SharePoint Consulting: The Seven Deadly Sins of Productivity
Our Sharepoint consulting engagements give us a lot of insight into the obstacles that prevent employees from being as productive as they could be. This list contains the Seven Deadly Sins of Productivity that wecome across during our SharePoint consulting engagements.
SharePoint is a powerful tool for overcoming time-wasters. If some of these sins seem a little too familiar to you, perhaps your SharePoint implementation isn’t being used to its full potential.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Productivity
1. Poor access to information
Employees who spend a lot of time sifting through massive data piles looking for the data they need probably aren’t spending a lot of time doing actual productive work. The information your company has should be an asset, not a hindrance.
Unfortunately, manual reporting techniques and departmental data silos can cause data to pile up to the point where it provides more headaches than insights.
2. Constant interruptions
It doesn’t matter if they come in the form of an email, phone call, instant message, fax, or carrier pigeon. Interruptions are annoying, and they keep you from being productive. A study found that it takes the average office worker 25 minutes to return to a task after an interruption.
Of course, it’s important that employees communicate with one another for knowledge sharing and collaboration purposes. Empowering them to communicate in a centralized location like SharePoint on their own schedule is a great way to keep employees focused on their tasks.
3. Shared file servers
Shared file servers exist for a reason, but when employees start treating them as a place to dump files randomly, they start to lose some of their value as business tools. Using a sharing system that actually keeps content organized and easy to find can put hours back into your employees’ day.
4. Multitasking
Trying to do everything at once is a great way to not get very much done at all. Some multitasking is unavoidable, but everyone works better when they’re focusing on the core tasks of their job.
The best way to avoid biting off more than you can chew is to delegate tasks to people you can trust to do them right. A collaboration tool like SharePoint can help make sure one person isn’t taking on too many tasks at a time.
5. Paper forms
Here’s a dirty little secret: many businesses still use paper forms to capture data, especially in industries that require field work. These forms take a long time to fill out, and often lead to data inaccuracies that can exacerbate data management issues. If your business still relies heavily on paper forms, ditch them now and watch your employees’ productivity skyrocket.
6. Spreadsheets
Using spreadsheet software like Excel as a database can work fine when you only have a small amount of data. However, as your business grows, you may find that your database quickly outgrows the capabilities of Excel.
You’ll be left with huge Excel files that take an eternity to load, and a mess of tabs and equations that keeps you from processing data in a timely manner.
7. Meetings
Meetings have become frequent targets of Dilbert-esque office humor, and with good reason: they’re often a complete waste of time for everyone involved. With modern collaboration tools such as SharePoint, it’s no longer necessary to have a meeting just for the sake of having a meeting.
Collaborating online can help make sure that face-to-face meetings are saved for the situations when they’re actually necessary.
For more on increasing productivity and getting the most from SharePoint, read our post on calculating SharePoint ROI!
Entrance Demonstrates How to Frac Your Data at Microsoft Global Energy Forum
Showcasing Custom Software Solutions
Entrance is a proud sponsor of the annual Microsoft Global Energy Forum, to take place on February 20th in Houston at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Now in its 11th year, this prestigious technology-focused energy industry event welcomes business leaders from both the Business Operations and Information Technology arenas.
As a long-standing Gold Microsoft Partner, Entrance will showcase custom software solutions for oil and gas. The SharePoint enterprise content management company, KnowledgeLake, will be joining as a co-sponsor to share how upstream companies can leverage digitization solutions.
Actionable Insight for the Field
Attendees of the Global Energy Forum can stop by booth number 116 to learn more about:
- Business Intelligence and Data Management: Tying together disparate databases to reveal actionable insight for the field
- SharePoint and KnowledgeLake: Instant, searchable, digitized access to any paper assets
- Business Process Automation: Reduce overall lifting costs by automating data from the field
Entrance president, Nate Richards, commented on the upcoming event, “Information is the next unconventional play for oil and gas,” said Entrance president Nate Richards. “Decision makers need to be able to frac their data across departments to access intelligence that is readily available and accurate. This is the key to driving up production and pushing down costs for the successful producer.”
The Move Towards Digitization
Now more than ever, the oil and gas industry is grappling with an overwhelming amount of unstructured paper data and paper. Entrance and KnowledgeLake have partnered for the Global Energy Forum to showcase a digitization and well management solution based in SharePoint for land and well files that will help drive true competitive advantage.
