This is the sixth article in the SharePoint Online planning guide for Office 365 for enterprises. This article discusses how you can develop a plan to train and support the users of your site and site collections.
In this article
Who should read this article?
You should read this article if you are a site collection administrator, a site owner, or someone who is otherwise responsible for helping employees in an organization become productive with SharePoint Online for Office 365 for enterprises. This article will guide you through some of the key considerations involved in training people to use SharePoint sites, and it will direct you to some of the basic resources you can use to help train and support site users.
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Why train and support your users?
A training process does not need to be elaborate to be successful. Having a plan in place for providing users with information about SharePoint can help you ensure that the people in your organization are able to get productive quickly with your new site or site collection. When people are able to use your SharePoint site and they understand the best practices that you want them to employ, you can help ensure that your SharePoint deployment will be successful and easy to manage.
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Identify the training needs of your users
The first step in developing a training plan for your users is to spend some time thinking about who your users are, how they will use SharePoint Online, and what tasks they need to perform. To start this process, you may find it helpful pose the following series of questions about your users:
The tables below list some suggested questions you can use to start analyzing the training needs for the SharePoint users in your organization. The lists of questions (and the considerations that follow from them) are not exhaustive, and you may discover that additional useful questions occur to you as you work through this process.
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Who
| “Who” questions you might ask about site collection administrators, site owners, and site users |
Considerations for planning your training |
- Who will be using the site?
- What roles do they occupy in your organization?
- Will they have varying levels of permission for the site?
- Are your users new to SharePoint?
- Will your site collection administrators be different users than the site owners? (You may want to train site collection administrators before site owners.)
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- Training works best when it’s targeted well towards its audience. If different groups within your organization will be using the site for different types of tasks, or if they will have permissions to do very different types of things, consider offering separate training to each group, so that you can address their needs specifically.
- If people in your organization already have experience with SharePoint sites, you might want to direct them to resources that highlight what’s new or different (for example, these users might find content about SharePoint’s new Ribbon user interface helpful).
- If the people in your organization have never used SharePoint sites before, you will want to plan to train them on basic tasks involved in working with SharePoint sites.
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What
| “What” questions you might ask about site users |
Considerations for planning your training |
- What types of tasks or work will people be performing on the site, and what features will they need to use to perform those tasks?
- Will people be searching for and viewing information, or will they be adding, editing, or deleting content?
- Will tasks vary by organizational role or permission level?
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- When you identify the types of tasks people will be performing on the site, you can determine what SharePoint features they may need to learn to use.
- If different groups of users will be performing very different sets of tasks, you might consider offering unique training to each group.
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When
| “When” questions you might ask about site users |
Considerations for planning your training |
- When will people need to use the site?
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- Certain users may need to be trained before others if they will be using the site before others. These users may also be candidates to serve as internal SharePoint experts who can help train and support their colleagues. You may also want to train site collection administrators before you train the site owners. Site collection administrators may be useful in helping decide which features will be available for users.
- If your organization is gradually customizing your site or adding new solutions, you may need to plan to deliver training on specific areas in phases.
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Where
| “Where” questions you might ask about site users |
Considerations for planning your training |
- Where will users be when they access the site?
- Where are users accustomed to performing their work (e.g., in desktop applications or in Web applications?)
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- If site users will be working remotely or travelling, you may need to set up the site to accommodate mobile access, and explain to users how they can access it this way.
- If you know that users are accustomed to specific tools, you may be able to anticipate what areas of working with SharePoint sites might seem new to them.
- If users are very accustomed to working in Microsoft Office desktop programs, you might want to highlight various ways they can perform SharePoint tasks from within these programs.
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How
| “How” questions you might ask about site users |
Considerations for planning your training |
- How will users manage documents, collaborate, or track projects?
- How frequently will users access the site?
- How might industry or organizational policies affect your users?
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- These questions might help you pinpoint issues specific to your business or industry that you might want to add to your training.
- For example, are there business processes that people should follow when they use SharePoint sites?
- Are there rules or policies specific to your organization, or to your organization’s plan to manage SharePoint that you want people to be aware of?
- For example, if you want people to avoid uploading family vacation photos to a team site, then you may want to incorporate some basic best practices into your SharePoint training plan. Such governance considerations may apply to all site collections for the organization.
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As you work through these questions, you should begin to develop some sense for the types of information your users might need, as well as the additional information you may need to integrate into your training.
Don’t forget the “Why?”
As you work through the “who, what, when, where, and how” questions to identify the training needs of your users, there’s an additional question you might want to consider, and that question is “Why?”
If the people in your organization have never used SharePoint sites before, your training should do more than simply introduce them to procedural “how-to” information for performing tasks in SharePoint. If people are going to use SharePoint to perform work that they are accustomed to doing a different way or with different tools, then you may need to demonstrate the benefits of the change to SharePoint Online. In other words, if your organization’s move onto SharePoint will be a major change in process for people, then incorporating some “change management” into your training will help ease the transition and ensure the success of your SharePoint deployment.
