Governance, Information Architecture, Project Management: Pick Any Two

In SharePoint Conversations, we ask our resident think-tank difficult questions or dilemmas and then ask them what they would do, say, or respond to these scenarios.

You’re invited to join the conversation too; the tankers, as we lovingly call them, are here to offer their own personal opinions, but you are free to agree or disagree. After all, who said these people have all the right answers?

In the forum, an excerpt from which you can see at the bottom of each topic, you can follow along with the discussion and voice your opinion. Don’t worry, there are rarely right or wrong answers to these questions, and your input is always valuable!

For our first SharePoint Conversations topic, we’re going into the land of tough decisions. Here’s the question we asked our think-tank:

“In a perfect world, we have endless resources to do our SharePoint projects exactly how we want. However, reality usually comes along and sets limits to what we can do.

So, if you could only choose to allocate resources to either two of governance, information architecture, or project management, which two would you prioritize and why?

Here’s what two of our tankers think:

Chris Geier

If I were forced to pick I think I must pick governance and information architecture.

Governance is one that I could not give up, so even if I were forced to only pick one (for now) that would be it. Governance potentially has many tentacles that can sprawl out have on effect for other areas. (Ironically here I see ways in which good governance can have effects on both project management and information architecture).

SharePoint 2010 has so many new and wonderful features that allow the users to get involved such as Managed Metadata, Keywords, and Records Management etc. that even if you do a good job with information architecture not doing governance can mess that up.

One may even be able to argue at least a little that good information architecture plays a role in governance. So those are the two that I would have to pick.

Ruven Gotz

Let me break it down this way (a bit simplistically):

Governance – sets the rules of the game. What can happen, when and by whom? If you want the thing you build to maintain value over time, you have to ensure governance is inplace or it will devolve to chaos.

Information Architecture – builds a rational structure for your information. This lets you know where to put stuff and, very importantly, how to get it back again when you need it. We work with information; we need to know how we’re structuring it to be able to make good use of it.

Project Management – Make sure the right stuff happens in the right order and make sure things get finished on-time and on-budget.

If I need to drop one of these, it would be project management. Yes, our project may be late, and yes, we may waste time by doing work in the wrong order, but what finally gets built can still have high value.

Dropping information architecture will result in a system that is hard to navigate and useless for finding your valuable content. Dropping governance will impact the long-term value of your investment, as everyone does their own thing and the system becomes fragmented and unreliable.

What do you think? Join the discussion and share your opinions with the community.