My third post on "Thinking SharePoint" for www.endusersharepoint.com reproduced here.

Hi all

[Quick reference: Part 1 and Part 2]

If you have followed the first two articles in this series, I have been attempting to talk about SharePoint "head-space". In other words, SharePoint success is so much more a people issue than a technical or architectural one. As a result, it can be a little difficult to write about!

As a MOSS2007 product specialist and architect, I have slowly developed a kind of spider sense that allows me to pick out likely problematic implementations fairly early in the process. This spider sense is most definitely not along the lines of "oh these guys know nothing about application development/security/collaboration/[insert word here]". Often there are excellent, really knowledgeable staff on hand with exemplary credentials. It is instead a feeling that I previously described as "organisational maturity". Want a better explanation than that? How about something like the "oh they are *so* not ready for what they are getting themselves into" factor.

In Part 2, I’ve touched on the potent combination of differing personality types and the different stages of learning along with all of the new SharePoint features and options at your disposal. If you did not read part 2, then I strongly suggest you do so before continuing with this article because I am going to revisit the learning types stuff here.

Another way to describe the "unconsciously incompetent" stage of learning (that sounds much less insulting 😉 ) can be summed up as "you don’t know what you don’t know". The "Ikea guy" example in the last post is a perfect example of low organisational maturity. In my example, the poor unloved Ikea guy turns up at a house to install an Ikea modular storage solution and has to satisfy the conflicting requirements of a family so dysfunctional that the Simpsons seem pretty tame by comparison. It is clear from an outside perspective, that they have called in the "Ikea guy" way too early in the piece and in fact he is completely the wrong guy to call anyway! Wrong guy? Who should we be calling then?

Who you really need is someone like Carson and the boys from "queer eye for the straight guy" – Either them or Doctor Phil. They might come on a bit strong at first, but they work by winning your trust, building your respect and slowly but surely give you the confidence to change your old, bad habits. Before long the dysfunctional family have turned a corner, to the amazement of yourself and those around you. As an added bonus, you had a lot of fun along the way and your dress sense has improved as your stress levels have dropped 🙂

You still need the Ikea guy, but at least now the family no longer argues so much over which drawer your socks should be stored in!

Of course, the ultimate SharePoint consultant is this mythical person. can deal with your emotional issues *and* install the system! 🙂

Workshops, workshops!

Where possible, I always undertake SharePoint engagements in an advisory capacity before any time and cost estimates are made. Why? Because invariably, many/most clients start from a position of unconscious incompetence. Not just in term of the product itself, but in terms of a shared understanding of the problem with their colleagues and co-participants. Anyone who has been to a Microsoft sponsored SharePoint seminar and thought that SharePoint is the answer to their prayers is definitely in the first stage of their learning. In fact, when a client wants to skip the advisory stage and get straight into the "just tell me how much it costs", my spider senses tingle…

Thus, I run *plenty* of workshops. I don’t believe that "IT Integrators" who, for example, specialise in Exchange, Cisco networking and firewall type security are overly well suited to perform SharePoint implementations. Equally, I’m not convinced that a "Web Design House" is also particularly suited either. Yes, there is a big technical/architectural component (Ikea guys), but most of the work is in the facilitation, dialogue and requirements gathering stage of the process (Carson/Dr Phil guys). In other words, getting people from that "unconsciously incompetent" phase to "consciously incompetent" stage of learning.

I tend to keep the workshops to no more than two hours in a single day, with a break after an hour for everyone to recharge their brain cells with a jolt of caffeine :-). I also keep the workshops to 4 people or less and split into multiple workshops if there are more than 4 participants.

My goal in these workshops are threefold.

• Teach some product basics, answer common questions and set the scene
• Get participants thinking talking about what SharePoint means to them, and what they want to get out of it
• Assess the personality/competency/maturity level among participants ("unconsciously incompetent" versus "consciously incompetent’)

Achieving these goals usually takes two to three workshops and it is unwise to pack all of those goals into one workshop anyway. The first workshop is all about the product basics (goal 1 above). I do not go into massive detail, just enough so that participants are not flying completely blind with their understanding of the product. Signs of success of this workshop are the shared realisation from participants of the huge potential of the product in certain areas, and an appreciation of the fact that there are a lot of organisational issues that will affect success, and thus it is much more than just whacking in the CD and running SETUP.EXE.

Politics, politics!

I prefer to wait a day or two before the second workshops, as it gives participants a chance to take in the content of the first. When we meet for the second time, I do a quick recap on workshop 1, and then we start talking through requirements, issues, constraints and risks. One sure sign of organisational maturity among participants is how long this workshop takes. This is a factor of the scope of the perceived "problem" to be solved, but more importantly, often this is the first time the participants have actually *talked though* a problem together (aside from previously all agreeing that it is sub-optimal in the first place). It is very easy for these workshop to go over time, or to finish unresolved.

Additionally in this sort of workshops, you can fairly quickly assess the political dynamic of the group (goal 3). Participants always have different agendas or belief on what needs to be done to solve organisational problems. Often participants have locked horns with each-other way before SharePoint came on the scene, and it doesn’t take long to see where the dynamics lie. Understanding this dynamic allows you to tailor your facilitation and teaching approach and build trust and respect among all of the participants.