Lead with benefits
Imagine yourself in the shoes of your end users or site owners. The audience for your training may be wondering:
- Why should I care about this?
- Why do I need to change the way I do things?
- What’s in this for me?
Most people view software as a tool they use to perform the “real work” of their job. They may not get excited about learning software for the sake of learning software. However, they might be eager to learn ways in which they can accomplish their job more easily or efficiently.
When you communicate to people in your organization about the move to SharePoint, try to lead with potential benefits. Explain to them what their work will look like in the new system, and what types of efficiencies or benefits they can expect in comparison with any old tools or processes.
Use work scenarios to get people engaged with the technology
To make your SharePoint deployment a successful one, consider structuring your training around familiar work scenarios. Use the tasks or business processes that are familiar to your audience as a way to draw your audience into feature-specific information.
For example, if people will use document libraries to manage trip reports that they used to save to a file server or manage by e-mail, you might introduce the topic of document libraries by saying, “Now we will talk about a new process for managing trip reports.” This may be more engaging for most users than saying “Now we will talk about uploading documents to a document library.”
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Gather resources and information
After you determine what types of tasks your users will be performing, you can pinpoint the types of feature-specific content that your users might be need.
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Find SharePoint content for users
Include organization-specific information and best practices
If you develop slide presentations, handouts, or other formal training materials, consider integrating information about the rules, processes, or best practices that your organization has put into place around the use of SharePoint sites. The set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that you establish to determine how the people in your group use SharePoint is often called a governance model.
A governance model typically addresses topics such as:
- Site creation
- Permissions management
- Information architecture
- Site lifecycle and retirement
- Storage limits
- Classification of information
- Customization
- Data protection
- Navigation
- Search
- Roles and responsibilities for supporting the site
Some of these questions might already be decided for you, such as how much storage space you have for your site, and what sorts of customization you can do to the look and feel of the site. Others questions may not be relevant, depending on how complex your sites are, and how many people are using them. But even if you don’t have to make decisions about these topics, it’s a good idea to know what decisions have been made, so that you can inform your site users and owners and enforce policies appropriately.
By incorporating your governance model directly into your training, you can help ensure that users are aware of and compliant with these guidelines or practices.
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Train your trainers first
While you (or a small group of people in your organization) may be officially responsible for providing SharePoint training and support, you do not need to go it alone. It’s a good idea to build a network of people within your organization who are committed to developing their SharePoint expertise and providing peer coaching and assistance to their colleagues. By cultivating a network of internal SharePoint experts, you can help encourage the use of SharePoint and provide support to your users.
How do you identify these people? Good candidates might be individuals who are likely to be running or owning sites. Or, they could be people who are responsible for managing certain processes that are moving to SharePoint. These individuals are probably going to be your frontline in implementing and maintaining your governance model.
Plan to train your trainers first. You may also want to train site collection administrators before you train the site owners. Site collection administrators may be useful in helping decide which features will be available for users. Bring your trainers up to speed on your organization’s plans for SharePoint, and help them understand the governance model. Finally, help them gain expertise in using SharePoint. Once your network of internal SharePoint experts is up-to-speed, you can incorporate them into your training strategy. They can help deliver training at the team or department level, and they can serve as a resource for colleagues who need one-on-one coaching with tasks.
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Get the ball rolling: Train users and stay engaged
How you choose to actually deliver training to the people in your organization will depend a lot upon both the size and the culture of your organization, as well as other factors, such as available time and resources.
Training formats can assume many forms:
- formal classroom training with hands-on labs
- presentations
- small-group demonstrations
- self-directed reading and online training
- on-the-job learning
The most flexible and effective approach to training and supporting your users might be to offer some combination of these methods:
Consider kicking off your training efforts by holding a formal meeting with all users (if possible), where you can demonstrate your SharePoint sites and highlight key areas or solutions. Use this meeting as an opportunity to build enthusiasm by highlighting some of the benefits that users might experience. At this meeting, let users know what kinds of follow-up training opportunities or materials will be available to them in the coming days, weeks, or months.
Follow up the kick-off meeting with small group demos among specific teams or groups of users (group together users who have similar training needs, based on job role or permission level). Have the relevant internal SharePoint experts that you’ve tapped attend or lead these.
Create a mechanism for day-to-day support. Perhaps internal SharePoint experts can make themselves available for questions at “office hours” at designated times, or they can just be available for over-the-shoulder coaching. Consider creating a SharePoint discussion list where users post questions and answers.
Finally, encourage users to use the online resources on Office.com for procedural how-to articles or detailed feature information. Many of these resources can easily be printed for quick reference. If you think your users would be interested in self-directed training, many of the Training courses for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 are also applicable to SharePoint Online.
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Previous article in this planning guide: Step 5: Create and customize the public-facing Website
Next article in this planning guide: Step 7: Plan to monitor and maintain site collections and sites
Main planning guide article: SharePoint Online planning guide for Office 365 for enterprises
