This document is a summary of a panel discussion on staffing and developing a successful SharePoint team. It introduces five panelists who are SharePoint experts and provides brief biographies of each. It also lists 10 questions that were asked to the panel on topics such as challenges in recruiting for SharePoint roles, ideal team composition, justifying roles to management, training budgets, and how Office 365 impacts staffing. Contact information is provided for each panelist.
3. Our Panelists David Berry ShadeedEleazer Labrina Loving Marie-Michelle Strah Rima Reyes (moderator) 3
4. David Berry Booz Allen Hamilton Associate - SharePoint Architect David has ten years’ experience with SharePoint and currently leads the architecture, design and planning of SharePoint 2010 engagements. Having almost 20 years’ experience in consulting and technology, David focused on the Microsoft development platform which also included working on Content Management Server 2002, the forerunner to SharePoint’s WCM capabilities. David also co-manages the CapArea.NET SharePoint group in Northern Virginia. 4
5. ShadeedEleazer SharePoint Engineer at Planet Technologies Shadeed is a US Navy veteran with over 12 years experience supporting Military, Federal, State government initiatives revolving around SharePoint and a wide range of custom applications.Shadeed is the publisher of SharePoint Careers, which provides career resources for SharePoint professionals and is currently writing the SharePoint 2010 Business Roles book. 5
6. Labrina Loving Manager, Application Development and Integration at Hitachi Consulting LaBrina Loving is a Manager on the Microsoft Platform team at Hitachi Consulting, a Microsoft Gold Partner. She has over 11 years of experience developing solutions for clients using Microsoft technologies. She first began her career building large scale e-commerce web solutions for clients. For the last 4 years, she has focused on architecting and delivering solutions on the SharePoint platform. In addition, she is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) in SharePoint 2010 and 2007 as well as a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD). Ms. Loving enjoys using her technical skills to enhance the community around her by volunteering at events like Random Hacks of Kindness and Microsoft Give Camp. 6
7. Marie-Michelle Strah, PhD SharePoint Solutions Architect and Practice Lead at BroadPoint Technologies Michelle has over 15 years experience in IT, project management, healthcare IT and R&D specializing in Health 2.0 and Government 2.0 solutions as well as enterprise architecture solutions for the commercial and not for profit space. Currently, she is the Practice Lead and SharePoint Architect for BroadPoint Technologies in the Washington, DC area. She is a recognized Healthcare SharePoint SME and has spoken at numerous user groups, SharePoint Saturdays and national conferences on enterprise architecture, Agile project management, and systems integration including SharePoint Best Practices 2011, Microsoft Convergence 2011 and SharePoint Saturday NYC. She is also a founding member of Women in SharePoint and President of Women in SharePoint DC. Her recent work focuses on enterprise architecture and complex intranet, business intelligence and supply chain redesign for military and civilian agencies and private sector clients leveraging MS SharePoint, Project Server and Dynamics GP and CRM as well as legacy and domain specific LOB applications. 7
8. Rima Reyes Technical Consultant at Hewlett-Packard Company Rima Reyes is currently a Technical Consultant at Hewlett-Packard in Washington, DC and has consulted to and trained federal government agencies for the past 6 years on various platforms. She began her career by innovating a custom web application integrated with SharePoint to fulfill government contract staffing needs. This application is now available corporate wide at TASC, Inc. She then went on to create a custom SharePoint training platform for 5000+ employees. Rima now focuses on providing federal government clients with industry leading custom solutions in SharePoint utilizing SharePoint Designer, InfoPath, & C#. Rima is a founding member of Women in SharePoint DC and currently serves as Vice President. 8
9. Question #1 What are the challenges managers face in recruiting/staffing SharePoint teams? 9
10. Question #2 What constitutes an ideal SharePoint team? What are the key roles? 10
11. Question #3 How can I help a non-technical recruiter find the SharePoint person/role I am looking for? What are some key terms that I can include in a requisition to help recruiting? 11
12. Question #4 How does staffing a SharePoint team in the federal space differ from other private sector businesses and organizations? 12
13. Question #5 Does a SharePoint team size need to differ based upon the amount of users in my organization? 13
14. Question #6 How does Office365 change the SharePoint staffing landscape? 14
15. Question #7 How can I justify to management all of the SharePoint roles I need on my team? 15