Our SharePoint services focus on establishing a base platform and then driving all features, over time, from a master work schedule. We often use this methodology to set up the SharePoint installation and complete the initial features necessary for go-live, and then transition to the customer’s staff for ongoing maintenance and support.

However, we’ve noticed that it is hard to find and keep good SharePoint talent, and many customers simply don’t have enough SharePoint maintenance work to be done to keep one employee busy full-time. This means that either the maintenance work doesn’t get done until something is extremely critical, or an employee is cross-trained on design, development, testing, and deployment on SharePoint in addition to their normal work tasks, typically ASP.NET development. This is a recipe for disaster.

Fundamentally, the process of assembling a solution in SharePoint is vastly different from typical .NET development, and is frustrating for the .NET developer. SharePoint, although built on .NET, is its own platform, with its own best practices, intricacies, gotchas, and not-so-obvious processes to get things done right. Also, the .NET developer often doesn’t address the other aspects of effective program management, such as maintaining the master work schedule, building consensus on feature specifications, and driving user testing. A Project Management Office can do this, but that is problematic in SharePoint because many of these efforts are small – a simply forms workflow application can be through design and development and ready for testing in 2-3 days.

This leads to another reason why SharePoint is not used effectively at many customers – their resources are not positioned to succeed at SharePoint. Between feature projects that are too small for a PMO to effectively track and a development approach that frustrates many .NET developers, SharePoint simply isn’t used to its full potential.

So, in addition to transitioning the master work schedule to your staff, we now offer complete SharePoint program management services. We can work with you and your users to ensure that your SharePoint investment pays off – that your users are delighted with SharePoint and will continue to effectively use it. We dedicate a technical engagement manager to you to handle working with you on the master work schedule on an ongoing basis to ensure it is current, accurate, and contains the requests from users and is prioritized according to your needs and input. As items are identified and prioritized on the master work schedule, we then work with our full-time SharePoint consultants as needed to get priority work done on time.

Because our methodology specifically is tailored to these small types of efforts, and our consultants are deeply experienced working with the SharePoint platform, the results are dependable, and our engagement manager works with you on a regular basis to review the master work schedule. We’ve found that the cost of engaging a program management service may actually be less than what you are incurring now in labor costs for SharePoint support, and the outcome should be markedly better.