SharePoint Business Analyst

Have you wanted to know where SharePoint and Scrum can go wrong? (Or Scrum in general for that matter!)

Over the Christmas period, when trying to come up with some New Year resolutions, I had time to reflect on where projects and been a massive ball ache for me in 2011 and where I could improve on these in 2012. I have decided to share these with the community and give some pointers as to how I think I can overcome these going forward.

I warn you now; these are not Scrum by the book as that book got thrown out years ago! These are just my opinions. Please get in touch if you have any other suggestions!

No defined Product Owner / Lack of dedicated team members

This is by far the most annoying thing of all the things I list and that I promise to myself to make the priority at the start of every project. Everyone in the business will all too often, have a view on how things should and shouldn’t be done, yet trying to get anyone to put their neck on the line and/or to appoint an individual to take responsibility for what should be the ROI on the project is pretty much impossible at times.

At the same time, trying to get the business give up committed resources to the project (that it so clearly needs” and still wanting the “moon on a stick” still happens.)

As a Business Analyst, this makes life very difficult in defining acceptance criteria and prioritising the product backlog.

The solution I found was to allow be two people to be the product owner. This has advantages over a single person. You can get them to agree jointly or make a decision in the absence of the other. At least one of them should be senior enough to make a decision on behalf of the business (and not have to go back and ask every time). Also, you can get a nice blend of skills if there are two people.

Likewise beware Change Managers who try and adopt this role who clearly have a conflict of interest!

Allowing Team member to be hijacked into meetings

“This will be a quick one”, “Just a quick questions”, “Have you got time to go through X”

These will be an all too common question on most projects. Yet all of these meetings take up valuable time. As the Scrum Master it is your / their job to protect your team from these ad-hoc, time consuming requests. I needed to remind myself that same thing a few times, as I stopped being the Rottweiler at the door that my team needed me to be. 95% of these questions can (and should) be answered by the BA / PM.

Project Plans with Scrum

It’s a fact of life.

The business claims that it subscribes to Agile and the world of Scrum. Yet no one tells the Senior Management that!

You WILL get asked for a project plan. You will get asked for estimates. You will get asked to work to a deadline. The day you realise this, you will be a far happier person! I found that rather than trying to pick a fight that I didn’t have the energy for (or a chance of winning!) doing Karen Greaves’ release planning exercise helped greatly. Happy to share the love and actually a very useful article. I provided a project plan with User Stories on them with development estimates also.

Chinese Whispers

“The CEO Hates SharePoint” “, “We’ve heard that SharePoint is useless at X”, “We’ve heard that the business wants this”.

 Beware the Chinese whispers. Everyone has an opinion, yet as a SharePoint Business Analyst, it is your job to challenge, question and quantify what these statements are. If you see the business running round like headless chickens off the back of such statements you are not doing your job properly.

Forget process and methods how to deal with this. One question to respond to all of these?

Why?

If they can’t answer the question with a tangible response, treat this as noise. Likewise, also treat comments that are from important people  in the business but not to the project with a pinch of salt. (#justsaying !!!)

Not a clue about what they actually want / why they want it.

This happens when people do generic requirements gathering. Try to make sure this doesn’t happen and that you get to the business early on in the process. My previous post covers this off

Unrealistic Deadlines

This will always happen. This is where you can provide some guidance as a SharePoint Business Analyst.

My theory is that you should know the product inside out. As, if you know what SharePoint’s capabilities are you can actually try and trim back some of the work on the project by trying to get to the magical 90% functional acceptance mark on the requirements. To give you an example:

Method 1 – Uses “out of the box” web parts, no code but looks a bit clunky yet does 90% of the functionality = 2 days

Method 2 – Is Custom Code, Custom Web Parts and offers 100% functionality = 20 Days.

Guess what they will go for if they absolutely must, cannot miss deadline?

In other words, we are using fixed date but variable scope.

Summary

Like I said, I am not saying these are right or wrong. Just the way I have done and experienced it.

I now feel cleansed and promise to myself to be a better boy in all of these areas above this year. Would love to know your thoughts. Contact me on Twitter @leestevens1979 or use the comments below.

A secretary walks into a Giant Car showroom and demands ‘OK tell me how much it is… I’ll take it?’ This is without actually telling the bemused sales guy; what make she wants, the model, the colour, age, size of the engine, spec etc. She had failed to ask her boss all of these things (end user) who had instructed her to ‘go out and get a car’, as he she took his instructions literally.

The salesman rubs his hands together and she goes and blows £300k of her bosses’ hard earned money on the latest supercar. All he needed was a basic saloon car to get around town!

