Keeping things simple to ensure SharePoint success

By John Ross

January 25, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 3)
People often ask about tips for getting started with their SharePoint project, and usually my advice is to keep things simple and focus on what SharePoint does best (and avoid what it doesn’t do as well). Normally whenever these words come out of my mouth, I’m very aware of how silly it must sound to someone because it sounds rhetorical. But the fact of the matter is that failure to follow these two little tips is the reason why most SharePoint projects jump the tracks.

The K.I.S.S. principle
If you aren’t familiar with the acronym K.I.S.S., it stands for Keep It Simple Stupid/Silly/SharePoint. The solution to any problem should be reasonably simple, but just for clarification that doesn’t mean that I’m advocating a specific way of solving the problem. For example, we’ve all talked to stakeholders who have some problem to solve, and we’ve probably all heard (or proposed) solutions that are the technical equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine (i.e. www.rubegoldberg.com). In these cases, you might address the original problem but would likely end up with long-term supportability issues.

If you happen to find yourself in a position where a complex solution has been proposed by someone (or maybe you’ve been the one who proposed it), the best thing is often to step back and look at the original goal. Many times the answer is to improve and streamline the process (executives love stuff like that!), or maybe it would be possible to just make the technical solution less elaborate so that you’d still get business value but not the perceived “perfect world” solution. In my experience, it is okay. Remember that you can always enhance functionality in the future, but it is far more difficult to dial back complexity once it has been implemented.

If you ignore the K.I.S.S. principle, you run the risk of delivering an overly complex solution that might be difficult to support and use. This can lead to loss of trust by your stakeholders. Start simple and create things that create real value for your stakeholders. If you do it right, they’ll ask you to do more, which is a very good problem to have!



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