Using SharePoint for Your Workflow Management to Be in Full Sail

In the life of any midsized company, there comes the moment when day-to-day workflows start to slip from its employees’ attention, and this is a disturbing sign they actually need to be structured. That’s not an easy moment as in a split second the dilemma arises: to choose a complex and expensive workflow management tool or to stay with the familiar, cost-effective and agile email? What to do if your email-based system turns to be exhausted but custom solutions are too complex? Let SharePoint be your ship captain to bring you to the right decision.

Sinking in the email ocean

Not so long ago, email was the only way of corporate communication. Even now employees use emails heavily. Actually, there is no need to dump it. Email systems are known to be our reliable partners delivering information non-stop. Moreover, using email doesn’t require any specific programming skills or investments.

So we can easily do with email only until our email boxes become rather similar to an uncontrollable whirlpool when it comes to more complex processes. We should admit that email is quite inadequate to handle sophisticated workflows. It doesn’t allow to track workflows in their entirety or define their status of completeness, as well as get back to their previous stages. 

A cruiser in the river

Wishing to break free from this email slavery, we enter the world of diverse enterprise systems, which provide rich functionality and are claimed to handle processes of any scope.

On the one hand, complex solutions are really efficient owing to their wraparound character. Having some innovative software on board, you can use it like a magic stick to deal with a huge amount of data, to follow thoroughly every stage of your workflows and employees’ performance, to get comprehensive reporting.

On the other hand, any enterprise system should be thoroughly tailored. No complex solution can be deployed without assistance. Thus you need to plan extra investments to hire external consultants and developers.

However, even having extra forces on board doesn’t guarantee bright results. Complex solutions usually require strict, built-in workflow logic that can be different to the one you are using. This can lead to a workflow slowdown or even a workflow break (e.g. when the system requests data that you don’t have).

The end of such an implementation looks sad as your workflow ship becomes a huge luxury cruiser in the river that risks to run aground. Having made a brave step forward toward the innovation, you would be cruelly pushed back to renew that close email or Excel friendship.

Riding workflow waves

When email is no more capable to cover your workflow management needs and specialized software leads your business to even more difficulties, SharePoint is what can show you a good way out of this puzzle. On the IT market since 2001, SharePoint proved its effectiveness many times as a first-aid workflow kit for midsized companies. Though not a universal solution, SharePoint can still accommodate your individual workflows when customized either by in-house developers or external IT consultants.

As a web application, SharePoint doesn’t tie users to PCs as it’s also available on mobile devices. An integral part of Office 365, SharePoint Online can be a great solution for Cloud advocates. A special Workflow Manager add-in for SharePoint developed by ScienceSoft is another useful tool to manage workflows on your site. It allows users to see the list of website workflows, filter lists by name or workflow instances by status and definition name, to resume and suspend workflow instances, to view error notifications, etc.

Heading for procurement

To illustrate how SharePoint helps all the involved departments, we use the example of procurement workflows. Unless your company is among those relying heavily on procurement, such as large retail, wholesale, construction or manufacturing players with complex workflows, SharePoint can streamline your processes to let you reduce expenses as well as save your employees’ valuable time.

FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION OF SHAREPOINT FOR PROCUREMENT WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT

Features	Email	SharePoint	Specialized procurement system
Automated procurement order (PO) creation & approval	A user can only send a PO to a supplier	A user can create PO templates; create POs and approve the manually after the system sends a notification	A PO can be created and approved automatically
Vendor management	A user contacts a vendor manually, subject to human errors	The system notifies workflow participants when communication is needed	Multiple VM tools are available (vendor information monitoring, vendor assessment and comparison, vendor performance evaluation, etc.)
Financial settlement & reporting	No financial or reporting mechanisms available	Users can audit the documenting lifecycle: user actions, document changes history, etc.	The system provides built-in financial and reporting tools
Automatic notifications	To notify, a user sends an email manually; calendar appointments are available	Once enabled, automatic notifications assist you at every stage of an internal workflow	Internal and external notifications are possible (e.g. automatic tender notifications)
Shared document storage	Documents can be only attached to an email and saved in any folder on a user’s PC or server	Users are able to create, store, share documents and folders with relevant colleagues	Sophisticated information sharing based on roles and business rules

The table above shows us strong automation capabilities offered by a specialized system. However, an enterprise solution requires a very strict compliance with built-in workflow structures and does not allow its users to skip any of the workflow steps.

We can add some other explicit characteristics, which highlight SharePoint advantages as compared with specialized systems:

• Simplicity – SharePoint is easy to use. Neither difficult trainings for users, nor external consultants’ help are required.
• Flexibility – SharePoint enables users to be more flexible when following a workflow. No strict rules are imposed to successfully fulfill the process. 
• Total cost – SharePoint offers moderate pricing as compared with any specialized system (taking into consideration licenses, implementation and customization price).

