Selecting SharePoint team members

By Eric Riz

July 24, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Creating a project team can be the most important and challenging component of your SharePoint implementation. Your team members can make or break your entire project. How do you ensure that you have chosen the right project manager? What about the developers? Do you choose someone based on industry knowledge, business knowledge or SharePoint knowledge? What if they have two of the three qualities, or worse yet, none of three?

As a consulting firm focused on SharePoint deployments and doing it “right,” we get asked by many clients what the “right way” is to select project team members. This article is being written to address some of those questions that occur during the on-boarding of project team members. For this reason, we ensure that reviewing and vetting the project team members is a part of each discovery we do as an organization. There are two elements to take into consideration: What is the skill-set of the individual, and what does the project need in order to succeed?

Let’s start off discussing the optimal team structure for a SharePoint project implementation. Like any project, you will have team members at various levels, some which are known by the business and employees, others which may not be. For example, not everyone is aware of the true definition of a “stakeholder,” and therefore become confused about who is and who is not a stakeholder on a project. My definition of a project stakeholder is, in fact, anyone who is involved in the project, from project manager to end user, senior management to developer—everyone!

This point is debated by some, who feel that the term stakeholder should only be used at an executive level. The fact is that I’m comfortable using whichever definition is agreed to; however, a simple inclusion of “senior” as the prefix to “stakeholder” will solve the issue before it begins. This being the case, the SharePoint team structure that I recommend is at three levels: stakeholders, core team, and extended team.



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