This can be a frustrating stage among participants, especially while a shared understanding is still being developed. But right here is the root of project failure – not just SharePoint.

What I will do now is tell you briefly about two different client engagements that I was involved in some time back. Both of these client engagements happened at around the same time, and each client happened to be in the same vertical market, although they had nothing to do with each-other. Both were ultimately successful projects in terms of delivery, but one was much more successful in terms of laying a foundation for future projects. If any aspect of these two tales resonate with you, please send a comment through at the end of this article.

Client 1

The first client was a tender that had a fixed time constraint (spider-sense goes gangbusters at this point). However the client had attended one of my seminars where we talked about how to approach a SharePoint project. (The subject matter being a more distilled version of my various posts such as this one). Thus, I had the chance to sit down and have a long chat with the client in an informal environment and felt the theme of our seminar had resonated with them and they had a solid appreciation why we approach SharePoint projects the way we do. 

Despite the very tight time frame I was able to conduct a couple of workshops in two groups and we were able to agree on deliverables that were realistic and achievable. However the workshops were an interesting experience. There were too many people and the group dynamic was clearly political in nature and there was open, sometimes rigorous debate, about specifics of the deliverables. The skill levels varied, as did the agendas. This client also outsourced IT support, so was somewhat light on the ground in terms of infrastructure and application development skills. Thus, we made a conscious decision to stick to SharePoint designer and go out-of-the-box for this initial engagement as we felt that the timeframe and process maturity constraints meant that we would be better served using tools that were easy to make modifications to. We had made this clear (or so we thought ) to the client when we responded to the tender.

By the end of the project two deliverables had expectation mismatches in their functionality. A couple of sticking points were actually how SharePoint was architected as a product and the miscommunication stemmed from a lack of understanding of how the product worked in particular regards. To change the behaviour would require disproportionate custom development work that would very likely be redundant fairly quickly, once users started using the product. Additionally, custom application development for SharePoint adds to governance and they were not yet ‘ready’ to make that leap.

Now it is important to note here that the client was not really at fault. You can hardly blame someone when they "don’t know what they don’t know". The failure was on my part, in that I did not do enough to ensure that we had a shared understanding and full awareness of the constraints of our approach. At the time I thought that we had achieved this milestone, but looking back, it as clear that principally due to the very tight time-frames that we had to operate under, we under-invested in this part of the project.

Fortunately in this case, we were able to agree on workarounds that got the project over the line on-time, made logical sense and did not have any major impact on either party. But the major "lesson learnt" from this project is that we never actually guided the client properly to the "consciously incompetent" stage of their learning.

Client 2

Client 2 was an interesting case. They attended the same seminar as Client 1, principally because a competing integrator had sold them the idea of using SharePoint for their Internet site. Upon seeing the high cost of the licensing, the competing integrator then showed them "all of the other great features" that they would get from investing in SharePoint and overloaded them on recycled Microsoft "6 pillar" marketing material. The client liked all of these new features of course, and thus broadened the scope of the deliverables to help justify the cost.

Result? Even more confusion (and at this point they still had not actually *used* SharePoint). So they attended my seminar for some direction and I was subsequently engaged in an advisory capacity to help them make sense of it all.

I used the workshop approach as described above, and the first workshop was heavy going, because it took a while to sort out all of the marketing fluff from reality. They had been the victim of one too many PowerPoint slide decks and thus jumped around from topic to topic. I answered as best I could, occasionally having to use geek-speak but mostly was able to keep it pitched at the right sort of level. The client then had to reconcile the reality of SharePoint against this overly broad scope that they had created for themselves. It was frustrating for them, and I really felt for them. I even went as far as to offer to discuss things over a beer. (It’s amazing how much more progress you can make over beer 😉 .

A week went by, and the client called me back in. That week they had spent a lot of time soul searching and debating where, when and how SharePoint should be tackled. In the end they had re-examined the corporate strategy, which was a high level, 3 year plan that had been signed off by the organisation previously. They then examined the IT department’s 3 year plan which was developed to support the organisational strategy.

They came to the conclusion, that their external web site was not the place to start, for various reasons. Instead, they identified a much smaller scope project that slotted in perfectly with both the IT department strategy and more importantly, the organisational strategy. They asked me for feedback and I was very enthusiastic in how well they had done, considering the hard-slog workshops from the week before.

At this point, the transition from "unconsciously incompetent" to "consciously incompetent" was well underway

I met with them a few days later. Since the entire team was behind the agreed project, they had talked to the organisation stakeholders, mapped out and documented the process before I had arrived. They also were eager to learn SharePoint, and since the scope of this project was not large and the shared understanding was high, we were able to use this project as the training exercise to learn various concepts from Farm Administration, libraries, lists and columns, SharePoint Designer workflow and InfoPath Forms Services. When we hit an obstacle, we collectively were able to find creative, yet simple ways to get around them.