SharePoint assists its users throughout workflows. Even if the system depends on human actions, it enables users to follow their personalized processes and doesn’t let them forget about any step included in the workflow.

A short implementation period is not to be left aside. A fully functional complex system requires a considerable amount of time (1+ year) to be implemented. Are you ready to wait so long before your workflows get adjusted? With SharePoint workflows can be set much quicker (just in 2-4 weeks).

Sharepoint on board

By implementing SharePoint workflows, you opt for a smooth management of your business processes. SharePoint’s flexibility and user-friendly interface will allow employees to continue working in the familiar Windows environment, staying focused on accomplishing business tasks, not on system requirements or limitations. SharePoint will be your workflow companion to protect you from a workflow chain rupture and assist you at all stages.

Our SharePoint consulting team is always ready to answer your questions and help you get the most of your SharePoint site.

This article originally appeared on ScienceSoft Blog and has been republished with permission.

by Sergei Golubenko via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Crossing departmental borders with a SharePoint collaboration site

Developing a SharePoint-based solution for content or workflow management, companies take lesser risks of its poor adoption as it’s about helping users to manage their daily duties. Sleek performance, easy navigation and integration with enterprise systems can usually ensure the solution’s buy-in.

But as soon as a company decides to implement SharePoint for collaboration needs, there comes a waterfall of challenges. What is more important: interface or functionality? Which features are necessary? How to retain users’ satisfaction? How to ensure cross-departmental collaboration and engage specialists from different departments? The questions swarm around SharePoint and make the project’s prospects hazy.

To address these challenges, we suggest considering the concept of a dedicated SharePoint collaboration site as the key to successful collaboration and knowledge generation.

Why a collaboration site?

One of the common mistakes causing SharePoint failure usually lies in the initially incorrect approach to developing a collaboration solution. Non-customized out-of-the-box tools have no chances to gain users’ affection and incite employees to actively use them. A fruitful collaboration can only exist in the heart of a forum-like full-fledged solution, such as a SharePoint collaboration site that serves as:

A single source of information. A site allows to perform tasks via a unified collaboration platform and share valuable information with colleagues instead of just storing it on PCs, in the cloud or even on paper. It also enables employees to accumulate important work-related information in one location and reuse it at any time.

A corporate knowledge base. A collaboration site gives the opportunity to broaden a corporate knowledge base that can be used to accumulate data on a company’s current activities, to conduct market research on new business areas and opportunities, as well as to educate new team members in order to facilitate and shorten their introduction period.

A unified discussion hub. A site is a great tool that enables employees to instantly discuss business issues without disrupting their personal timetables with lengthy meetings. Posted opinions and ideas will never be lost and can be revised or elaborated further whenever a team needs it.

At the same time, to achieve success while using a SharePoint collaboration site, you will face three major challenges: to manage large volumes of content, to assign user roles and to win employees’ loyalty to the site.

Taming the content

As the concept of a collaboration site is built around publishing information, employees will have to deal with large amounts of content. The site should offer the possibilities to easily publish new materials and to sift it out in order to prevent the site from becoming a data dump.

Content publishing features can help employees to make posts on the collaboration site in a unified style. Fortunately, SharePoint provides an embedded HTML-editor that covers the whole range of functions from text formatting to inserting files and pictures. The objective is to let users edit and publish their content on their own and make it readable and easy-to-understand for other community members.

Content moderation features aim to minimize the risk of a site’s ‘informational pollution’ and give the green light to valuable and relevant data. Additionally, we recommend to assign a content moderator responsible for content filtering. This way, every post draft will first go to the site’s moderator and will be published only after his / her approval. It’s also possible to create a rating scale to assess every publication from irrelevant to top important. This is how every post will have a rate enabling users to find the most valuable content easier.     

Both content management and content moderation rules can be described in detail and placed in a separate content guide tab to let employees consult the guidelines at any time.

Assigning user roles

In order to ensure a transparent user structure, it’s advisable to foresee at least 3 groups of users provided with relevant permissions according to their role on the site, in order to ensure the site’s optimal functioning and prevent chaotic site management.

Observers. These are users who aren’t team members and don’t participate in team collaboration actively but want to follow the community, see new publications and expand their knowledge on a particular issue. This role doesn’t allow to publish any content but permits to access the collaboration site, read posts and search for information. Whenever an observer wants to join the community, he or she will have to apply.

Contributors. All the active team members who regularly add content and participate in the discussions can be called contributors. This group of users should be able to make new publications, edit them and leave comments. Contributors are also provided with personal pages that they can use as their personal knowledge boards.

Moderators. Depending on a team size, a collaboration site can have one or several moderators. A moderator is a user with the most extensive permissions allowing to evaluate others’ publications, reject a post if it doesn’t meet the requirements of the content guide, rate posts and participate in the development of the site by adding new topics and subtopics.

