Microsoft SharePoint: Project Management Answer for a Multi-Million Dollar Construction Effort
How do you manage the reams of paper and complicated project management timeline related to a $170 million building expansion? For the Van Andel Institute and their consultants, Microsoft SharePoint proved the answer to staying on time and on budget and saving $250,000 on paper costs alone.
Specifically, SharePoint took some getting used to, and its workflow didn't support the project's requirements out of the box, he says. Provisioning proper access for users was also tricky using SharePoint TeamServices. But the consultants and the Van Andel IT staffer who developed the site worked around those difficulties and crafted a solution that has largely met everyone's needs. Here's a inside look at their solution and what it accomplished for Van Andel's building expansion.
Building a SharePoint Site
Kim Jeffries, an application analyst at the Van Andel Institute, began developing the SharePoint site in February, 2006. She first met with Culhane and Fahrenkrug's administrative assistant, who explained which stakeholders were involved in the design phase of the construction process and the associated workflows. The admin told Jeffries that the project was going to have different teams focused on areas such as brainstorming, parking, construction and sustainability, and that these teams would need different levels of access on the site. She gave Jeffries a spreadsheet listing all of the people involved in the design process and the levels of access they'd need. Culhane and Fahrenkrug also wanted an area of the site that only they could use.
"We drew it all out and we ended up with a home page that everybody hits, with about five sub-sites off the home page, a couple of document libraries, main contacts, discussions and at least one private site for our owner rep team [Culhane and Fahrenkrug]," says Jeffries.
Because the Van Andel Institute was already using SharePoint Team Services internally at the time, Jeffries had to build accounts for each participant locally on the existing SharePoint server. Then she had to bring in each participant page by page, library by library, and meeting workspace by meeting workspace. She says provisioning access for users in Team Services was "tedious" and "the most difficult part" of building the site.
It took about 40 hours over the course of a month to get the site up and running, Jeffries says. When it was complete in March, she turned the design and the content administration over to Fahrenkrug and Culhane's administrative assistant. Jeffries continued to create accounts for new teams and individuals as they came on board, because that process was complicated and it needed to be done on Van Andel's local SharePoint server.
Fahrenkrug says it generally took users two to three weeks to get accustomed to SharePoint. Jeffries hired a local training center to teach the owner representatives and a handful of employees from the architecture firm and construction offices to use Sharepoint. But, Fahrenkrug says, most users learned the system on the fly.
Though the SharePoint site took some getting used to, Fahrenkrug says, the user interface is more intuitive than an FTP site, which looks more like a computer file than a web page and never offers enough storage, in his experience. As such, SharePoint makes storage and retrieval of documents easier, he says. Users can access the site whenever they want; and they don't have to wait for Federal Express deliveries. Jeffries adds that users receive alerts via e-mail whenever a new document is added to the site.
When users need to find a spec, they can simply type the name of it into the search engine on the home page, which takes them right to it, as opposed to drilling through folders to find it, he notes.
Troubleshooting problems is also easier on SharePoint than on an FTP site, says Fahrenkrug.
"If people couldn't get into an FTP site, it was pretty hard to figure out why," he says. "With SharePoint, my admin can go in, figure out why they can't get access, and if there is a glitch on our end, we can easily fix it."
1. Train users. "If you can't get people to use SharePoint, putting a site together is not worth the effort," says Kim Jeffries, an application analyst with the Van Andel Institute.
2. Give novice users targeted tips. "When I created an account for a new SharePoint users, I sent them an e-mail with their user name and password and some quick tips on how to access the account, what level of security they had, and what that meant in terms of what they could and couldn't do, how to use the calendar, and how to use a document library," says Jeffries.
3. Follow the three-click rule. Within the SharePoint site, says Jeffries, keep content as close to the surface as possible. "You should be able to get done what you need to get done in three clicks," she says.
4. Make sure you have enough storage. By the end of the Van Andel Institute's building expansion, the SharePoint sites might take up one terabyte of storage, says Bryon Campbell, CIO of the Institute.
5. Understand SharePoint's capabilities and limitations. "SharePoint is not the end all be all of software, but it works if you understand what it can and can't do," says Matt Fahrenkrug, owner of Culhane & Fahrenkrug Consulting. "By understanding that, you can manipulate the software and get to the result that you want."
--M. Levinson
Upgrading to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
When the Van Andel Institute migrated to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) in January, 2007, Jeffries had to update external users' security levels because they could no longer access their specific site with the local accounts she had originally set up for the previous version of SharePoint, Team Services. (Security is set up differently in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server than it is in Team Services.)