That smaller scope project was successfully delivered, and the benefits were significant. The team now has a much better understanding of the product, its constraints and limitations. It was now much easier to plan for and tackle the more significant project of web content management (Internet site) as there was a much greater level of shared understanding between participants. They felt more confident in their knowledge of the product, and now feel confident that they would be able to manage the expectations of the organisation.

All in all, it was a great engagement and I came away with a huge respect for that client. More importantly, the relationship continues to this day.

Conclusion

I wonder if the story of the first client is a familiar one to readers, either as being and end-user or being involved in the project itself? 

Certainly the second client had frustrations at the start, as they realised that SharePoint was not the panacea they were looking for, they stopped, took stock and co-operatively reassessed the situation. Unconstrained from a fixed time deadline, they realised that more thought was required. That action potentially saved them a lot of stress and heartache which they would have experienced had they ploughed on ahead with an ambitions project. It has now given them a great foundation to build upon for the future.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

Those in the security community who have ever performed vulnerability assessment/penetration testing will know of the Google Hacking database. Google is actually a very handy tool to look for potentially vulnerable sites, due to the fact that it will crawl anything it finds. Therefore, if you have misconfigured an externally facing web-based application, at some point the crawler will come along and your misconfiguration will end up in Google’s giant cache.

Extending this risk to SharePoint is not such a stretch. For example, type the following into a Google search…

"view all site content" "sign in" "people and groups"

What do you see?

Scary, huh?

Now to be fair, I have to make some points here.

• Many of these sites are legitimately meant to be accessible to the public
• I am not disclosing a SharePoint vulnerability, or any issue with the security of the product. Hence why this is not posted to say, bugtraq and I am not making a big deal of it beyond this post.
• SharePoint is secure by default in the sense that privileged operations are protected by granular access permissions and anonymous access must be explicitly granted.
• It is extremely unlikely that you will be able to change anything – as this is read-only anonymous access explicitly granted by the SharePoint administrator. Areas of the site not marked anonymous (e.g site settings) should be safe from modification
• If there is an error here, then it is human error around configuration of the product.

But as a "bad guy", when you decide to target an organisation, you go through a phase of gathering as much information as possible. Some of these sites expose domain names, user account names and other personal details. Such information can be used to gather additional information. For example, knowing a person’s name, I could set up a fake email address, myspace or facebook account in that person’s name and target their colleagues using social engineering techniques. Using anonymity tools like tor in combination with say, WGET, you could sponge all of the data and documents on such sites for offline analysis.

Documents left inside public document libraries expose internal system names, acronyms and details that paint a fuller picture of the internal organisational set-up. Such information can be used for bogus telephone surveys for the purpose of obtaining more information, targeted Trojans disguised as patches, etc. On occasion, particularly sensitive information can be found within these publicly accessible lists and libraries. (Consider the risk if a data connection library or client list was contained in a site like this).

Additionally, when I see domain names, it gives me a pretty good idea of the topology of the SharePoint infrastructure also. Why? Well, for example, if I see domain names, then people are signing in using their domain accounts. Therefore, the SharePoint server has to be part of the Active Directory and is very likely residing on their internal network and published to the Internet via ISA or some other reverse proxy or port forwarding technique.

All in all, it should be a wake up call to SharePoint administrators about the risks of information disclosure when setting up public-facing SharePoint sites.

Google does not forgive (or forget).

Thanks

Paul Culmsee

As I mentioned in my last post, I always security trim SharePoint. A very common issue with a security trimmed SharePoint is the "access denied" message that you receive when trying to activate the "Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" site collection feature.

There are lots of blog topics about this. Most refer to this one as the definitive source.

Activating Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure

The issue here is that the publishing feature actually breaks a security rule. When you think about it, activating a site collection feature should only ever modify settings related to that site collection. I previously blogged about how it was bad practice for a site collection feature to modify the web.config files for a given web application.

If you set the scope of this feature at the site collection level, you are basically allowing a site collection administrator to make a change that affects all other site collections in the web application. Uh – does the site collection administrator have access to other site collections? Probably not, so why the hell would you allow them to perform a task that impacts on site collections to which they have no access? You don’t – it breaks the security model.

Well, as it happens, the publishing feature needs to create some SharePoint timer jobs to deal with the scheduling of publishing pages (i.e. Setting the date/time of when a page should be published to the masses). But where are timer jobs edited and managed?

Site Collection Administration! This is a *farm* level operation. Should a site collection administrator have the access rights to add custom timer jobs to the SharePoint farm? Hell, no! that is a farm administrator’s job!

So, is it no surprise then, that the publishing feature barfs when activated by a site collection administrator who has no *farm* level access? (I’ve pasted the error message to the end of this article).

I could whine about how this *should* be done, but instead, I’ll simply tell you the two quickest tricks to fix this issue. Both of these methods do not require changing permissions as per the aforementioned blog.

The first method, is to use STSADM to activate the feature for the site collection. By definition, to use the STSADM command, you have to be logged into the SharePoint server and be a farm administrator. Therefore, running the following command should do the trick.

stsadm -o activatefeature -name PublishingSite -url http://sitecollectionurl

The second method is the one that I use (although it’s less clean). As per normal, I create a web application, and then create a site collection. (Usually the blank template for reasons that I will talk about some other time). But rather than log into the site and activate the publishing feature via site settings, I immediately create a *second*  site collection (e.g /sites/boo).