Keeping employees engaged

Another challenging task while working with a SharePoint collaboration site is to motivate all the team members to use it in order to develop a centralized knowledge baseregularly. There are a few features that will help to stimulate user activity.

‘User catchers’. To hook the community’s attention, ‘user catchers’ can be created. It might be a system of automatic notifications that will inform users on every new publication or weekly updates made on their collaboration site. This could invite them to enter the site and participate in the discussion, ensuring their better awareness of the content.

• New post notification can be sent to work group members to let them view the latest changes to the site. The notification can include a ‘Read’ button containing the direct link to a new publication.
• Weekly summary notification will notify all the site members about the posts added during the past week. The notification can provide the direct link to the general newsfeed with the latest posts first.

Personal ratings. By evaluating content, a moderator guarantees the relevance and the value of every post that appears on the site. The system of an automatic personal rating can be also introduced to determine the most active members, e.g. to rate best publishers of the week or of the month in order to let the team see the most active contributors. For more passive team members, it will be reasonable to introduce a dynamic chart that will show their own activity progress throughout different timeframes (e.g. weeks, months or quarters).

Personal pages. A strict moderation that prevents the site from clogging implies that a number of posts will be sifted out. But what could you do if a team member wants to keep a post containing important information that is too specific for the rest of the community? To publish posts with no previous moderation, employees can be provided with their personal pages that will give them more freedom, will let them store all the information they need in one place and share it with other members even if it’s not published in the general newsfeed.

Custom design. Last but not least, custom design is actually what a collaboration site cannot succeed without. A site should give the sense of belonging to a community and reflect the domain users are working in. Custom design isn’t an option in this case, it’s a must that will help to increase user acceptance significantly. We encourage companies to spend some efforts on creating a custom master page, as well as a few templates for subsites, which will help to visualize the general concept (e.g. if your team specializes in healthcare, create pages with ‘healthy’ design).

Choosing a development course

Implementing SharePoint collaboration at an enterprise isn’t an easy task. Any attempts to deliver an out-of-the box solution won’t work, as the risk of rejection is too high. Moreover, even a feature-rich solution can also fail if it doesn’t meet users’ needs.

The development course should be designed with employees’ expectations in mind. When taking up a SharePoint collaboration project, start with drawing a portrait of the future user and describing their information needs, then think together with a SharePoint consultant about how the site can become an integral part of the users’ working days.

Give us feedback

We are looking forward to hearing about your experience of adopting SharePoint-based collaboration solutions. What were the pitfalls of implementing such a solution at your organization? Which features are considered the most popular and proved to help with user engagement? What do you think are the ways to make SharePoint collaboration projects more successful?

This article originally appeared on ScienceSoft Blog and has been republished with permission.

by Sergei Golubenko via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

SharePoint on the treasure island, or 3 pillars of effective innovation management

As if it’s a real treasure island, innovation companies and their R&D departments strictly guard their most precious assets – valuable knowledge and human resources. However, even with a small number of employees, innovation-focused companies are not so simple to manage, as their vitally important task is to handle some very specific processes such as research, idea generation, screening and nurturing. Moreover, innovation companies have to attract investors to raise funds for their breakthroughs. In biotechnology, as we have seen in our practice, there is even a bigger challenge of coming through years of tests and approvals before reaching a plateau of productivity.

To cut short, it is not hard to understand that innovations have a lot of pitfalls. This is where innovation management software can help. Among numerous solutions offered to support innovations, SharePoint is the one that successfully combines knowledge management, collaboration and security mechanisms which form three pillars of innovation management.

Pillar 1: accumulating the treasure

The process of idea generation has almost stayed the same through centuries: it still starts with someone’s light-bulb moment or in-depth study.

Searching for a high-quality concept, innovation-responsible employees generate dozens of ideas every day. Before they discard some of them as unrealistic, you will want to take care of all of them in case they turn out to be a jewel (remember James Watt, a famous Scottish mechanical engineer? His steam engine that started out the Industrial Revolution was used just for pumping water out of mines for almost 50 years!)

To keep track of them, ideas should be stored in an appropriate knowledge base (KB). SharePoint can serve both as a knowledge base and an effective tool to manage a company’s internal knowledge treasury.

• Structure – SharePoint enables users to structure ideas in Libraries and Lists. Categorized by content type, ideas can be reviewed or shared at any moment. The idea graph contains elements (idea title, category, author, contributors, status, etc.) that facilitate data search and updates. It is also easy to upload and move files with drag-and-drop. 
• Integration – Business Connectivity Services enable users to access data located outside SharePoint (e.g. in Outlook, Excel, Visio, Word), retrieve, filter, sort and present it for interaction.
• Search – with SharePoint, there is no risk to be lost in files. Properly adjusted, SharePoint Search enables users to quickly find the requested information. Users are free to filter search results, extend or limit search parameters and preview the files found.