“We are excited to partner with Entrance Software to provide the next generation of Energy Information Management solutions based on Microsoft SharePoint. By leveraging SharePoint to manage unstructured content and structured data, we are able to provide upstream customers with real time actionable information for Well File, Land and corporate records groups that was only before possible with multiple point solutions,” said Vice President of Engineering at KnowledgeLake, Ben Vierck.
Visit the team on February 20th for a demo, or to pick up a copy of the first annual Outlook on Energy.
For more, check out our presentation that explains how your company can frac your data to avoid lease jeopardy. Or find out more about the Microsoft Global Energy Forum.
Enterprise Content Management: Azure Blob Storage
Collaboration and Enterprise Content Management
Enterprise content management can be a big pain point for organizations that do not properly plan ahead for file sharing. One Entrance client had an interesting problem that the software consulting team was asked to fix. Read More
Oil and Gas Software: Moving the Needle on Decision Making
Oil and Gas Software and Lack of Integration
The Harvard Business Review posted a blog this week called, “Four Areas Where Senior Leaders Should Focus Their Attention,” that applies to how leaders in the energy industry should look at oil and gas software.
SharePoint ROI Part 2: Developing a Road Map for Collaboration
What does SharePoint success look like?
Earlier this year, our SharePoint team lead, Carol, published a blog on calculating SharePoint’s return on investment. Based on my SharePoint consulting work, I’ve developed a few more thoughts to add on to this topic.
Community Sites in SharePoint 2013
Our SharePoint consultants are still learning new things about SharePoint 2013 every day as we begin to implement this platform. One of the hottest new features of SharePoint 2013 is Community sites. What is a Community site and how does it differ from a Team site?
Microsoft Campaign Highlights Collaboration Tools Like SharePoint and Yammer
Last week, Entrance covered an article that shared statistics around the usage of collaboration tools like SharePoint, and how most people mistake social collaboration for Facebook or Twitter. This week, I ran into another article in TechCrunch announcing a new campaign by Microsoft to help businesses understand how social collaboration can make business teams more productive.
SharePoint and Enterprise Content Management: The ROI
This week, several of Entrance’s software consultants are attending P2’s ASCEND user conference to go live with our “Frac Your Data” campaign for the energy industry. Yesterday I attended one of the sessions called, “The Power of an Enterprise Digital Strategy,” where we learned how taking control of your company’s assets and housing them where they are accessible can be a powerful tool.
Knowledge Management a Pressing Concern for the Oil and Gas Industry
I recently attended the 6th Annual Marketing Symposium at the Rice Jones Graduate School of Business, and while I was there to sharpen my marketing skills, one of the panel sessions covering how oil and gas companies are incorporating marketing into their organizations featured a very interesting discussion around the challenges the panelists saw for the near future in their industry. Jane Gasdaska, Manager, Planning and Optimization for Phillips 66 had this to say,
Entrance Sponsors Contract Management Conference
As organizations go back to the Gulf for exploration and allocation of liability in E&P projects become more vast, the oil and gas industry needs to pay more attention to the quality of their contracts. Entrance attended Marcus Evans’ Upstream Oil and Gas Contract Management conference on conquering the risks and liabilites in the upstream sector to draft clear and effective contracts this past week.
Entrance was a sponsor of this event, where we talked with the attendees of the event about their options for improving contract management beyond expensive solutions like SAP and overly simplistic options like Excel.
Many companies overlook the fact that SharePoint can be used to create notifications, improve collaboration and automate some of the repetitive tasks involved with contract administration.
We created a contract management planning kit for this event where you can find out more. Get a copy today!
SharePoint 15 Beta this week – are you prepared?
SharePoint 15 – Better, Faster, Stronger!
SharePoint 2010 is old news, forget everything you know and start over! Ok, enough drama. Indeed the rumor mills are saying the SharePoint 15 beta is scheduled for this week, with a product release in early 2013, and there is sufficient reliable data for us to believe this is true.
So what features should we be looking for? It is expected that SharePoint 15 will make use of HTML 5 and CSS 3.0 – which will pave the way for the new Metro UI. Tighter integration with mobile devices is very likely, and expanded features for the cloud offering on Office 365 is all but fact. Here at Entrance, we’re preparing a specialization in Windows 8 application development, and SharePoint 15 is an exciting movement toward best of breed technology capabilities for Enterprise Content Management, Business Collaboration and Business Intelligence – and more.
