What Businesses Get Wrong About SharePoint Governance
SharePoint has become an essential tool for organisations across Australia, offering powerful collaboration and document management capabilities. Yet despite its widespread adoption, many businesses struggle with SharePoint governance, often approaching it in ways that create more problems than they solve. Understanding these common misconceptions can mean the difference between a SharePoint environment that empowers your team and one that frustrates them at every turn.
Treating Governance as a One-Time Setup
Perhaps the most significant mistake organisations make is viewing SharePoint governance as a box-ticking exercise completed during initial deployment. They create a governance document, file it away, and consider the job done. This couldn't be further from the truth. Governance is a living framework that needs to evolve alongside your business.
As your organisation grows, restructures, or changes its ways of working, your governance approach must adapt accordingly. What made sense for a team of fifty people won't necessarily work for two hundred, and the permissions structure that seemed logical three years ago might be completely inadequate for your current security requirements.
Focusing Solely on Permissions and Access
When many businesses think about governance, they immediately jump to permissions and access controls. Whilst these are certainly important components, they represent just a fraction of what effective governance entails. A truly comprehensive approach encompasses naming conventions, metadata standards, content lifecycle management, storage limits, and user training. Sydney SharePoint experts frequently encounter organisations that have locked down their SharePoint environment so tightly that legitimate users can't work efficiently, whilst simultaneously having no standards for how sites are named, what metadata should be captured, or when outdated content should be archived. This creates a system that's both frustratingly restrictive and chaotically disorganised at the same time.
Overlooking the Human Element
Technology solutions often fail not because the technology itself is flawed, but because the human aspects were neglected. Businesses invest heavily in configuring the perfect SharePoint architecture but forget that actual people need to use it every day. Governance policies written in technical jargon that nobody understands, or rules that make simple tasks unnecessarily complicated, will inevitably be circumvented. Users will find workarounds, create shadow IT solutions, or simply revert to emailing attachments because it's easier than navigating an overcomplicated governance framework. Effective governance strikes a balance between maintaining control and enabling productivity, and it's communicated in language that resonates with the people who actually use the system.
Creating Governance in Isolation
Another common misstep is developing governance policies behind closed doors without input from the people they'll affect. IT departments sometimes craft elaborate governance frameworks based on what they believe users need, only to discover that these policies don't align with actual work patterns. The marketing team might need flexibility to collaborate with external agencies, whilst the legal team requires stricter controls. Finance might need different retention policies than human resources. By involving representatives from different departments in governance planning, organisations create policies that reflect real-world requirements rather than theoretical best practices. This collaborative approach also builds buy-in, making users more likely to actually follow the governance guidelines.
Neglecting to Plan for Growth and Change
Many businesses design their SharePoint governance around their current state without considering future scalability. They create site structures and permission schemes that work perfectly for their existing twenty sites but become unmanageable when that number grows to two hundred. Similarly, they might establish workflows optimised for their current processes without building in flexibility for future business changes. Sydney SharePoint experts recommend taking a forward-looking approach that anticipates growth, mergers, restructures, and evolving compliance requirements. This doesn't mean over-engineering solutions for problems that might never materialise, but rather building governance frameworks with enough flexibility to accommodate change without requiring complete overhauls.
Failing to Enforce and Monitor
Creating governance policies is only half the battle—enforcing them is where many organisations falter. Without regular audits, monitoring, and gentle course corrections, even the best-designed governance framework will gradually deteriorate. Sites proliferate without oversight, permissions accumulate over time as people change roles, and storage fills up with duplicate and outdated content. Effective governance includes regular health checks, automated alerts for policy violations, and clear processes for addressing issues when they arise. This doesn't require a full-time governance police force, but it does need someone to own the responsibility and have the authority to maintain standards.
The Path Forward
Getting SharePoint governance right isn't about implementing the most restrictive policies or creating the thickest procedure manual. It's about finding the sweet spot where control and enablement intersect, where structure supports rather than stifles productivity. The businesses that succeed with SharePoint are those that view governance as an ongoing commitment rather than a completed project, involve users in shaping policies that affect them, and remain flexible enough to evolve as circumstances change. By avoiding these common pitfalls, organisations can transform their SharePoint environment from a necessary evil into a genuine competitive advantage.