ScienceSoft’s tip: SharePoint as a knowledge management system is clockwork if you restrict use of other KB management systems or prevent your employees from storing their ideas out of your SharePoint site. Provided that your SharePoint KB is permanently renewed and represents the warehouse of unique ideas, it will serve you well. 

Meanwhile, let’s keep in mind that document storage is not knowledge management yet. To become a real knowledge, information should be discussed, shared and expanded. And here we come to the second pillar.

Pillar 2: sharing the treasure

Innovation is undoubtedly a team activity. Once generated, any idea is rather raw and shapeless. Collaboration is a magic key to transform a newborn idea into a well-shaped concept. Considered as an internal social network or intranet, SharePoint encourage employees to collaborate. It includes a number of tools that make a company’s social computing and communication enjoyable:

• SharePoint discussion board – a communication hub that enables users to exchange ideas, to answer questions, provide feedback, choose the best opinions or ideas.
• Social networking – the latest SharePoint versions have social networking features: a built-in messenger (Yammer), microblogs, likes, shares, hash tags, status updates, etc.
• Feeds – My site is a SharePoint feed-rich section (e.g. Newsfeed, Everyone feed, Activities feed), which displays latest items, posts or activities to accompany a project or ideas.
• Community Sites – a useful tool to encourage innovators’ communication. A Community Site helps to discuss an innovative idea or a project. Best answers or ideas generated in discussions can be rated by a moderator and placed at the top of the page, so that everyone can see them.

Why is collaboration important? Collaboration is the way to a higher team productivity, as it accelerates both idea generation and nurturing. SharePoint is a good example of collaboration software that helps to raise the level of employees’ involvement. Co-creation boost innovative thinking that expands a company’s innovation pool and increases the visibility of ideas.

Here you can find our customer’s success story that proves the effectiveness of SharePoint as an innovation and collaboration platform.

ScienceSoft’s tip: SharePoint can also help to overcome that fear of failure. Creating the area for idea generation and discussion, an innovation manager can be sure that no idea is lost on the way due to fears (‘Nobody can understand and appreciate my idea’) or doubts (‘I think, somebody has already shared the same idea’).

Pillar 3: guarding the treasure

In innovation management, security issues are of top importance, since know-how leaks can lead to tragic consequences. As an innovation management solution, SharePoint provides effective, in-built security protection tools:

• Server security – As a Microsoft product, SharePoint is well-equipped with security features in line with Microsoft’s best practices. Moreover, the SharePoint server can be reinforced to minimize the server’s attack surface (number-one step will be to isolate server roles).
• Authentication and authorization – SharePoint provides security for websites, lists, folders and items. To be able to perform specific actions, users should be granted respective rights by a system administrator. Security management is role-based at all levels, which enables breach-free security across the entire SharePoint platform.
• Distribution of access rights - SharePoint is highly flexible when it comes to assigning access rights. Access rights can be granted or restricted at any level, which allows regulating the access level to particular data or to the entire knowledge base.

ScienceSoft’s tip: Do not underestimate user trainings. A wide range of security issues can be prevented by explaining employees the importance of the data they store and share. Point out that extracting documents from the internal SharePoint site and using them in external resources (personal email, file hosting services, etc.) can lead to undeliberate breaches in their company’s security.

Conclusion

When used and managed properly, a SharePoint site contributes greatly to a company’s knowledge base evolution. Effective for the purposes of collaboration, knowledge management and security, SharePoint is a handy tool to accumulate more valuable knowledge and protect it properly from security breaches.

For more details on SharePoint advantages in innovation management, please contact our SharePoint consultants.

This article originally appeared on ScienceSoft Blog and has been republished with permission.

by Sergei Golubenko via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Manageable collaboration as the key to your CXM cycle vitality

When approaching customer experience management, companies traditionally focus on the CRM-based cycle, which is reasonable since no software knows customers better than CRM. In our practice, we also see CRM as the core of the 4-step approach to managing customer experience that includes data collection, analysis, targeted actions and result re-evaluation. However, the CXM chain has one more important component, and this is collaboration of CXM participants that ensures success of the entire cycle.

This is exactly where SharePoint comes up to the stage to take up the collaboration challenge and make the complex customer experience management process more dynamic, facilitate stakeholders’ communication and minimize their efforts.  

CXM-related collaboration is painful but vital

To show how important collaboration is in the CXM cycle, let’s start with an example straight away.

A US retailer with 1,000+ stores in 7 states registered a significant decrease of customer satisfaction in 17 stores. The investigation showed that this negative trend was caused by long queues at peak hours in 15 of 17 stores. CX managers developed a plan to change the situation. However, as soon as they initiated corrective actions, they got involved into intense negotiations with operational and HR departments. Moreover, CX experts met a strong resistance from store managers who weren’t ready for additional expenses without being sure that the measures would prove successful. This led to pretty modest results since real actions were approved only for 5 of 17 stores.

