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Developing a Plan for Governance 12-11
Key Components of a Governance Plan

Key Points
The key components of an effective plan for governance are:
• People. Define a clear vision for the solution and articulate the roles and
responsibilities.
• Technology. Define policies for service levels and appropriate use.
• Policy. Articulate design and usage principles, such as best practices and formal
policies.
• Process. Define procedures for common tasks such as creating a new site,
requesting a new shared content type or attribute, or requesting a new site
template. You should publish these procedures in a central portal location so
that site owners can easily find and follow them.

An effective governance plan provides a framework for design standards,
information architecture, service-level agreements (SLAs), infrastructure
maintenance, and your overall measurement plan. The intention of a governance
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12-12 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
plan is to summarize and bind the documents that describe these activities in
greater detail.
Your governance plan should refer to all of your existing IT policies for items such
as the appropriate use of technology resources, content confidentiality, and records
retention. As your SharePoint Server 2010 environment develops, you will need
new IT policies to control these new features and capabilities, which will impact
your governance of SharePoint Server 2010. Therefore, you must make your
governance plan flexible enough to add references to these new policies as they
arise.
Your governance plan should include the following critical elements. The next

lesson discusses each element in more detail:
• Vision statement
• Roles and responsibilities
• Guiding principles
• Policies and standards
• Training


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Developing a Plan for Governance 12-13
Lesson 2
Key Elements of a Governance Plan

A successful governance plan contains several critical elements. You must carefully
consider all of these elements when you develop your governance plan. This lesson
describes the key elements of a governance plan.
Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
• Describe the vision statement for your SharePoint Server 2010
implementation.
• Describe the roles and responsibilities for a governance plan.
• Describe the guiding principles for a governance plan.
• Describe the policies and standards included in a governance plan.
• Describe the role of training for a successful SharePoint Server 2010
implementation.

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12-14 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Vision Statement


Key Points
Your vision statement should describe what you want to accomplish by using
SharePoint Server 2010. It should describe how the solution delivers value to the
business and to its employees. A lucid vision statement provides critical guidance
on the decision tradeoffs that you will inevitably need to make when you create
your governance plan. You will typically write the vision statement when the
project to create the solution starts, but you will probably need to refine it as the
project matures. Here is an example of a vision statement for SharePoint Server
2010:
“SharePoint Server 2010 provides a holistic view of organizational assets that simplifies
employee interaction with our enterprise business systems. It also helps to improve
collaboration within the company and with our suppliers, partners, and customers. In
this way, it improves employee productivity and employee and customer satisfaction.”
After you have written your vision statement, the next step is to determine and
document the roles and responsibilities of the people who are involved in your
implementation of a SharePoint Server 2010 solution.
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Developing a Plan for Governance 12-15
Roles and Responsibilities for a Governance Plan

Key Points
Roles and responsibilities define how each employee as an individual or as a
member of a team is responsible for ensuring the ultimate success of a solution.
Documenting the roles and responsibilities of your SharePoint Server 2010
solution is a crucial part of your governance plan. It defines who has authority to
mediate conflicting requirements and make overall decisions about branding and
policy.
Some of the policy decisions that will create the outline for your governance plan
and therefore form the foundation of your definitions of the roles and
responsibilities include deciding:

• Who you will make responsible for the technical management aspects of the
environment, for items such as hardware and software implementation,
configuration, and maintenance.
• Who you will allow to install new features, Web Parts, or other code
enhancements.
• Who you will make responsible for setting up new sites.
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12-16 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
If this responsibility lies with your IT team, they will probably need to
establish some SLAs for site setup responsiveness with the business
stakeholders. However, if you delegate this responsibility to users, you must
also give them adequate training to ensure that they follow agreed and
acceptable principles and standards for allowed content, naming, storage, and
so on.
• Who you will grant access to each page and site, and who you will enable to
grant access to others.
• How much responsibility for page and site design you will delegate to page
owners.
• Whether you will allow users to modify Web Parts on pages that they own in
team sites. Can those users modify Web Parts on pages that are part of the
corporate intranet publishing solution?
• Whether to fix some Web Parts on the page, or allow page owners to
customize all of the content on their pages.
• Who you will make responsible for the management of metadata.
• Who you will allow to set up or request new content types or site columns,
and how much central control you want to have over the values in site
columns and the properties of content types.
• If your governance plan defines that page and site owners should be
responsible for their own content management, whether you will
decommission pages where no one in the organization claims page ownership

and therefore responsibility for the content.

