If you have never read Seven Habits of Highly Effective people you are missing out – especially when it comes to making the most out of an investment in portal. Specifically, I am referring to the concepts of stewardship delegation and production capacity, both of which can be developed through an educational curriculum and guidelines aimed at empowering business users. Simply put, in order to gain the most value from a portal deployment the business needs to understand how to fish.

Stewardship delegation places the responsibility for project results onto the business participants. This ability to participate is gained through platform education and agreed upon guidelines for contribution, thus increasing their production capacity, commonly known as effectiveness. This will maximize the return on the technology investment.

Although at first intimidating it is possible to grow production capacity within the user base via a formalized gating process users. In order to have business needs met through the portal the business must actively participate in some educational offering and obtain rudimentary levels of knowledge with the toolset, before being allowed to complete the deployment of their project. This process should be mandated by way of portal governance. With this being said it is understood and accepted that a less mature portal deployment might not have a robust governance framework yet in place and we may need to begin the process of education with more pragmatic measures.

Common Roadblocks to Building Production Capacity
Beyond executive sponsorship the primary roadblock to building production capacity generally sits with the fallacy that the portal team “cannot afford to take time” to educate their user base how to self-serve. Remember that we need to focus on effectiveness, not efficiency. It will always be more efficient to have the portal team do the work directly, but it will not scale. We need to build effectiveness.

This is somewhat akin to owning a race car, but never taking time to learn how to drive the car properly – you have made the investment, but will never unlock the full potential of the investment. This is why investing in an organization’s production capacity makes so much sense. The portal team can still continue to produce results for the business, but some of their time needs to be spent building the production capacity of business teams themselves.

It may seem obvious, but this approach goes a long way towards
• Allowing the portal solution to scale throughout the business
• Providing faster response times to business needs
• Allowing the portal team and development staff to focus on more strategic initiatives and less day-to-day management of the platform

The beauty of this model is that after experiencing success with it the business is unlikely to want to wait on the portal team to laboriously build out solutions that they can configure themselves. Just imagine a solution development system where a portal team spends more time developing reusable or strategic components and evolving the governance model!

Getting Started with Stewardship Delegation
In the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People the concept of stewardship delegation is introduced and is alarmingly similar to portal “Governance”. This style of delegation takes time and patience on the part of the educator, but the end result is a rewarding relationship where the student (the business) walks away able to effectively contribute to solutions. You may ask why this is different that any other form of education. Good question!

Per the Seven Habits, Stewardship Delegation requires an up-front mutual understanding of and commitment to expectations in five areas. The following areas are taken from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and updated to directly relate to portal initiatives.

1. Desired Results – Have the person see, describe, make a quality statement of what the results will look like and by when they will be accomplished with their project. This should be achieved through a formal request stating the mission of the initiative, that is vetted before a portal steering committee or project approval board.

2. Guidelines – Identify the parameters within which the project group should operate. Keep the responsibility for results with the project team that has been empowered. This should include the responsibility for participating in a portal education session. The project team should not be able to commence work until they have completed the education session and had their project request approved.

3. Resources – Identify the resources available to accomplish the required results and who will maintain the solution once it has been created. Although seemingly simple, long term ownership can be very challenging. When solutions are built without clearly defined long term ownership they detract from the end user experience, cluttering it with out-of-date or irrelevant content.

4. Accountability – Set standards of performance to be used in evaluating the results and specific times when evaluation will take place. This represents a layer of governance present in more mature portal deployments that should be placed around any project that is undertaken within the portal.

5. Consequences – Specify what will happen as a result of the evaluation, including rewards and penalties. In the above example this might relate to the community being discontinued if traffic levels fall below a certain level. These metrics need to be agreed on by the parties ahead of time and will be used to ensure that the project outputs (perhaps a community) stay on track well after completion.

Governance is complex and the above illustration of the five areas only scratches the surface for what is needed to successfully run and manage a portal deployment. It is clear, however, that the common thread is the participant’s commitment to agreed-upon desired results.

My hope is that the above elements can jump start a more formalized approach to deployment success within an organization. The participants realize that they need to be place genuine commitment behind their initiatives, but also understand that they will be rewarded with the ability to have a generous degree of autonomy and control over their projects if they commit to the five areas above.

