It is interesting how often the poor secretary is overlooked. These days some politically correct establishments have decided not to use the term secretary and in others, secretaries are viewed as role from the past and managers are more able to cope alone. Yet in most businesses we will still find plenty of receptionists and personal assistants.
The administrators (as we will call them) in most organisations have an excellent view of the business as a whole, have a superb personal contact network within the organisation, know how their managers feel and what they think, know what works and what does not, are typically IT literate, if not super users, and can influence senior management thinking at the flick of a mouse. Therefore we wonder why they are not used more often to gain SharePoint adoption within a business?
In our experience the personal assistants are the defenders of the their management teams, solid walls of granite which cannot be bypassed, resolutely loyal to the business cause and also extremely interested in anything at all that makes the working lives of their manager and themselves far more easy.
Demonstrating the merits of SharePoint meeting sites for meeting minutes and meeting agendas, attachments that are usually laboriously distributed via email or printed out etc quickly proves the value of SharePoint to an entrenched and busy audience. Save time for a PA and they will love you for ever.
We firmly recommend the strategy of creating a PA or administrator focus group, demonstrate a wide range of easy to use functionality, get their buy-in, show how SharePoint can save valuable time and enhance the lives of their managers and themselves and you are on to a sure fire win. You can be sure that they will then become your business champions, send positive messages through the grapevine and inspire confidence in the leaders above them. That way you cannot have a better audience to begin with.
Perhaps it is your turn to bring them a cup of coffee for once !