Remember that I am performing this task via SharePoint central administration, so I have farm level permissions.

When I create this second site collection, I choose the publishing site template. As the name suggests, the publishing site template uses the publishing site feature by default. So in creating this site collection, the SharePoint timer jobs get added to the farm.

I then immediately *delete* this site collection, as it is no longer needed.

Now I can load the originally created site collection and activate the publishing feature. It will work fine, because the timer jobs have already been created, and all of the other goodies that the publishing feature gives you, are scoped at the *site collection* level. Therefore, no more "access denied" messages.

Regards

Paul Culmsee

www.cleverworkarounds.com

Error message: (stop reading now – this is for google 🙂

"Feature Activation: Threw an exception, attempting to roll back.  Feature ‘PublishingResources’ (ID: ‘aebc918d-b20f-4a11-a1db-9ed84d79c87e’).  Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to provision the scheduling job definitions.  Page scheduling will not succeed. OriginalException: Access denied. —> System.Security.SecurityException: Access denied.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObject.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPJobDefinition.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWorkItemJobDefinition.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.RootProvisioner.<>c__DisplayClass5.<AddSchedulingJobDefinitions>b__4()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevatedWrapper

I guess the entire SharePoint world now is aware of the post SP1 "Infrastructure updates" put out by Microsoft recently. Probably the best thing about them are that the flaky "content deployment" feature has had some serious work done on it. (My advice has always been use with extreme caution or avoid it, but now I will have to reassess).

Anyway, that is not what I am writing about. Being a former IT Security consultant, I have always installed SharePoint in a "least privilege" configuration. I use different service accounts for search, farm, SSP, reporting services and web applications. The farm account in particular, is one that needs to be very carefully managed given its control over the heart of SharePoint – the configuration database.

Specifically, the farm account never should have any significant rights on any SharePoint farm server, over and above what it minimally needs (which is some SQL Server rights and some DCOM permission stuff). For what it’s worth, I do not use the Network Service account either, as it is actually more risky than a low privileged domain or local user account.

Developers on the other hand tend to run their boxes as full admin. I have no problem with this, so long as there is a QA or test server that is running least privilege.

However, as always with tightening the screws, there are some potential side effects in doing this. There are occasions when the farm account actually needs to perform a task that requires higher privileges, over and above what it has by default. Upgrading SharePoint from a standard to enterprise license is one such example, and it seems that performing the infrastructure update may be another.

If you take the time to read the installation instructions for the infrastructure update, there is this gem of advice:

To ensure that you have the correct permissions to install the software update and run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, we recommend that you add the account for the SharePoint Central Administration v3 application pool identity to the Administrators group on each of the local Web servers and application servers and then log on by using that account

You may wonder why this even matters? After all, it is exceedingly likely that you logged into the server as an administrator or domain administrator anyway. Surely you have all the permission that you need, right?

The answer is that not all update tasks are run by your logged-in account. Although you start the installation using your account, at a certain point during the install, many tasks are performed by the SharePoint Central Administration application. Thus, despite you having administrative permissions, SharePoint (using the farm account) will not have.

So the advice above essentially says, temporarily add the SharePoint farm account to the local administrators group and then log into the server as that user account. Now perform the action as instructed. That way the account that starts the installation is the same account that runs SharePoint and thus we know that we are using the correct account with the correct server privileges.

Once the installation has been completed, you can log out of the farm account and then revoke its administrator access, and we are back to the original locked down configuration.

So keep this in mind when performing farm tasks that are likely to require some privileges at the operating system level. It is a good habit to get into (provided you remember to lock down permissions afterwards 🙂 ).

Cheers

Paul

Hi all

My poor-old cleverworkarounds blog has been sadly neglected lately (and my numbers are reflecting that too dammit). But I have actually been doing a while lot of writing for other SharePoint online publications, namely EndUserSharePoint and SharePoint Magazine.

The feedback from both has been great and much appreciated. If you haven’t read these articles, then here is your quick reference.

Series 1: Rethinking SharePoint

This is a 4 part series that was a serious attempt to delve into SharePoint headspace. I focused very much on the human/social side of SharePoint projects. I was pretty pleased with how it came out and look forward to the final part being published soon.

• Thinking SharePoint – and listen to your mother!
• Thinking SharePoint Part 2 – The “unconsciously competent” Ikea Mecca
• Thinking SharePoint Part 3 – A Tale of Two Clients
• Thinking SharePoint Part 4 – Zen and the art of SharePoint

Series 2: A tribute to the leave form

This series is an offbeat look at the world of InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint Designer workflow. Although I am having a bit of fun with this, there is a serious message behind it. While forms services looks terrific in demos, sometimes looks can be deceiving! The trick with this series is that they are also written to cater for a large audience, and that will be quite a challenge when we get into web services and code behind in InfoPath.

I’ve written 4 articles so far and I’d say there could easily be a dozen by the time I am done. The feedback has been really good, so here’s hoping I can deliver the rest!