This short example shows that CXM-related collaboration can become a mammoth-heavy task, since it involves employees from absolutely different departments and of different hierarchical levels. To make things even worse, CXM collaboration can be painful and often leads to the conflict of interest, since CX-managers’ initiatives usually require quite deep changes to the established operational approach with no benefits guaranteed (in our case, improvements were eventually registered in 4 of 5 stores).

Full of human-related pitfalls, CXM collaboration cannot be left as it is, scattered and uncontrollable, since it engenders a whole range of negative consequences.

Unmanaged collaboration ruptures the CX cycle. Without efficient collaboration and all the stakeholders being involved into the discussion on an improvement plan, CX managers risk to get stuck at the stage of data analysis, unable to transform their insights into real actions.  

Sluggish collaboration slows down the CXM cycle. When it comes to enhancing customer experience, every day counts, and delays are inacceptable as they can make situation even worse and ruin a brand’s reputation. Dedicated collaboration tools should be adopted to ensure more effective and quick decision-making based on the strategy elaborated by all the parties and not exclusively on arrangements made during face-to-face meetings.

Collaboration gaps bring inappropriate results. As CXM collaboration involves employees of different hierarchical levels, CX managers should coordinate their actions with all of them. Not approved by all stakeholders, CX managers’ initiatives can cause not only conflicts between the CXM cycle participants but also lead to significant financial losses.

Managing CXM-related collaboration in SharePoint

Since CXM-related collaboration is often unpleasant and hides a whole range of pitfalls, the task is to facilitate it and make it more effective, dynamic and streamlined. Trying to adapt CRM software for these purposes may have a not-so-happy ending, since a company will have to venture quite a deep customization and face heavy license costs to provide access to all the stakeholders (who may simply reject working in a CRM).

Not to make the collaboration challenge even more problematic, it’s reasonable to delegate it to a dedicated platform with collaboration at its heart, such as SharePoint. Companies can both implement SharePoint for CXM needs as a stand-alone tool or integrate it with the corporate CRM. In any case, SharePoint offers large capabilities of transforming CXM collaboration into a well-managed and effective process.

Fine-tuning cross-department collaboration

SharePoint is a proven platform in terms of cross-department collaboration, thus it can successfully unite participants of the CXM cycle. There are several opportunities for this. For example, a company can develop a fully functional CXM collaboration site for stakeholders to work on each particular CXM case, discuss problematic issues and take decisions. Another feasible solution is to integrate a SharePoint-based collaboration solution with a CRM. This will allow CX managers to create independent collaboration boards linked with CX cases and subcases.

Transforming unmanaged collaboration into formalized CXM workflows

The biggest challenge of any collaboration is to evolve from spontaneous communication to a managed process with precise stages to complete. To structure CXM collaboration, companies can transform it into a traditional workflow that will include the following sequence of steps: discussion, decision-making, actions (started, delayed or ended), progress review, escalation and final result.

The workflow can be coupled with task management features for every workflow participant to see the to-do activities along with their precise deadlines.

Facilitating document management

To take the burden off a CRM, CXM-related document management can be organized within SharePoint. This way, all documents will be centralized in a general storage classified by customers, cases and CXM techniques. Documents will be easy to find, read, edit and shared with colleagues at any moment.

Creating CX knowledge base

SharePoint not only gives the opportunity to manage CXM-related collaboration and CXM tasks but also assists companies in creating their unique knowledge base for corporate CXM expertise. This would provide CX managers with the possibility to review older cases, study their details and apply more effective measures for new cases. It would also help onboarding CX managers to quicker adapt and understand the CX methodology of a particular company by studying corporate CX archives.

How to make it work?

Making such a CRM-SharePoint tandem work effectively is a challenging task that can be fulfilled only by the experts with a deep understanding of both customer experience management principles and SharePoint development to align a company’s CXM needs with the software capabilities.  

It’s also crucial to define a precise scope of the future CXM-related collaboration. This will help to design a tool that will help stakeholders to solve CXM issues easier and less painfully, along with making collaboration more result-oriented and controllable with customer experience improvement as a priority.

by Sergei Golubenko via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Continuous Maintenance: Does SharePoint Really Need It?

There is just a thin line between love and hate. Translating the saying into the software language, it’s not hard to understand that a reliable solution that satisfies the needs of employees today can be easily rejected tomorrow as soon as serious troubles occur. SharePoint is that kind of software that is constantly living in this love-or-hate reality refilled with both users’ recognition and hostility. Even when implemented according to a well-elaborated plan, a SharePoint solution can lose its popularity when a bad experience comes to the fore.

Instead of waiting for the tragic end, let’s see which core SharePoint problems can cause users’ dissatisfaction and how a thought-out maintenance can help to save the platform’s reputation.

