There’s an old project management adage, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. This is certainly true for deploying Office 365 and more specifically, SharePoint Online, for an organization. Planning involves more than just answering the technical questions needed to sync a company’s Active Directory to Office 365. Planning for Office 365 should involve coming up with a governance plan that covers not only the goals of the initial deployment but guidance on how an organization will use Office 365 over the long term.

First, then, let’s establish some foundational vocabulary. What is governance? In the case of Office 365, “governance” is the set of policies and procedures that a company defines in order to align the use of Office 365 with company goals. How are those policies and procedures established? Though the work of a governance board. What is a governance board? A governance board is a diverse group users representing executive stakeholders, a variety of departments, and technical stakeholders including the company’s SharePoint administrator(s) and compliance and security stakeholders.

Service Capability Decisions

• Should we provide, support, and train users on Sway?
• This same question applies to any discrete application within Office 365 that can be turned on or off or are premium add-ons. Other examples are Yammer, Project Online, Azure Rights Management, and PowerBI.
• This also can include deciding what the right choices are on many other settings in the administration pages for the Office 365 tenant.
• This can also include decisions about the level of effort and money invested in taxonomy, content management, content lifecycle, and workflow capabilities.
• Should the SharePoint/Delve user profile page become the employee directory?

Discover common questions that the governance board would be responsible for addressing. Read more.>>