Failed SharePoint Implementations??

Bottom line. A lot of companies, both large and small have jumped on the “SharePoint bandwagon”..  They bought it, they installed / configured it, they taught their employees how to use it.  But my personal opinion is that a lot of companies are experiencing some slight “buyers remorse”

Why?

1. They expected SharePoint to automatically (or at least easily) do a ton of amazing, productivity saving things for their company – straight out of the box.

2.  They expected that their employees would be as thrilled as they were about the acquisition of this amazing new platform when most employees had thoughts more in the line of “oh geesh, another application / login info that I have to learn”

3.  They hired back-end .NET developers (who, like lots of us, moved to SharePoint because that’s where the jobs / money are)

4.  They did not have a complete understanding of what SharePoint is good for and, more importantly, NOT good for..

5.  They tried to use OOTB SharePoint Workflows to recreate their business processes

6. They tried to lay technology over broken business processes, thinking that the technology would solve the issue. (One of my favorite sayings – “If you can’t whiteboard out your process in 5 mins, don’t even THINK about throwing technology on top”)

7.  Their IT departments “disabled” a lot of the best pieces of SharePoint functionality, therefore making it inherently a less productive tool for their company

8.  They failed to realize the massive mind shift and day-to-day work task process changes that SharePoint would bring – therefore not investing near enough in training and end user adoption initiatives.

9.  They failed to focus on things such as metadata, taxonomy, governance, etc at the beginning of the project. (Did I mention that I detest SharePoint folders?  If you are going to use folders, keep your files on your LAN and save yourself the cost of SharePoint..)

 To be continued..