Sun Tzu’s 5 Tips for SharePoint Success

You’d think that Sun Tzu, the great warfare strategist, wouldn’t know neither the up nor the down of modern software such as SharePoint. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from ancient Chinese.

In this slightly cheeky article, I’ve adapted five passages from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to a more modern age and made SharePoint the main star of the story. Ideally, this will give you a bit of insight into how to achieve more success with your SharePoint implementations.

Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in SharePoint there are no constant conditions

OK, Sun Tzu may have said warfare rather than SharePoint, but had he been around these days, I’m sure that he’d agree that his ideas applies to SharePoint as much as warfare.

SharePoint’s greatest feature is its ability to adapt and become what you or your client needs. When faced with challenges that you need to resolve, your greatest tool is to adapt to the problem rather than trying to change the problem.

SharePoint allows you to do just that. Do you need a different data model? Fine! It’s as easy as changing the columns of your content types. Need a more appealing or efficient visual interface? If you can implement it in a browser, SharePoint can handle what you need.

However, before you rush out and start applying SharePoint to anything you can see, read on because…

He will win who knows when to implement SharePoint and when not to implement SharePoint

Although SharePoint is a brilliant product that can be adapted to virtually any situation, that doesn’t mean it is a good idea to use it in every situation.

This tip from the master of warfare doesn’t just apply to SharePoint, but it is absolutely important to SharePoint implementers. You need to know when SharePoint makes sense and will yield the most benefit for the least effort.

A typical example of bad usage is trying to get SharePoint to replace a traditional and moderately trafficked relational database service like SQL Server or MySQL. Yeah, SharePoint can be used like that, but you’ll be putting far more effort into getting SharePoint to perform and behave in the same way that it would likely be cheaper to go with other tools.

Learn the strengths and weaknesses of SharePoint and don’t try to force it to do something for which it is not suited.

To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence

Hah! I didn’t even have to modify that for it to make sense, although I had to look up the meaning of ken.

Basically, what Sun Tzu means is that easy victories are not great victories, nor will they win any battles. It is very easy to impress people with SharePoint, showing them how easy it is to create lists, libraries, surveys, sites, and workflows. People may be so impressed that they’ll hire you just because you can quickly show off some random tricks.

That doesn’t mean SharePoint success! SharePoint is a massively complex beast, and if you want to harness its full potential, that will take massive efforts and resources. Don’t pretend like it’s going to be easy to get a SharePoint solution successful just because you can reap easy victories during the sales presentation.

The control of a large farm is the same principle as the control of a few sites: it is merely a question of dividing up their numbers

When it comes to governance of large sites, Sun Tzu shines as ever. It takes the same amount of effort to maintain 10,000 site collections as it does one site collection, scaled. So, if you require one editor to maintain a single site collection, you require 10,000 editors to maintain 10,000 site collections.

You’ll hear people say that managing a massive farm takes a whole different team. That may be true for some roles, but in general, SharePoint scales quite well and predictably up to very large installations.

What most people forget, however, is that content is always king, especially in SharePoint. To maintain that content, you need real manpower, or womanpower as it may be. Straining your editorial resources leads to decline in content quality, and that leads to dissatisfied users.

Plan your content maintenance early, and ensure you have sufficient resources to keep content up-to-date and properly maintained. Then, whether you have 5 or 50 site collections is merely a matter of scale.

Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances

SharePoint isn’t about doing what everyone else does, nor doing the same thing over and over. SharePoint’s true beauty is in its ability to adapt and to handle almost any conceivable situation.

Organizations are unique, just as their requirements. Projects may look similar, but most often, you’ll find that after doing the initial research, projects are unique too. If you use a solution that you like because you know it, you are asking the users to learn how that solution works, rather than harnessing SharePoint’s ability to adapt to how they want to work.

You should, of course, apply past experience to new situations, but it is always wrong to assume that your next client, organization, or project will have just the same needs and just the same parameters as anything you’ve seen before. Perhaps they are similar, but it is always wrong to force users to adapt your way of thinking rather than adapting SharePoint to their way of thinking.

So, as ancient as Sun Tzu may be, he had a thing or two to say about modern software too. I never cease to be amazed at how much I can learn from this ancient guru.