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Roles & Responsibilities

​​Client Roles

The following roles represent client participants:

  • Project Sponsor: This is the member of your staff who is the primary champion for developing the solution on the SharePoint platform. This person is often a departmental manager or company executive. Their main purpose on the project is to establish Client policies and procedures that will help to drive adoption of SharePoint and to make any high level decisions that are required along the way.

  • Project Stakeholder(s): These are members of Client staff who are affected by the SharePoint project in some way. Usually they'll be performing their regular duties within the SharePoint sites being developed. While no special technical skills are required, some additional training may be needed.

  • Content Steward(s): The participants are Client staff who have responsibility for maintaining some part of the content on the SharePoint site, but who usually have official duties outside of IT. Realms of responsibility can include organizing documents, and developing or maintaining site content. They're characterized as people who are somewhat computer literate and/or IT savvy; they may have the ability to share knowledge with others and act as a positive example or even trainer. These include Power Users, Content Managers, and SharePoint Site Owners.

  • IT Staff: Client staff with duties involving the development and maintenance of information technology solutions. Such staff will interact directly with our consultants to deploy and configure solutions in the SharePoint farm. Their help may be required to support the all or part of the solution we develop. Note that many small businesses do not have any dedicated IT staff, or have IT staff who lack necessary SharePoint skills. In such cases, you can rely on us for help in this area.

Having the right level of resources within your organization is an essential component to getting the most out of our services and SharePoint in general. To ensure a successful implementation, you should have at least one Technical Steward capable of interacting with Liquid Mercury Solutions staff on a regular basis – but more may be required. Complex deployments or large organizations may require additional IT Staff for support. Please inquire with your Liquid Mercury Solutions consultant to determine if you'll require additional services from us to effectively meet your needs.

LMS Roles 

The following roles represent LMS staff that you will typically interact with before, during, and after the proposed project:

  • Delivery Coordinator: Your delivery manager is responsible for ensuring that project objectives are completed in the planned timeframe and that your needs have been appropriately met.

  • Business Analyst: This role interviews the customer's key staff such as the Project Stakeholder to ensure that the business requirements and desired functionality are documented. Sometimes they'll have applicable Microsoft certifications. They're typically most active during the requirements gathering portion of the project, and may fill other roles such as testing or documentation at other times.

  • SharePoint Administrator / IT Pro: The admin assists your IT staff with installation and configuration of databases, SharePoint, custom solution packages, and/or third-party products. They may also be called upon to support complex SharePoint issues or to configure advanced services such as Managed Metadata or Enterprise Search. They're typically Microsoft Certified Professionals. In many cases, they're typically assigned during the initial period of the Solution Jump Start.

  • SharePoint Specialist: This member of the team is proficient at configuring SharePoint sites and out-of-the-box features like Content Types, Search Web Parts, or Document Sets in order to achieve the desired functionality in a SharePoint site. They generally act as second tier when handling SharePoint support cases. They're also typically assigned during development portion of a SharePoint project.

  • Office Technology Specialist: This person is proficient with Microsoft Office products such as Word or Excel, and has the level of SharePoint user experience needed to effectively create document templates for your site. Out of necessity, SharePoint Specialists are often also Office Technology Specialists. They're typically assigned during the development phase of a project.

  • SharePoint Developer: Our developers are programmers who create custom solutions for SharePoint and can assist the team with diagnosing and correcting issues that require changes to code. They typically have Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist or higher level accreditation. They are often involved during the design portion of the Solution Jump Start and possibly later on as well.

  • SharePoint Expert: At many stages of this process, a SharePoint SME such as a senior developer, consultant, or architect will provide guidance and oversight to the other members of the team. SharePoint Experts will typically have either Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, Microsoft Certified IT Professional, or both. They're often involved during the design portion of a project, and play a supporting role later on.

Division of Labor

Even more than most IT projects, any SharePoint project is truly a joint venture. As such, we have to carefully define who will perform each task. Our project plan includes high level tasks involved in implementation of SharePoint features.. Each task is designated as being performed by LMS, by your staff (Client), or Together.

  • Work assigned to you can be completed autonomously. However, due to the limited scope of Solution Jump Start it is extremely important that these tasks are completed promptly. Feel free to ask us if you need our help.
  • Likewise, this is true for work assigned to LMS, though you may hear from us if we need your help or have any questions.
  • Work done together is usually done in the context of a meeting. In some cases, we might work separately, but the division of labor for the tasks can be hard to tell ahead of time. On the schedule, jointly assigned tasks to affect the total hours for both parties equally.

The Solution Jump Start format is designed to be light on project management overhead but heavy on results. On Day 1, during the kick-off you'll receive a customized work breakdown of the tasks and activities that will occur during your Solution Jump Start project.