• A tribute to the humble “leave form” – Part 1
• A tribute to the humble “leave form” – Part 2 *not yet released*
• A tribute to the humble “leave form” – Part 3 *not yet released*
• A tribute to the humble “leave form” – Part 4 *not yet released*
• .
• .
• A tribute to the humble “leave form” – Part n *not yet written* 🙂

I have a large list of topics to also get well and truly stuck into, so hopefully I’ll have some quality stuff for you fairly soon.

Stay tuned

Paul Culmsee

This post from the eLumenotion blog is clever and really tickled my sense of humour.

He describes a declassified wartime era document called the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" and the content is pure gold 🙂

"It gives advice on how to deliberately screw things up but can also be read as an anti-pattern of behaviors to avoid yourself and to watch for in those you manage or collaborate with. The evil genius of this guide is that all of the techniques it advises are destructive behaviors that normal people exhibit on a daily basis. So, if you were to do these things in a theater of war you could hurt the enemy while maintaining plausible deniability and avoid a firing squad."

Sections include

• Sabotage Under the Guise of Process
• Sabotage Via Project Management
• Sabotage Your Team Via Poor Work

I soooo wish that I had seen this when I was writing the "SharePoint Project Failure" series as I actually touched on some of these areas.

Do yourself a favour and check the post.

My next post on "Thinking SharePoint" for www.endusersharepoint.com reproduced here.

Hi again. Sorry about the delay in continuing with this "how to think SharePoint" series, but in Australia, the month of June is the end of the financial year. I assume it works the same way in the rest of the world too. What happens here is that IT Managers suddenly realise that they have some budget funds left over and therefore feel an irrepressible urge to spend it all. (They tend to be fearful that they will get less money allocated for the next year if they don’t spend all that is allocated to them this year).

Usually what they spend surplus budget cash on depends on whatever product or technology is at the peak of the hype cycle for that year. Therefore instead of something morale boosting like paying their hardworking staff a bonus or purchasing training vouchers for them, this year a lot of IT managers will wander around showing off their shiny new Apple iPhone and a lot of SharePoint consultants like me are very busy indeed.

And this is relevant, why?

Okay so yes, I am busy and haven’t had much time to devote to writing. But the real reason that I bring this end of financial year stuff up, is to point out that if you took anything away from the first post, you would appreciate that I find it a warning sign. Despite best intentions, buying SharePoint because you have some budget left is not necessarily the best place to focus surplus funds. You are in effect perpetuating the whole issue of the "solution looking for a problem".

In this world of organisational politics, no manager or sponsor is going to purchase SharePoint without something with "wow factor" to show for it. So on top of a fixed deadline, it has to look great and solve a few pertinent business needs, so that the organisation endorses and evangelises it, right?

My SharePoint spider senses are tingling already…

The plight of the "Ikea guy"

In the last post I implied that the prevalent world of folders (or directories) originated from two stoned Multix programmers in the 1960’s. I also likened folders to a wooden toybox and compared it to SharePoint as an uber-cool Ikea style modular storage solution. Of course, it all looked absolutely fantastic when you saw it in the display room in the suburban mecca that is an Ikea store.

So I want you to picture the plight of the "Ikea guy". He’s the guy who arrives at a house with a truck full of Ikea boxes who is going to install it for you. Now I want you to think about your organisation (in all its messed-up glory) and try and picture it as a family living at this house. 

From the Ikea guy’s point of view, the house looks really nice as he walks up to the front door. The garden is neat and trimmed and the lounge room is clean and tidy. The family inside seem really polite. However, once pleasantries have been exchanged and he takes a look around the rest of the house, it takes about 10 minutes for the Ikea guy to know that it’s just not going to be a good day.

Why?

• Mum and Dad are in marriage counselling and it’s not going well
• The kids barely speak to each other and don’t respect their parents
• Dad thinks he knows best and that everything should be strictly put away according to colour no matter which room
• Mum doesn’t care how things are put away, so long as they are put away
• One of the kids is a teenage goth/emo, and he wants it all painted black
• One kid is anal retentive and has one of those label makers and likes to put "Property of xxx" on everything
• Another kid is a greenie-stoner and "it all should be like.. whatever you want man…"
• One of the kids is vain and self obsessed, wants more pocket money and wants to individualise everything with stickers all over the place
• One kid is a toddler, needs nappies changed and leaves a mess everywhere he/she goes

Finally…

• The husband never told the family that the Ikea guy was coming anyway and his measurements were out

So after much arguments between themselves, they turn to the Ikea guy and say "You tell us how should we do this?"

At this point the Ikea guy is completely screwed, no matter what he says, he is in trouble. It’s like when your wife or girlfriend asks if she looks fat in that dress. Even a pause before answering is going to be misconstrued in a way where you always lose.

Personalities, personalities…

In a lot of my writings I have fun with stereotypes. I tend to imply that IT managers are luddites or micro-managers, web designers and branding people are all vain metrosexuals and IT nerds have no people skills :-P. Senior managers all have a serious case of attention deficit disorder and the general user population is as varied as the kids I used in the Ikea example. The "human" side of SharePoint fascinates me greatly, as I have seen some people completely besotted with particular product features, such as wikis or blogs, yet have no interest at all in other features.

