Business as usual (BAU) service
It’s a sign of a sensible and mature approach discussing planning for a SharePoint ‘business as usual’ service, at the beginning of the project and not as an afterthought following launch.
Microsoft SharePoint has become the de-facto standard for many medium to large enterprises over the last 3 years, with many of the most recognised brands investing in the popular technology in some capacity. Although a couple of years old, the following visual we think, speaks for itself.
What those numbers won’t tell you is how many SharePoint projects have failed to deliver the perceived benefits, much touted at the beginning.
A significant reason for this we think is an often overlook aspect of deployments we come across, which is that of budgeting for the activities, processes and resources that will be need to be in place, when SharePoint becomes a ‘business as usual’ (BAU) service, following its launch.
It’s often all about what it takes to implement the platform, not what it will take to support, maintain and derive the most out it in the future. Hence why we recommend you absolutely have this in your plans, even if you scale back your ambitions due to time or budget constraints.
What should you plan for?
Planning and delivering a robust BAU service can be a large, expensive and challenging activity and the success of which is in our experience is largely driven by some of the following:
- The demands of the business stakeholders – What type of support service do they want? What are the response times to calls?
- Scale of the budgets (heavily influenced by the size of the organisation) – How much can they afford to fund in addition to the existing project deliverables?
- Success factors agreed by the project stakeholders and sponsors – Is the BAU support service one of the key measures?
- How seriously the business aligns this service (and underlying technology) to its strategic objectives – Is this a tactical solution or of strategic importance that needs to be back by a robust investment profile?
- The approach taken to implementing and planning for change after it’s launched – How have you approached the topic of governance, how do you plan to manage change? Who will own platform roadmap from the business (it shouldn’t be IT!)
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…and arguably the local teams own skills and experience on what to plan and provide for here – What resources and skills do we have and or need? How do we manage change requests for the platform – think content, configuration and custom (three types of change on a SharePoint platform).
This can be something as simple as providing some administrator training to your existing support staff to deal calls and resolve them. To something a lot more involved around working with existing but outsourced operational and tactical support teams who are working with ITIL or other service and support frameworks, or a full blown team of internal resources often referred to a ‘Centre of Excellence’.
The latter’s existence is a relatively immature model, but is often underpinned by some form of platform steering committee. Its primary objective is to deliver a rounded service that thinks and acts both strategically and operationally in managing the platform, both on the day to day aspects, but also the future manageability and roadmap updates to the SharePoint platform. This is often joined up with related technologies like Microsoft Exchange and Lync services under the same ‘collaborative’ roof, with many larger organisations and is something we’ve been working with actively in setting up with some of our larger clients for several years now.
So in summary, introducing some form of BAU service is something you need to actively consider from the outset of your planning, and budget accordingly. If you don’t, you will seriously damage the credibility of the platform to be taken on by the business, as they will need support on an on-going basis, which if not received, will force them back to their previous ways of working or something else entirely.
If you are looking for advice on understanding more about this topic, get in touch by email or give us call with further details.
