Establishing a governance team is a critcal step to the success of a SharePoint project, no matter how simple the project.  I was working with a company that wanted to implement wikis and blogs on SharePoint to foster better internal collaboration.  This organization understood the importance of establishing a governance team as an initial step to the project.  The governance team was comprised of representatives of the various business groups that would be active in the use of the collaboration sites.  This team validated the initial approach to using the wikis and blogs, helped establish the information architecture and developed the process in which a new wiki or blog would be created.  We also presented to this team several use cases and had them validate that we had the right security and approval models. 

 

Once we developed the information architecture,the use policies and access procedures, we were able to implement the system with a clear and approved direction.  We then convenend the team to have them review the site and procedures before rolling them out to the general public.  The governance team was also involved in the development of the training and communications plan.  We were easily able to get buy in on both these plans as we had representatives from marketing and training on the team.  We not only got buy in but the representatives offered to help in the execution in the plan (this fostered ownership in the process).  This was key to the rollout process.

 

Using the governance team to not only help in the development of the policies and procedures but to help in the development and validation of the project was key to the successfull rollout of the system.  The system was received well and the project viewed by management as a big success.