SharePoint adoption: Team SLA’s

I stumbled on the networkworld community site with a post from Susan Hanley about SharePoint adoption.

She talks in that post about micro strategies for adoption, and how they almost seem like Service Level Agreements for team members.
She thinks it is a good idea to explicitly write down an SLA on how team members should behave (SharePoint-wise) in a project or on a site. That way, your team members will use the “best practices”. Great list to lay down on a kick-off meeting, especially with people who never worked with SharePoint before.

Her example list:
For our project team:
– We will use the team site template that’s been used on other projects – the one that we are either already used to using or will start seeing on everything that we are working on.
– We won’t email documents to one another – we will just send links to documents in our team site.
– We will make sure that all of the work for the project, even documents that are not finished, are stored in the team site.
– We will all make sure to use the Status attribute when we share documents, indicating whether a document is a Draft, Ready for Review, or Final.
– We will use Ratings to indicate whether a document is potentially reusable or a candidate for a best practice example. (In other words, this is the framework we will use to apply document ratings – this is what ratings mean for our team.)
– When we are assigned a task to review a document for a colleague, we will review the document and update the assigned task.
– We will tag content as it is added, even if the attributes aren’t required!
– We will let the team leader/project manager know if the metadata scheme needs to be adjusted.
– We will use a Meeting Workspace for agendas and minutes and we will upload meeting presentations to the workspace at least 4 hours in advance.
– We will use the Discussion Board instead of email to post questions and solicit feedback from each another.
– We will each agree to complete our user profile.
– We will share key project milestones in our status updates in our My Site.
– We will be accountable for checking the team site regularly – either by setting up alerts or using any other approach that fits within our personal work process.

I will probably use this in a project in the near or far future

About: Marijn

Marijn Somers (MVP) has over 14 years experience in the SharePoint world, starting out with SP2007. Over the years the focus has grown to Office 365, with a focus on collaboration and document management. He is a business consultant at Balestra and Principal Content Provider for "Mijn 365 Coach" that offers dutch employee video training. His main work tracks are around user adoption, training and coaching and governance. He is also not afraid to dig deeper in the technicalities with PowerShell, adaptive cards or custom formatting in lists and libraries. You can listen to him on the biweekly "Office 365 Distilled" podcast.