Ok this didn’t really happen but the exact same thing happens week in week out with Internal Communicators who use SharePoint as their Intranet and/or Content Management systems and never ask users what they need and would like to see.

Between IT and Internal Comms, they are the ones that often decide what the end users will need and want as they ‘know’ their audience and have done the requirements gathering. (Often a 1 hour meeting with them to tell them what they were going to do!)

The days of static content (pushed out by Internal Comms) are well and truly numbered. On an Intranet, users not only demand and expect content that is fresh and relevant to them personally but also applications that will make their lives easier. With SharePoint, you will be amazed how many applications can be built within days, without any custom coding and often life changers for the users. This will also drive user adoption and get people visiting the content you want them to more often. These can be anything as simple as a holiday request form, through to a Recruitment system.

You just need to ask them what their pain is!

8 Great Tips to get the most out of SharePoint

1. Don’t let IT Run the project – SharePoint is a business facing application. Unless there is a fresh installation needed, try to keep the project run by someone in the business who understands the challenges in the business rather than of the technology.
   
2. Requirements gathering – Ask end users what they want by actually asking the question ‘tell me about the challenges in your business’. Count the blank looks on people’s faces when you ask ‘tell me what you want SharePoint to do.
3. Custom code – There is always a time and a place for this but avoid wherever you can. For every 5 days of development, the same can be achieved with configuration in 1.
4. ‘Out of the box’ Features - Get to know all of the features that are in SharePoint. Knowing what the product can actually offer can avoid custom code!
5. 3^rd Party Products – SharePoint, like all systems, has its shortfalls, but there are thousands of products that can be bolted onto SharePoint to address these. These costs a fraction of the cost of developing from scratch and are supported also.
6. Micro-Projects - Wherever possible, try to deliver SharePoint offering in small chunks. This will make SharePoint become viral and also make it easier to improve on each piece that you deliver. Hard to do with a ‘big bang’ approach.
7. End User Training - Train Train Train – Allow a decent budget for training end users on how to actually use SharePoint. How will people use the tool if they don’t know how to?
8. Support - Log a ticket approach doesn’t work with SharePoint. Try to identify the ‘power users’ that can be accessible to help the business users.

Tonight was my first visit to the London SharePoint User Group (SUGUK) in over 6 Months! So.. I thought it was an opportune time to update the SharePoint Business Analyst Blog.

This lapse was caused partly by me being extremely busy but also due to lack of events, due to the fact that (apparently) Microsoft have pulled the funding (and thus sponsoring) of the events at their flagship office in Victoria. (That Pizza they serve up at half time doesn’t pay for itself I suppose!)

Overall, last nights session was perfect for a SharePoint Business Analyst or SharePoint Project Manager, as there was little Dev focus. (sorry Devs!) This was split into two sections, as follows.

Microsoft Office 365 | Alex Pearce |BFC Networks

For me, Microsoft Office 365 is going to be massive in the next 3-4 years, especially for SME’s who are looking for a low cost entry point to SharePoint. Alex confirmed that Microsoft has over 1500 developers currently working on Office 365, which will include:

• Office Professional Plus
  
• Exchange
  
• SharePoint Online
  
• Lync (Lync can be used to ‘federate’ between two Office 365 environments, so that video chat can be possible between users in sister companies for example)

SharePoint Online Includes:

• My Sites
  
• Team Sites
  
• Intranet
  
• Extranet
  
• Workspaces
  
• Public Facing Website
  

Main exclusions to Microsoft Office 365 are:

• Web Analytics (lack of)
  
• BCS – ( This is a biggie for me and not expected until 2012)
  
• The SharePoint Timer Job
  
• Records Centre
  

Disappointingly there is no Audio or dial in for (what used to be) Live Meeting, so if you need to be speaking with someone who has audio on their PC’s. (I am sure this is a cue for developers and companies to create a product, like http://www.gotomeeting.com)

Pricing is not out yet for the UK but the estimated price is meant to be on a par with BPOS, so around £6-£10 per user, per month.

Search Decoupled | Steve Smith |Combined Knowledge

Steve put together a really interesting presentation and covered the items listed below. In essence, he was talking about how you can configure different boxes to perform different jobs for search. This included mirroring and playing around with fallover settings.

This would ideally be for companies with over 5 Million Documents. (I can think of a few companies that are still using two boxes for everything!)