Face of a bad experience

SharePoint is largely used by companies representing a wide range of industries from manufacturing to healthcare. However, by the end of the deployment stage, users often face 3 major problems:

Poor UI. Boring, plain, unattractive, unfriendly – unpleasant adjectives siege the system’s interface. The debate on the SharePoint’s better appearance never ends, neither do users’ irritation nor the public wish to see the solutions’ stylish look. The poor UI’s danger is in its ability to plant the seeds of chronic disaffection that will be very hard to eradicate even if the system shows its great performance.

Insufficient functionality. Usually a SharePoint solution comes to an organization to solve particular tasks (e.g. to ensure workflow or document management). However, a bit later, employees may need new features to cover their current tasks or just want their portal to afford wider functionality, so they require the solution to be adopted for collaboration, social activities, etc. If the new features are not provided on time, users’ dissatisfaction isn’t long in coming.

Scarce information. If isolated from other enterprise solutions, SharePoint can hardly satisfy users’ constant need in information replenishment. A simple example: employees involved into a procurement workflow managed in SharePoint should be provided with a direct access to their ERP system.  With no integration, they will definitely continue working in an ERP and abandon SharePoint as switching between different platforms only takes time and adds confusion.

The list of these most common problems can be extended with other numerous issues that arise after the platform’s implementation. A piece of good news: all of them can be solved.

Timely assistance as the alternative to the platform’s deterioration

Just as physicians recommend to responsibly care of our bodies before serious diseases appear, SharePoint also needs timely improvements before it becomes a source of annoying troubles. That’s why even if you are only at the starting line of a project and addressing your requirements to SharePoint developers, we recommend to think of maintenance services based on the following principles:

Solving, not accumulating. The common habit of accumulating user requests and fixing all the troubles at once will not work out for SharePoint. Both minor configuration issues that can impact users’ activities and acute performance problems (e.g. slowly uploading pages) should be solved immediately. If no…can you hear the annoyed users sighing deeply right now?

Ensuring post-deployment maintenance. Frequently, companies want SharePoint maintenance services to be provided right after the solution’s implementation. Standard packages (covering a period from several months up to a year) enable employees to get used to a new system and address their questions to developers. However, the practice shows that sometimes the number of issues doesn’t decrease but even grows by the end of the fixed period. If the system is left with no assistance, troubles can come quickly. A continuous maintenance is the only remedy that helps to deal with performance issues, necessary upgrades, redesign and much more.

Respecting timeframe. Making their requests to a maintenance team, users should not wait for a SharePoint administrator’s good mood to see the change. Improvements are to be made as quickly as possible. We advise to establish a timeframe of 1-2 days for fixing problems and 1-2 weeks for delivering improvements.

Thinking of users’ comfort. The platform itself allows to handle multiple issues without disrupting users’ activities.  First of all, the SharePoint’s modular character allows to carry out pointed works on particular sites or site collections without affecting the entire system. Secondly, both latest versions of SharePoint (2013 and 2016) are created according to the client-side object model (CSOM), which means that there is no server code to deal with. All the necessary improvements can be made via JavaScript and CSS files upgrades, which allows to avoid prolonged interruptions in the system’s operation.

Yes, It Does

This is the answer on the question put in the headline. The system does require careful assistance even in the post-deployment period. SharePoint maintenance is a much larger notion than a simple troubleshooting and it goes far beyond fixing performance issues. Quality and continuous maintenance focused on the system’s UI and UX improvement is about ensuring users’ satisfaction and longevity of your SharePoint-based solution.

by Sergei Golubenko via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Workflows and Collaboration: Allies or Enemies?

The importance of workflows that help to structure business processes and let employees be more productive is unquestionable. To elaborate on the subject, we’ll try to find out if the rigid nature of workflows fits 100% of business cases. Also, we’ll tap into their weaknesses and answer a much-debated question: is collaboration a friend or an enemy to your workflows?

Squeezing out collaboration for effective workflows

The introduction of workflows aims to minimize human collaboration. To visualize the process, you can compare workflow automation with a squeezer: you take a business process and start to squeeze thoroughly all the human interaction out in order to get a pure activity not mixed with human communication. Why is it a necessary step? Human collaboration usually makes the entire working process much slower and sometimes leads to unexpected mistakes and delays caused by communication gaps and misunderstanding.

Having squeezed human collaboration, you get a refined workflow that can be split into separate actions fulfilled by a responsible person who doesn’t deviate from the prescribed process. This way a workflow represents an accurate sequence of actions that all together allow achieving the ultimate goal.

If any problem arises and the given conditions contradict the possible workflow scenario (e.g. with the established limit of $200 per stationary order for a department, a procurement manager gets the order for $415), the further action can be rejected with no serious impact on the enterprise’s activity.