Not only are there different personalities, there are different leaning types. For people involved with SharePoint projects at any level, I recommend reading up on Myers-Briggs Indicators or the Marsden DISC quadrant model. I’ll blog in detail about these some other time, but the point here is that your version of the truth, if you’re lucky, will be shared by only 20% of your peers. So even if you put a bunch of SharePoint technical experts into a room and asked them to design a collaborative solution, the chances of them creating the same design is actually pretty low.

It’s like music taste. I’m sure that some readers thought to themselves "What’s wrong with the Backstreet Boys?", after reading my first post. Whilst I find that question too ridiculous to even contemplate, I recognise that part of the key to "thinking SharePoint" is recognising that Backstreet Boys fans do actually exist and therefore ensuring that their "special needs" are accommodated :-).

Moral? Chacun à son goût. Each to their own! Just remember that not everyone sees it the way you do and what will excite and interest you will not necessarily do the same for others.

Learning Styles

Another big contributor to effective "SharePoint thinking" is actually rooted in learning style theory. The theory says that when training people, there are different stages of awareness and competence. Personality types affect learning a lot, but here I present a bastardised SharePoint version of learning theory.

Stage 1 – SharePoint ‘unconscious incompetence’

• The person is not aware of the relevance or considerations of the problem that SharePoint is being used to solve
• The person is not aware that they have a particular deficiency in their knowledge of the applicability of SharePoint
• The person might deny the relevance or usefulness of SharePoint
• Conversely, the person might oversell the relevance or usefulness of SharePoint

Training theory states that the person must become conscious of their incompetence before development of the new skill or learning can begin. The aim of the trainer is to guide the person into the ‘conscious competence’ stage. In most problematic SharePoint projects, it is common that participants are at this unconscious incompetence stage and training without recognition of this fact is misfocused and wasteful. While the majority of participants in a SharePoint project are at this stage in their learning, then you are on a dangerous slope to SharePoint project failure if you proceed too fast.

Stage 2 – SharePoint conscious incompetence’

• The person becomes aware of the existence and relevance of the problem that SharePoint is being used to solve
• The person is therefore also aware of their deficiency in SharePoint knowledge and skill, ideally by attempting or trying to use the product
• The person realises that by improving their skill or ability in SharePoint, their effectiveness will improve

Many people will feel that they are at this stage, but in fact they are still in stage 1. (It’s hard to put a quantifiable finger on how I personally determine this, but I think it is something that seasoned SharePoint professionals get a good feel for over time). Essentially any untested assumption on how SharePoint works or how it should be used to solve a problem is within the realm of stage 1!

I find that if I can get clients into Stage 2, then the nature of engagements change. The fixation on delivering the whole enchilada in a fixed time and fixed cost is replaced by dialogue, workshops, strategy sessions and the likes. At this point no scope of what is to be delivered has been fixed in stone as the client realises that they have to invest more in their learning and understanding for an ultimately positive outcome. The client has in effect made a commitment to learn and we proceed steadily to stage 3.

Stage 3 – SharePoint conscious competence

Note, In my opinion this period takes anywhere from two to twelve months, depending on the organisational size, culture, wickedness of the problem to solve, etc.

• The person achieves ‘conscious competence’ in SharePoint when they can use it without feeling fearful or intimidated
• The person will need to concentrate and think in order to understand the technical and organisational governance implications of a new SharePoint solution
• The person will not reliably perform SharePoint work unless thinking about it – the skill is not yet ‘second nature’ or ‘automatic’
• The person should be able to demonstrate SharePoint skills to another, but is unlikely to have the ability to teach it well to another person
• The person should ideally continue to practice their skills, and if appropriate, commit to becoming ‘unconsciously competent’ at the new skill
• Practice is the single most effective way to move from stage 3 to 4

Stage 4 – SharePoint unconscious competence.

Nirvana! Are any of us here yet???

• Applying SharePoint features and capabilities to business problems skill becomes so practiced that estimates of time, effort and cost are accurate and met
• Understanding of technical and organisational governance considerations of potential courses of action are implicitly understood

And then there was the Intranet

One of the reasons that folders have stuck for so many years would have to be its simplicity. For all of its suckiness, it has a somewhat constraining effect. Whilst folders can suck royally, it’s all you have available to use and therefore debates/arguments are not about whether to use folders or not, but how to use them. For most, there really was no alternative.

Then from around the mid nineties, there came the rise of the intranet. As a content delivery mechanism it proved hugely popular and suddenly corporate knowledge was made available via a much more accessible medium. But it was a different kind of content, and there was a significant "disconnect" with the corporate file system. Content authors would put their files onto the file-system and then on the intranet in a different format.

For the sake of article size and keeping it flowing, I am not going to talk too much about portals vs intranet’s because to the average end user, they are one and the same. I know people will beg to differ with me on this but I don’t think the distinction will be that relevant to this article.

Choices, choices, choices…

Even now more than a decade of "intranets" later, many clients who I talk to really struggle with the concept of a "SharePoint style intranet". The disconnection between the traditional intranet and the file-system is fairly ingrained, and in my experience, it is very common to find people initially unable to "connect" with the idea that your file-system, document management system and workflow system can be your intranet and visa versa.

