Following twelve signs of problems are just few of many that our team has noticed the organisations like yours may be coping with on daily/monthly basis. Year in, and year out... Please read through the following sections and do let us know, whether you identify any of the signs in your organisation.
1 - Email Overload
You spend more than 10 hours per week in email searching for, reading, and forwarding the old emails.
Is that an issue in your business?
2 - File Search and Retrieval
Every project requires searching your file server, emails, customer data, and other business related data in 5 different apps and folders for relevant materials.
3 - Creative Thinking
You can only spend less than 20% of your time thinking about the issues, the rest is in endless meetings, admin, management, and clunky search for existing data.
4 - Repetitive tasks and application overload
You need to browse through 5 different systems before you gather all relevant information. And finally you find out that the topic you are about to research has already been worked on and resolved by another department just couple of months ago.
5 - Knowledge retention. When do we get the time to work on that!?
At the meetings, everyone always knows everything. But the output of creative sessions is often lost, with no way of easily locating the creative threads that led to key decisions.
6 - Response Time!
The response time to client requests. You find it too diffcult to respond with speed to client questions as decision process takes ages, and the knowledge is often scattered, in people’s heads or hard to ask of the right people quickly.
7 - Frustrated employees
All team members and staff often complain of time wasted, inefficient processes and being ‘swamped’.
8 - Your problem is never important enough.
Your problem is never big enough to get the attention of the IT. If the problem becomes important enough it takes 6 months or more to get the IT solution implemented even if you feel that your colleague from IT could mock it up in a week time.
9 - Unworkable project software
The software the company makes available for projects is too complex, and no-one uses it outside of the project specialists.
10 - Where is my report?
It’s a weekly task for your colleague to send you that report. And you keep waiting for that “please find the new report attached” email to arrive. It should be so easy to have a look at the data required just when you need it and how you need it.
11 - Integrating contractors...
It may be hard to get contractors up to speed and contributing to projects. It is often necessary to break security policies to get them access to what they need, or their methods of working are simply too different from the rest of the team.
12 - Mixed Messages on Business Priorities and Risk Management
When should we cut costs and when do we need to invest to get ahead of the game or at least stay compliant? There are mixed messages comming from different senior sources. What is our direction? Is it still the same as our CEO communicated it to us at last year's end of financial year corporate briefing event?
Did you identify with any of the signs for SharePoint Intranet?
No? Congratulations! You clearly manage your, time, staff and communications better than most. You may of course, already have a mature collaboration platform or perhaps you are still small enough where these issues have not yet emerged.
In case you did identify yourself at least with two of these signs, and you would like to discuss them further. Please do contact us via one of the options that are listed on this contact page (or simply fill out a form in the top right corner of this page).
WorkShares Team's passion and mission.
Our core team of SharePoint Project Success Managers, Architects, Developers, Communication Officers and Trainers have been gathering their experience on the most complex SharePoint projects for over a decade. Now they are here to help you to move to the next maturity level of how you get things done, and free up the time to focus on the things that really matter to you at work.
We, the WorkShares SharePoint Team, are excited about resolving the problems related to the signs mentioned above. We see them in organisations we work with every day. And we take pride and joy when we see these problems being reduced to a minimum or even disappear for good.
