What does SharePoint success look like?
Earlier this year, our SharePoint team lead, Carol, published a blog on calculating SharePoint’s return on investment. Based on my SharePoint consulting work, I’ve developed a few more thoughts to add on to this topic.
One key to getting a good return on your SharePoint investment is start out with a clear understanding of the specific problem that needs to be solved. SharePoint is a great tool that can fit a range of needs, but without a good grasp of the business problem it can be difficult to assess what success looks like!
Metrics for success
After you’ve identified the business problem that SharePoint will solve, you should also take some time to set clear metrics for success. For example, if document management is an issue, you could set the goal of uploading and tagging every asset in SharePoint by a certain date.
Another example of a business problem could be lack of local storage. Dealing with many requests related to this issue is a drain on IT’s time, and storage on SharePoint would make assets available anywhere from the cloud.
The solution to this problem might be to train employees to use SharePoint for document collaboration and sharing. To take the metrics a bit further to hard ROI, you could calculate the cost of the amount of extra local space on hard drives, plus wasted IT time.
Identifying areas for improvement
As you think about your company’s business problems, it may also help to prioritize them based on the largest total cost. Think about the following:
- How much time does it take to process an order?
- How much time do developers spend looking for project or customer documentation?
- How much rework results from users not having the most current draft or documentation?
For each of these, you should estimate the total time to complete a process and the number of times the process is performed.
For question one, the equation might look like this:
After you run this equation on multiple problems, it should become very clear which processes are wasting the most time and money for your company. Since you can’t do everything at once, this will give your team a very clear roadmap for where to begin.
Achieving efficiencies through one solution
Moving beyond the process specific return on investment, another consideration for SharePoint is the value of an enterprise level, company wide solution. Without this, each department is on their own to solve the same problems over and over. Not only is this a waste of effort, it also prevents information from flowing smoothly from department to department.
As we shared last week, lack of access to information can result in employees wasting up to two hours every day looking for information. This number can mushroom exponentially when you consider other factors, like:
Looking for documents
Who has the most current document?
Is this the official document?
Looking for information
Who is the key contact for the XYZ Project?
Who are the team members on the Safety Committee?
Waiting for a coworker to send a draft document
Depending on the size of your company, this time sink alone could be enough to justify the investment in SharePoint!
Investing in better processes
Every day, your team faces breakdowns in collaboration due to lack of documentation, manual processes, and duplication of effort. No doubt SharePoint is an investment, but running the numbers on your company’s most time and effort heavy tasks should very quickly highlight areas that would provide a quick ROI.