoing maintenance tasks is one of the most important when
planning a new site.
About the Author
Greg
Winterhalter is the Executive Vice President of EPM Solutions, an enterprise
project portfolio management and collaboration solutions company specialized in
Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint.
EPM
Solutions is ISO 9001:2008 certified, and one of INC 500|5000 Fastest Growing
Private Companies in America. It serves medium to large organizations such as
Cisco, Boeing and US Navy.