This disconnect needs to be addressed early in the piece. Failure to do so and expectations will be unmet. Differing versions of the truth will abound and then how can participants and stakeholders possibly cope with the veritable smorgasbord of choices offered by SharePoint?

We still have folders of course, but now we have other elements as well, such as document libraries, columns of various types, webparts, versioning, approvals, lists, workflows, sites, site collections, web applications (oh and full text indexing/search too). So rather than debate on how, we now also have to argue on the what as well.

Combine organisational culture factors, SharePoint conscious or unconscious competence levels, the different personality types, life skills and values of participants, each with different buttons to push. Is it any great revelation then that too many choices can be more destructive than none at all?

Sheesh! It’s a wonder we don’t kill each other trying to work this all out!

Conclusion

I suspect that many reading this article would not be too offended if I suggest that they are "SharePoint consciously incompetent". It is actually where you need to start from, and in some ways I am preaching to the converted here. It is the people, not reading this article, who are likely to be in the unconsciously incompetent stage of learning. So, no matter what your role in your organisation is, one of the keys to "thinking SharePoint" as it were, is to move yourselves and your colleagues from stage 1 to stage 2.

In the next post I am going to tell you a tale of two clients, where one made the transition from SharePoint unconscious incompetence to SharePoint conscious incompetence and one who did not. I was the "Ikea guy" in both cases, and I think the stories offer some valuable insights.

Bye for now

Paul

Note: Special thanks to Andrew Jolly for his excellent ideas and feedback

I have to say, SharePoint is one of the most misunderstood products that Microsoft have ever released. The misunderstanding extends from executive management who signed the budget approval to put it in, to the geeks who actually put it in for us, and all the way to us end-users who are expected to find nirvana in its magical world of sites, lists, libraries, workflows and the like.

Misunderstanding creates confusion, and confusion leads to bad implementations, expectations unmet, teams deflated and the word “SharePoint” being spoken only in whispers in-case you’re overheard by the many ears of the corporate immune mechanism.

The outcome of this series is to give the reader an appreciation of a more human look at SharePoint. Therefore I will not be exhaustively examining every feature within SharePoint, but instead to take a high level look at some of the key SharePoint concepts and then try and put them into an organisational context. To get the best out of SharePoint requires forethought and soul searching. Despite the obvious temptation, diving straight in can be a little like wearing a Backstreet Boys t-shirt at a Metallica concert – you may live to regret that decision…

.. but you can hardly blame Metallica can you?

Article Pre-requisites

This series has been aimed at a broad cross section of the user base. If your circumstances match any of the following scenarios, then the material may be for you.

• you have had SharePoint pushed at you by an overzealous IT department and you are wondering what the fuss is all about
• you are a member of the overzealous IT department, a true believer and wonder why the masses don’t get it
• you are a senior executive who’s computer literacy extends to the on-button of your laptop but your IT Manager tells you this “SharePoint” thing may be good for the organisation
• your organisation is doing one of those heavily promoted organisational change frameworks with a fancy slogan, t-shirts and mouse-mats. SharePoint is touted as a key component
• you find the myriad of documentation, blogs, and online references to be too intimidating or nerdy for your taste
• SharePoint is deployed, you have been sent on a 2 day feature-fest training course but little real progress has been made since then.

For those not yet convinced

If you do not consider yourself a SharePoint true believer, then good on you! You are probably half way to a successful deployment already. It is not a panacea and it will not bring about world peace. It has massive potential – no doubt about it, but the propensity to fail is higher than you might expect. (For more on that topic see this series I wrote a little while back)

SharePoint has a myriad of features and ways to approach solving common business problems. Whether you are a senior manager, team lead or team member, chances are you can find a way to improve or optimise some aspect of your work using SharePoint. You can find plenty of great articles on endusersharepoint.com to introduce you to the product, solve common problems and learn from others. But at the end of the day, SharePoint is a tool and all tools are supposed to come with a safety manual to prevent misuse and accidental injury.

So to continue the above metaphor, the only way you would get out of the Metallica concert alive with the Backstreet Boys t-shirt would be to shout the bar and buy a lot of beers!

In this series, I hope to teach you which t-shirt to wear at a metal gig, as well as how and when to buy those beers when you get it wrong!

How Microsoft software products are normally delivered

SharePoint represents a change for users as well as IT people. Previously, when say, the latest MSOffice suite was deployed to a company, users had little say. If you were lucky, you would get sent off to some training, and then left to your own devices. But that was cool – its MSOffice. We have all used it, and using a new version isn’t really a major hindrance to producing Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents. Give it a day or two and you are pretty much back in business.

But SharePoint – that’s a whole different story. Not only do you need to be trained in how the product works, you need time to take it all in. You almost certainly need to also change the way you think about certain aspects to your work and you will almost certainly not get it right the first time. Thus, for some of you (likely all who are reading this article) will relish the opportunity to use some of the features to improve your productivity. However, many others will resist it and take a long time to come around.

What makes SharePoint such an interesting product is that the pro and anti crowds will have to accommodate each other if a SharePoint project is to really succeed. That is the tough bit!

