Getting Executive Buy-In for Support and using SharePoint

As SharePoint is new to most organizations and progressing steadily, there is a need to ensure that the Executive Team is using and supporting the tool, When asked on how and what successes or what can you share to help me help these individuals begin using SharePoint and encouraging their staff to embrace and utilize SharePoint. We track soft cost-saves, and can provide details of departments who have increased efficiencies, reduced email, increased communication – but we  need things that will provide these executives with hands-on, applicable to them, various other uses of SharePoint. Plan on meeting one-on-one and using a hands-on approach to make sure they are familiar with SharePoint (Explain them about the Workspaces, electronic form submissions, collaboration sites, reports, and increasing communication, Wikis, Blogs, Discussions and Custom Lists name a few.)

Here we go:

1)      Getting Executive buy-in is crucial to the success of SharePoint, so well done on that account. By tracking all the successes as you have been doing, you have won half the battle already. Then by going to the Execs on a one on one basis you are far more likely to get their buy-in because you can address their specific needs. Have those case studies handy on how much time (and translate that into costs) you’ve saved, just in case they ask. They will be impressed that you are prepared for anything. Let them know how excited the staff is about using it because it’s saving them so much time, so you’d really like their support in driving that enthusiasm.

2)      Synchronization of Outlook to their Specific Document Libraries and Lists and Calendars.

3)      Custom Lists are always a winner because we get rid of many spreadsheets and you can show online real-time reporting.

4)      Extracting information is always a big challenge, but something like simple Custom Lists can be huge winners in this space.( If you have Enterprise Features, you can create a dashboard with KPI’s

5)      Alerts to target the information and time having to go to SharePoint. Summary Alerts would be a good choice so they don’t get spammed to death by SharePoint.

6)      Search Functionality which would bring a great value to the table improving the employee’s productivity by 25 % right away. You can use RSS Feeds to search results so that they can pick up anything new from that quite easily and also Outlook RSS feeds

7)      Documentation is a Priority then your users would love Versioning. Version control is a big deal – especially when you have multiple people collaborating. No more creating tons of copies of your files with inconsistent nomenclatures

8)      Show them how better manage information along with Metadata to replace subfolders. This will help for search to work better based on the metadata search.

9)      Once done with the training of their specific needs, provide them a Cheat sheet/Quick Reference guide or a Cue Card to keep in handy if they forget the steps.

10)  Find a straight forward manual process that the Executives are involved in and build a workflow in SharePoint. We built a Quote Approval workflow and now they all HAVE to touch SharePoint several times a week. They see the efficiency gains first hand.

11)  Also automation of several manual processes and setup home page to default to a rollup report outlining $$ captured in approval process.

12)  Visual display of Indicators, Red, Yellow and Green formatted lists and color coding of calendar solution

13)  One other aspect was the storage space savings when transitioning to links to SharePoint rather than attaching files to an email. So many reports used to be sent via email as attachments. Now we still send email but with a link to file in SharePoint instead. Huge disk storage savings here!