He stated that when Scaling Search to consider the following:

• Crawl Server
  
• Query Server
  
• Search Administration
  
  • Inc Best Bets
    
• Property Database
  
• Crawl Database
  
• Crawling Target Server
  

   

A number of rendering Issues were mentioned with deployments that were not planned effectively. These included.

• Lack of memory
  
• Active Directory Lookups are slow
  
• User Profile Service access is slow for people queries
  

   

Steve mentioned that Search is becoming so big that you will have people that will know Search and Fast and nothing else

Oh and an150m Documents should become FAST. Now that’s a different story!

Just read a great Blog Post about what seems to be a really hot topic. SharePoint Governance.

As a SharePoint BA, I find it amazing how many of the SharePoint Governance challenges and issues are caused by poor planning and lack of training. More often than not, comprehensive governance plans are actually written after the horse has well and truly bolted from the cart.

When I speak with my industry peers about a typical Failed
SharePoint project:

• 5% of the budget would be used on requirements gathering
• 90% of the budget will be used on the build
• 5 % of the budget (if you are lucky) is spent on user training.

So in short, people spend more time building something that they don’t actually know what someone wants in the first place. The result, a nice shiny SharePoint application that no-one knows who asked for and no-one knows how to use. This is the equivalent to building a formula one car and then leaving it in the garage!

SharePoint is very good at actually governing itself, if what is built, is actually wanted and needed. Plus governance is often enforced well when people know how to use it.

Too much time is spent on telling people what they can’t do, when they probably didn’t know they could do it in the first place.

The answer; More Planning and More End User Training.

This week, I started what could probably be one of my toughest challenges to date as a SharePoint Business Analyst. SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 and SAP Integration.

Now effectively, this should not be too much of an issue. I’ve read every white paper and blog there is to read on this subject (and trust me there are quite a few!)and in the main it seems pretty simple.

1. Install Lightning Tools BDC Metaman (Nick you can have that one for free!)
2. Find a way of connecting SAP and SharePoint (hardware or software)
3. Configure the SharePoint BDC and also SAP

Easy as that! Or so the research would lead you to believe! The fact remains that there are not thousands of success stories of SAP and SharePoint integration out there. So why is that?

This could be for a number of reasons.

The main problem is that all of the solutions I have looked at, from 3^rd party vendors through to creating your own, require someone with a very good technical knowledge of both SAP and SharePoint.

The other challenge I have had was actually testing /evaluating this solution. One vendor even asked if we could take a box down to Microsoft with SAP installed so we could test it! The reason for this was their solution was hardware not software so we needed to plug this in! Can you imagine sitting on the tube with a box full of confidential data under your arm on a server??

The other factor I am guessing is that it probably needs a company with deep pockets to even test the different solutions. I am guessing that it would require roughly 20 total days of effort to even to a proof of concept. If you know what a good SAP Developer / SharePoint Developer costs these days, you know that will not be cheap, just to test if something works or not!

I may be way off the mark here, but I need to do some more digging and talking people of both sides of the SharePoint and SAP fence! Surely there has got to be an easier way and a guide to planning this type of project?

I would love to hear from anyone reading this who has some good tips regarding this matter.

Meanwhile, I will keep everyone updated with my progress and pass on any tips along the way! I’ll maybe even do a Top 10 if I have time!

First post in a long while but pleased to say that I’ve been using my time wisely and was revising hard for the SharePoint 2010 MCTS Configuration Exam (70-667). Pleased to say that I passed this last week.

I did some studying but did the bulk of my studying for 7 days solid ‘boot camp’ style at a purpose built learning centre near Bedford. This was pretty intense. Things kicked off on the Sunday night, with a 700 page book to start reading. This was followed by 5 days of 12 hour classroom sessions with more studying periods at night. I finally sat the exam on the last day. I would definitely recommend who I did this with as it was great to immerse myself in a SharePoint learning environment (without a screaming baby and wife – no offence Mrs S!).

Now to start putting the learning into practice!

Further to recent work we have undertaken with one of our partners Simply-Communicate at a leading retail bank, we have recently launched Simply-Intranets as a joint venture.

One of the first  things we did was to spend a day in the glorious London summer sunshine, filming a series of videos which explains what SharePoint 2010 actually does and means for the layman. We have covered all the main bits of the SharePoint pizza.

• Communities
• Sites
• Content
• Search
• Insights
• Composites

For those of you that have read my previous post on the best bits of SharePoint 2010, this will be fairly similar, but we’ve added some screenshots etc and explained some of the more popular bits in a bit more detail. Click on the links above to see how David Letterman is going to be quivering in his boots!  (I also got interviewed in Simplys webinar last week.  Go to their home page to hear that).