Going Fish – Making it Happen in the Real World
It is obviously easy to write about the merits of the above model when we seemingly find ourselves constantly bailing the water out of our canoe so we do not sink. Just as when we are working diligently at jobs there is never a “good” time to take vacation – but we just need to do it to protect our production capacity.

Once an organization has made an investment in the portal platform it would be doing itself a disservice not to start engaging in stewardship delegation to enable its user base to increase its production capacity through education and adherence to agreed upon guidelines. The following items represent some practical steps and guidelines to help begin the journey of increased production capacity

• Design a community request form that addresses each of the five areas highlighted in the “Getting Started with Stewardship Delegation” section above

• Find a request suitable for a pilot project that the portal team can mentor the business team to develop themselves

• Make it mandatory for anyone who requests a community to actively participate in a portal 101 class and demonstrate a fundamental understanding of the toolset

• Hold lunch and learn workshops to enable business users to get a better sense of what business value can be provided by the platform and where it has been successful in the organization

• Develop a community that contains a wide range of sample portlets so people can get a sense of what platform tools exist to meet business needs

Implementing the above concepts through stewardship delegation will go a long way to ensure that an educated, empowered business team has an optimal production capacity and can make the most out of the portal investment. This will allow the portal team to then focus on developing the vision and strategy necessary to continue to support new solutions for the business in a timely, effective manner, making the most efficient use of portal.

Setting off on a portal deployment or adding elements into an existing portal deployment without a well thought out governance strategy is unfortunately a path to disaster. Do not be fooled into thinking that by virtue of having an enterprise caliber portal platform somehow governance will magically be take care of. Just as with any technology project it takes expert planning to create a solid, long lasting foundation that will make the platform easy to manage.

The good news is that by following some basic guidelines your deployment can start on top of a solid foundation and stay healthy over the course of its lifespan. Implementing proper governance will arguably add a level of overhead, but once your deployment grows beyond a trivial level, it will provide some serious returns and create efficiencies for users who are developing or contributing within the platform. To keep this guide platform agnostic major content or application areas within a portal will be referenced as a “Collection”.

Collection Lifecycle Methodology

1. Request

The Request exists to formally review and approve any collection that a user would like to propose for inclusion. This process is critical, as without it no responsibility is associated with the content and other components that may be created and it is no longer possible to manage the content lifecycle.

a. Define Purpose and Ownership – a clear purpose needs to be articulated for the Collection. This will determine if the Collection and its components are suitable for inclusion within the portal. In larger deployments this portion of the request would be vetted within a steering committee, during regularly scheduled meetings. Within smaller deployments or if this Collection were to be included as a sub section of an existing Collection, the inclusion could be determined by the parent Collection owner. This is generally applicable for a department or functional group within an organization.

Explicit ownership of the Collection is imperative. Not only should a named person be accountable for the Collection and its contents, but the group that they belong to must also have ownership. It is not uncommon for people to change roles or exit an organization and therefore there must always be a parent owner associated with the Collection. This can default to a generic spot within the organizational hierarchy. This spot must be amenable to the responsibility and its duties (see education 1.d below) to this in order to have the ability to create a Collection.

b. Establish Metrics / Success Criteria – it is important to establish metrics and or success criteria by which to judge the collection during audit periods (detailed below in 3.a). This is critical to avoid the danger of having a portal deployment loaded with irrelevant content that complicates navigation throughout the portal and presents challenges around quality and relevance of search results within the portal. One common criterion might be monthly usage or another objective metric. For information that is an “artifact” like 401k information (see “Technical Tips”) it is possible that the content must exist regardless of metrics and its success criteria is simply inclusion.

c. Functional and Technical Specifications – just as with traditional software development, some level of functional and technical specifications are appropriate for the project and should be submitted with the request. Given the broad range of what may be deployed within a Collection there are wide differences in the level of depth that is required.

Generally there are two different classes of specifications that may be needed – one that pertains to an application that will run within the portal and another that relates to content that will reside within it. It is suggested that this is done only to the extent that it will make sense for the deployment and not act as substantial overhead to everyday management of the portal.

d. Education and Time – education requirements are just as important as ownership and success criteria. Any person or department that is requesting a collection must allocate time for the owner to receive training that is verified and commit to allocating weekly or monthly time for that individual to participate in the maintenance and development of the collection items. If this is not possible the Collection request should be denied. In order for any Collection request to be approved the management responsible for the request must allocate time for the Collection owner to tend to what has been created within the Collection.