Such a filtering of workflow conditions forms a new corporate culture, as employees understand business logic better, thus become much more organized and consistent in their work. Moreover, well-structured workflows help to eliminate inefficient processes, which usually lead to the consumption of extra resources.

Why can it go wrong?

Indeed, transforming your business processes into a line production where every employee strictly follows workflow stages greatly contributes to effectiveness, reduces costs and eliminates the possibility of mistakes. However, such a rigid and dried-up process has its weaknesses.

Let’s analyze a typical situation. A procurement manager working in a biotechnology company gets a request to buy a new freezer. As an experienced employee, the manager knows that the company uses -86°C ultra-low freezers and decides to purchase one more. The procurement manager buys a freezer with a discount (thus saves the company’s money) and get it delivered with no delay. Unfortunately, at the last moment he learns that there was a need for an -150°C ultra-low freezer, as it was intended to start new types of research.

Was the workflow completed successfully? Yes. Is the result positive? No. Why the biotech company faced such a problem? It can be explained with a range of reasons:

• Software gaps – e.g. a request form doesn’t provide enough place to leave comments and describe order in details.
• Staff negligence – e.g. the head of research who made the request was in a hurry and forgot to indicate the needed parameters.
• Lack of collaboration - e.g. the head of research forgot to contact a procurement manager to provide the order details.

This is an exaggerated example, of course, but in reality similar situations happen every day causing considerable financial losses to companies. It also proves that building up a well-structured workflow is not always enough to achieve the goal.

So is it possible to avoid this ‘wrong-freezer’ situation without interfering into the workflow structure itself?

Collaboration life buoy

To answer the question, let’s go back and revise the stage of squeezing collaboration out of workflows. Yes, it’s a needed measure to make employees more process-focused and task-oriented. However, the reality shows that in some cases workflows without collaboration are inefficient or, at worst, even fail.

That’s where a collaboration platform like SharePoint can be helpful. SharePoint collaboration features are unique, as the platform allows to build up effective collaboration that won’t break the workflow logic but support workflow participants at any stage of the workflow cycle. There are at least two opportunities to smoothly add collaboration to your workflows.

Task-centric collaboration in SharePoint

If you already manage workflows in SharePoint, then adjusting it for collaboration is a no-brainer. You only need to address your requirements to either qualified in-house SharePoint developers or to turn to SharePoint consultants who will tailor the platform to your new business needs (learn more on SharePoint capabilities here).

Just to give you a hint for a feasible solution: collaboration spaces can be created as a part of workflow tasks to function in line with current workflows. This way, every task will be provided with a link directing workflow participants to a dedicated collaboration space where they can discuss workflow-related issues.

Considering the possibilities to store and share documents generated during a workflow, as well as to adjust notifications on workflow-related events, you can manage the entire workflow on a SharePoint site without being forced to switch to another system, which contributes to better structuring of working processes and greatly saves time.

Collaboration via integration

Provided you use an industry-specific solution or an enterprise system (ERP, CRM), integration is what will allow you to marry the two platforms and enrich your enterprise system with independent collaboration spaces for workflow participants. Using a dedicated collaboration space linked with an enterprise system, employees are able to share their ideas and questions, share documents and discuss problematic issues with colleagues with the opportunity to go back to their enterprise system immediately.

The biggest advantage of integrating SharePoint collaboration with your enterprise solution is that you preserve the rigid workflow structure and provide employees with collaboration spaces accessible only for workflow members, which makes working process not only targeted but also secure.

In order to ensure great enterprise collaboration in your organization, you can use an easy formula from our SharePoint experts that includes the most important components such as user convenience, data protection and reasonable price.

Conclusion

Right, so are they allies or enemies, workflows and collaboration? The answer should always depend on business processes that determine specific workflows. Very often automation requires minimizing human-to-human interaction in order to achieve better results and enhance employees’ productivity. However, in particular cases the lack of collaboration can cause unexpected barriers and even workflow failure.

SharePoint can become a real life buoy for your workflows, as its collaboration features allows preserving workflows’ rigid structure and, at the same time, support employees and help them to manage their tasks more efficiently. SharePoint collaboration spaces can work as an integral part of your enterprise system, adapting to particular needs of your business. 

by Sergei Golubenko via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Gear up your HR processes with SharePoint

HR management doesn’t usually cause much trouble at small companies with only minor HR processes in place. But as the organizational scale grows, HR needs grow accordingly. As a result, an HR manager gets covered in tons of papers as the volume of interviews, meetings and candidates’ applications becomes completely uncontrollable. This is a great danger for an HR manager’s work processes: with just one task overdue, others will be postponed too.

To save your HR department from such a situation and to raise HR productivity in your company, SharePoint is the tool to adopt. Actually, the list of HR activities is very large (documents, competences, trainings, vacation, sick leaves management, etc.) and all of them can be automated by SharePoint developers.