There are several key roles to consider in your governance plan, and in some
smaller organizations, an individual can often fulfill multiple roles.
The following tables list some of the typical roles and responsibilities for the
overall solution and for each site or site collection in a successful solution.
However, you will need to adapt both the responsibilities and the names that you
use for each role to suit your specific organizational environment.
Overall solution role Key responsibilities
Executive sponsor Serves as the executive-level champion for the
solution, whose primary strategic responsibilities
are positioning the solution as a critical
mechanism for achieving business value and
helping to communicate the value of the solution
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Developing a Plan for Governance 12-17
Overall solution role Key responsibilities
to the management levels of the organization.
Governance committee Serves as a governance body that has ultimate
responsibility for meeting the goals of the
solution.
Business owner Manages the overall design and functional
integrity of the solution from a business
perspective.
Solution administrator Manages the overall design and functional
integrity of the solution from a technology
perspective. Works in partnership with the
business owner.

Site and site collection role Key responsibilities

Site sponsor/owner Serves as the centralized, primary role for
ensuring that content for a particular page or site
is properly collected, reviewed, published, and
maintained.
Site steward/contact Manages the site by performing the everyday
tasks required to ensure that the content on the
site or page is accurate, relevant, and up to date.
This person will also act as the Content Steward
for the sites for which they are responsible.
Site designer Creates and maintains the site or site collection
design in environments where site design is
delegated to business users.
Site user Uses the solution to access and share
information. Users may have different access
permissions for different sections of the solution,
sometimes acting as a content contributor, and
at other times acting as a content consumer.
Question: Which solution role holds the primary strategic responsibility to ensure
that the business gets value from the solution?
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12-18 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Guiding Principles for a Governance Plan

Key Points
The guiding principles of a governance plan define the organizational preferences
to support the vision. These critical statements reflect best practices that all users
and site designers must understand and internalize to ensure the success of your
SharePoint Server 2010 solution.
You can use the example principles in the following table as a starting point to
help define a set of guiding principles for your solution. You might also want to

consider creating some supplemental reference material to help users internalize
these principles, or perhaps consider adding a principle of the day to the home page
of your solution. If your users have a good understanding of your guiding
principles, you are more likely to get them to follow your governance guidelines.




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Developing a Plan for Governance 12-19
Guiding principle of
governance
Implication Key consideration
Example General Principle
Policies are tied to the scope
and intention of the site.
Governance policies are
more flexible for sites that
have limited access than for
sites that are shared with a
broad audience.
The different audiences
for sites enable you to
adapt the governance
model according to
business needs. You will
enforce some policies
across the entire
organization, but site
owners may also apply

their own policies.
One size does not fit all.
There are rules, but you
must identify when it is
appropriate to deviate
from a standard to achieve
a business objective more
effectively.
Example Security Principle
Role-based security governs
access control and
permissions on both intranet
and extranet areas of the
portal.
Users may have different
permissions on different
areas of the portal, which
has an implication for
both governance and
training. Although most
users may not have
content contribution
privileges for tightly
governed intranet pages,
all users have Full Control
privileges for their own
My Site.
You may not have the
same permissions on every
page of the portal.

Example Site Design
Principle
You must provide a
consistent user experience.
Users should be able to find
key information on any
collaboration site and search
for the content that they
need.
All sites also follow a
consistent baseline design
template to ensure
consistency and usability
across collaboration sites.
When you design your site,
you must consider what
your users’ needs are.





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12-20 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Guiding principle of
governance
Implication Key consideration
Example Content Principle
Site sponsors/owners are
accountable, but everyone

owns the responsibility for
content management.
Site owners are
accountable for content
quality and archiving old
content on a timely basis,
but site users are
responsible for making
site owners aware of
content that needs
updating.
Everyone is responsible for
content management.

It is especially important to remember the “one size does not fit all” guiding
principle when it comes to developing your governance plan.