2. Create

The Create phase is relativity straightforward. It acts as a gate to ensure that the materials being produced conform to the original vision and are ready for release to their specific audience. Generally the Create stage is very specific to an organization’s established development processes, so a rough outline of generic steps is presented below.

a. Create – create the Collection on the basis of what was defined in 1.a and 1.c. The creation should be completed in a development environment or sandbox environment where the Collection owner has the ability to privately test what they are doing without interrupting typical usage of the portal environment.

b. Secure – any security criteria that may have been part of the request in 1.c should be enforced at this point, even if it is being constructed within a sandbox or development area. Leaving this step until a launch into a production environment could create serious unforeseen complications.

c. Check – review what has been developed against the purpose that was outlined in 1.a and 1.c above. If a delta exists between the two – either revisit 1.a and 1.c and update it based on the new needs or adjust what has been deployed to conform to the specifications that were outlined.

d. Launch – if the check stage above has been passed, deploy the Collection to the portal for consumption by the intended audience. The Collection will now enter the Manage phase of its lifecycle.

3. Manage

This stage should be performed on a quarterly basis or as makes sense based on the nature of the collection and availability of resources. It provides an opportunity for the portal to stay current and to continue to provide high quality, relevant material to end users. Although it may seem like a large investment in time, its results prove very cost effective with regard to worker productivity and the aversion of significant costs associated with a deployment that has become unmanageable.

a. Audit – based on the metrics and success criteria that were outlined in 1.b review what has been deployed and how well it has met the expectations that were created for it. If the Collection is not meeting the objectives that were outlined for it should be decommissioned as outlined below in step 4. The audit should also include a review of ownership to ensure that a specific individual is still accountable for the contents of the Collection. Due to resource constraints it is fair that the audits take place on a quarterly schedule or as possible based on available resource levels. The people conducting the audits should be from a Business Analysis role that interfaces with the various groups seeking to build Collections within the portal framework. If the audit is failed for other reasons, such as lack of meta-data on various parts of the Collection, the owner(s) should have a fixed amount of time to correct the issue.

4. Retire

Retirement provides for the methodical removal of Collections or content that have not passed the audit stage. This process has to be completed by the respective Collection owner to avoid any unintended removal of valid content.

a. Close – if a Collection or part of a Collection fails audit or is no longer relevant to the deployment it should be removed from the portal. This is very difficult for most organizations to achieve due to a lack of obvious ownership around content, but there is compelling value to the user experience in doing so. The person responsible for the removal of the Collection or pieces within it should be the owner.

Technical Tips

Even though a technology platform does not automatically provide governance, it can do many things to ease the pain around providing a layer of management on top of Collections. There are a few basic, expedient ways to add a lot of value and reduce the time consumed by the governance process.

1. Owner / Department Information – always associate this information with any Collection and the contents within it. Most portal platforms have the ability to associate meta-data with a wide range of objects. This meta-data is generally searchable and through saved searches or various queries it is possible to filter, sort, view and administer a Collection and its items from this data. This will allow for valueable reports around this information to be quickly created during the audits or otherwise.

2. Content Type (artifact vs perishable) – content generally comes in two forms – artifacts and perishable content. Artifacts are items like annual reports or a dental plan for 2006. They are static and will not change over time. Generally they are needed for reference and have unlimited lifespans within a deployment. Perishable  content might be various project documents that are only relevant for a short period of time before needing to be archived or removed from a portal. Just as with owner and department information, it is extremely beneficial to flag this information to allow content to quickly be sorted and evaluated for removal from the portal deployment.

3. Time Stamping – as mundane as a time stamp sounds it is very useful to help sort and act on content to keep a portal deployment running cleanly. It can be leveraged just as the above 2 elements to assist in report generation and auditing.

Wrapping Up

The general framework outlined above provides a clean, straightforward model to help govern a wide range of portal deployments. Whether the deployment is external or internal to an organization or provides content or applications, it will help any organization to keep a firm grasp on their deployment. Although some initial investment is needed, the usability and management benefits of a properly governed portal deployment far outweigh the effort for ongoing enforcement. If your portal is a crucial tool for your organization it is imperative that a solid governance framework resides on top of it.