Information Architecture Planning Sheets

It's not often that you come across tools that can be used to both educate users and plan implementation at the same time, however, Mark Miller has successfully accomplished this with his Site Planning Worksheets. I am beginning to explore the use of these with the training department at my place of work for both their educational and developmental potential.

My organization has been offering training to our users for around two months now, and each time they leave a training session, new ideas are hatched that could be implemented in SharePoint. These ideas range from simplistic site designs with a few standard lists and attached workflows to entire systems that are supported and maintained through SharePoint. However, after a few weeks, the "new" wears off and the user forgets the original idea.

With these worksheets, I hope to capture these ideas and place them into a queue for better analysis of the business problems my users are attempting to solve. This way -- even if the new wears off -- our development team can better serve the user community with timely and accurate solutions. Through the process of requirements gathering, we will refine the final solution and be better able to deliver a solution that is up to the expectations of the user.

I would highly recommend to anyone that is involved in a roll-out of SharePoint to review these worksheets. They have benefits to all levels of user -- administrator, developer and end-user.