40 years of folders

In 1965 an operating system called Multics was developed for mainframe computers. It wasn’t exactly a rampaging success back then. But hey, PC’s hadn’t been invented either and back then, “The Sound of Music” was everyone’s idea of a night out at the movies. Thus it wasn’t exactly dotcom times.

But it was here, where the first “Hierarchical file system” was developed.

“Hierarchical what the…” You exclaim?

You know it as folders, subfolders or directories and for over 40 years, the concept has essentially been unchanged. For most people, folders and subfolders have been your only option for categorising and collaborating on files.

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when the Multics guys wrote the specification for the hierarchical file system. Since it’s the sixties, I’m sure that’s it happened something like this…

Engineer 1 (smoking a joint of weed) “Dude, imagine if we could like… put a filing cabinet in the computer man…”

Passes joint to Engineer 2 who takes a drag and laughs uncontrollably for ten minutes

Engineer 2: Whoa man, your freaking me out! – let’s order some pizza”

Listen to your mother (and clean up your room already)!

We adults are complete hypocrites. As kids, we were told relentlessly by our mothers to clean our rooms. We tell our children to clean up their rooms too, yet the shared file system in the typical workplace is messier than even the most rebellious teenager’s poster covered, mouldy sock smelling abode.

The corporate file system is like a giant play-area for adults, which has not been cleaned in years. In fact, whenever there is a suggestion to ‘clean up’ the play-area, the adult equivalent of “oh mum do I have to?” is heard down the corridors.

Why is it that people don’t like to put their toys away? As you mother said, “if you leave them lying around they will get broken, and may be accidently thrown out”.

Anybody who has ever worked for an organisation of more than 1 person will know the joy (not!) of trying to find that all important critical file. You know darn well it’s there somewhere, but do you think you can find it? Then you go to the trouble to recreate your work, only to find that someone changed permissions and you no longer see it.

The inefficiencies caused by the messy play area are pretty significant, not only on your individual stress levels, but at a departmental and organisational level too. Often files go missing, or the wrong versions are used. Multiple copies abound, and everyone seems to have an in-built reflex to file and name things slightly differently to everyone else. I’ve seen this cost big money too, an example being hundreds of thousands of dollars lost when a fixed price contract used a cost estimate based on the wrong specification. Ouch!

The Ikea effect

Forget the marketing fluff and the seemingly endless array of features on SharePoint slide decks. For most people SharePoint will be about sites, lists, libraries, forms and workflow. In subsequent articles I will talk about these as these concepts are really important, but if there is one theme I want to leave you with.

These new features are like going from a wooden toybox like this…

…to a fully decked out Ikea playroom like this

It might look pretty, and smell new and fresh at the start. But the moral of the story is this. You might have a fancier storage system with additional bells and whistles, but you still need to put your toys away and agree with everyone else where things should go! Furthermore, The IKEA guy who installs it all for you might make some suggestions, but at the end of the day, he isn’t going to be able to definitively tell you where things go and you wouldn’t listen to him anyhow as they are your toys.

So in the next post I’ll dig a little deeper into putting our toys away properly.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

I just posted a new article to the EndUserSharePoint.com as a guest author. There will be a few of us doing this over the next few weeks, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out. The article is a more end-user focused version of the topic areas that I am interested in – the human side of collaboration. I’ll re-post it here too in a couple of days, but for now, you can read my article here.

The article is called "Thinking SharePoint (and listen to your mother)"

In the ongoing quest to find the perfect metaphor, it features Metallica, the Backstreet Boys, two stoned software engineers and Ikea.

later

Paul

Hi

Well, here we are at part 8 in a series of posts dedicated to the topic of SharePoint project failure. Surely after 7 posts, you would think that we are exhausting the various factors that can have a negative influence on time, budget and SharePoint deliverables? Alas no! My urge to peel back this onion continues unabated and thus I present one final post in this series.

Now if I had my time again, I would definitely re-order these posts, because this topic area is back in the realm of project management. But not to worry. I’ll probably do a ‘reloaded’ version of this series at some point in the future or make an ebook that is more detailed and more coherently written, along with contributions from friends.

In the remote chance that you are hitting this article first up, it is actually the last of a long series written over the last couple of months (well, last for now anyway). We started this series with an examination of the pioneering work by Horst Rittell in the 1970’s and subsequently examined some of the notable historical references to wicked problems in IT. From there, we turned our attention to SharePoint specifically and why it, as a product, can be a wicked problem. We looked at the product from viewpoints, specifically, project managers, IT infrastructure architects and application developers.

In the last article, we once again drifted away from SharePoint directly and looked at senior management and project sponsors contribution. Almost by definition, when looking at the senior management level, it makes no sense to be product specific, since at this level it is always about business strategy.

In this post, I’d like to examine when best practice frameworks, the intent of which is to reduce risk of project failure, actually have the opposite effect. We will look at why this is the case in some detail.

CleverWorkarounds tequila shot rating..

    For readers with a passing interest in best practice frameworks and project management.

For nerds who swear they will never leave the "tech stuff."

Continue reading “Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? – Part 8”