Delegating recruitment to SharePoint

Recruitment is among the most time-consuming, long-running and document-abundant HR processes. An HR site on SharePoint is what can save much time and effort here, turning HR challenges into HR benefits.

SharePoint assistance starts with defining what a recruitment workflow is. All the recruitment steps (opening and approving a vacancy, searching for a candidate, creating a workplace, onboarding, etc.) can be included in the workflow depending on the HR department needs and recruitment scope.

At the same time, SharePoint workflows don’t stay rigid, they grow and change progressively with HR department development. Even if SharePoint workflows start to drop behind the current HR processes, they can be extended to cover new functionality and to fit the HR demands.    

HR’s benefit: Adjusted HR workflows allow an HR manager to view the full picture of recruitment and control its progress. An HR director will be able to evaluate HR managers’ performance and detect problems.

Interviewing with SharePoint

An integral part of the recruitment process, interviewing can also be assisted with HR software. There is a plenty of off-the-shelf interview management systems on the IT market. But do you really want an independent system for each of your processes?

With SharePoint, an HR director can choose a suitable working scheme within the single system that manages all the HR processes. Interviewing can represent either a separate SharePoint workflow integrated with other recruitment processes, or a part of the existing recruitment workflow. In both cases, interviews won’t drop out of the recruitment chain but will guide an HR manager throughout the hiring process.

Speaking about interviews, time management is not to be left aside. Recruiters are welcome to manage their schedules (appoint meetings and interviews) in SharePoint that can be synchronized with the external Outlook calendar. Thus, users will be automatically notified on every upcoming event either via SharePoint or email.    

HR’s benefit: Extending an interview workflow on their SharePoint site, HR managers will be able to follow up the entire hiring cycle within the single system.

Brushing up a recruitment database

When HR processes accelerate, the volume of documents grows enormously.  SharePoint is a handy tool to put your daily document routine in order so that no candidate’s profile, completed test tasks or job offers get lost in emails. By storing all HR data in the centralized SharePoint database, an HR manager has 24/7 access to recruitment information. A recruiter won’t have to spend hours looking for an old document either, as it can be found in 5 seconds via the search panel.

When needed, an HR site on SharePoint can be reinforced with reporting capabilities. Reporting will allow an HR director to control current workflows, evaluate HR managers’ effectiveness by their results, monitor the HR department activities by time periods and much more. A user is free to choose how and what information (e.g. vacancies open for more than 30 days, candidates accepted but not employed yet, hired candidates, etc.) to include into a recruitment report.

HR’s benefit: SharePoint allows an HR manager to arrange and store HR data that can be always turned into an up-to-date report.

Speeding up collaboration

SharePoint capabilities for collaboration are useful to make HR coworking easier and faster. As a collaboration platform, SharePoint is nice both for one-to-one and team work.

An HR manager can share candidates’ CVs with colleagues, discuss vacancies, send interview results through the SharePoint Newsfeed and create HR communities to discuss the current HR issues. All HR data stored in SharePoint can be viewed and edited by any member of the HR department whenever employees need it.

Moreover, a recruiter using SharePoint will never feel isolated from the HR department as the platform allows users to follow their company’s activity outside of the working place (at home, on holidays or on the go), owing to the Office 365 capabilities.

HR’s benefit: SharePoint facilitates HR collaboration and keep HR managers constantly tuned into HR processes.

Implementing SharePoint for HR

Although SharePoint is regarded as off-the-shelf, it does require qualified consultants to be installed. Our 6+ year SharePoint expertise shows that a SharePoint site development from scratch is the best option.

First of all, HR managers are free to define the HR processes to be automated. Thus, employees choose the exact functionality they will use.

Secondly, by the end of implementation they will get a flexible HR tool that can be transformed on the go (e.g. a system administrator can change views, fields and elements in SharePoint lists and libraries where HR files are stored).

Thirdly, SharePoint implementation can be completed in a short timeframe. In our practice, we spend 2-4 weeks for a medium-size SharePoint project (even with no technical task or requirements provided).

Getting more benefits

The above-mentioned HR benefits serve as the foundation for even bigger advantages:

• Customized according to specific requirements, SharePoint not only cuts the amount of manual work but saves an HR manager’s time by reducing the hiring lifecycle.
• SharePoint is one of the solutions with double benefits:  it is implemented in a short timeframe and provides a rich palette of tools in a single solution.
• SharePoint has a highly flexible functionality. You decide how you want your HR system to look like.

Conclusion

The choice of a solution that fits your HR department well can’t be made in a single day. Before you come to a decision, all the HR needs and all the capabilities of HR software should be considered. SharePoint is one of the solutions that can be optimal for your HR processes automation, as it stays flexible and is able to grow proportionally to your HR department development.

Please contact our SharePoint consultants to learn more about the platform and its capabilities. 

by Sergei Golubenko via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community