Custom SSRS Reports – the SharePoint tool you didn’t know you had.
SQL Server Reporting Services is an amazing tool which creates feature-rich reports customized to match business and user needs. With a little time and effort, SSRS can become a viable tool at your disposal which integrates seamlessly into your SharePoint environment. The most surprising part of this tool is that you most likely have it and don’t even know it.
A lot of organizations will overlook reporting, or set it as a to do list item for down the road. When the time comes to start reporting on internal/external metrics, a calf scramble takes place looking for a proper solution to their needs. Before going out and spending thousands of dollars on reporting solution, check to see if SSRS will suit your needs then compare the cost implementing other industry standards with this solution.
SharePoint and E-mail: Never lose an attachment again
It’s incredible that we’re now over a decade into the 21st century and e-mail—a standard that was first developed and implemented in the 1970s—still reigns as the king of business communication. Invoices, meeting invitations, contracts, and automated alerts are just a few of the critical items that might be sitting in your Outlook inbox right now. Interestingly enough, you can manage all of those things using SharePoint 2010, though I would not suggest dumping your Exchange server outright in favor of this software. Instead, I’d like to talk about some e-mail-enabled features of SharePoint 2010 and how you can use them together to get the most out of your SharePoint implementation.
Anyone with a little bit of SharePoint software experience knows that one of its most powerful features is its out-of-the-box e-mail alert capability. But in case you’re not familiar, the SharePoint 2010 software allows you to enable e-mail alerts on any document library, list, or page in the system. This means that any time an item is added or changed in a library, or if a page is edited, you can receive an e-mail alert letting you know what has changed, when, and who changed it. I’ve personally seen this feature used in a variety of different ways, from organization-wide e-mail alerts on announcement lists to group-wide alerts on project pages and Wikis. The fantastic thing about SP’s out-of-the-box alerts is that they are simple for any SharePoint user to set up and manage.
Managing a SharePoint Migration
There’s a popular phrase in science and engineering that I’ve always loved: “Garbage in, garbage out.” It’s used to impress upon system developers that even the best code or software solution can’t create good information from bad input. And the same applies for robust, enterprise software solutions like SharePoint 2010. Though this software is an intuitive product with lots of features to make collaboration, automation and centralization possible, it’s only as good as the data you bring into it. So before moving to the SharePoint platform, it’s important to properly manage your migration and not bring any garbage with you.
For instance, migrating to this software is the perfect time to assess your organization’s data management and retention policy. How many weeks, months, and years need to pass before your data is no longer “living?” How many old documents—untouched for years—are currently bogging down your organization’s ability to find good information? Experienced SharePoint consultants can help you separate the old from the new and plan a retention policy that can be built right into SharePoint! Old or static documents can be moved to and flagged based on retention policy rules, keeping the most relevant data and information in front of your users.
Records Management in SharePoint
Do you know the value of your business records? Does your business need to comply with federal regulations such as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley? Do you stand ready for an audit without pulling manpower from daily operational tasks to hunt through piles of unorganized information? An often overlooked business process is that of records management, and understandably so. Until an auditor or lawyer shows up at your door there is typically no immediate consequence of a poor file plan.
SharePoint has the features you need to build a comprehensive and effective file plan to suit your needs. Listed below are some of these features:
SharePoint Content Databases
Some Best Practices for Content Databases in SharePoint 2010 (or: Attack of the 32-Character GUIDs)
One of the coolest things about SharePoint’s platform (and one of its biggest selling points, if you ask me) is its scalability. It can follow a business from its humble beginnings to its days of Fortune 500 glory, providing a familiar platform for collaboration and knowledge capture all along the way.
Since SharePoint 2007, Microsoft has made it easy to move around Web applications, shared services and content databases when the time comes to scale up. One Windows Server instance running both the Web frontend (WFE) and SQL Server back-end can quickly be broken into a two machine topology by detaching the content database and moving it to a new server. Two servers can become three by migrating the more process-intensive service applications to a third machine, or by introducing a new WFE. This process can continue ad infinitum, though at some point you’ll want to begin using a load balancer between your web front-ends.
You Database May be Abnormal
You may never directly see the underlying database structure that holds your company’s valuable data but what you can’t see may be unnecessarily costing you time and money. Database “normalization” is a technical term which describes how the tables, fields, and data relationships are structured in a database. Databases can be under-normalized or over-normalized and finding the right balance of normalization is essential when designing a custom database solution.