Christian Ullrich January 2026

This backbone lists the explicit decisions that must hold as an initiative approaches an irreversible commitment. Each sentence clarifies scope, ownership, and accepted downsides, ensuring contracts, plans, and slides remain consistent under scrutiny and that any decision that cannot survive review is corrected or removed before commitment.

Table of contents

Purpose & Scope

1. We decide to position the site as voluntary rather than mandatory because this gives us higher long-term acceptance and lower resistance in everyday work instead of enforcing organization-wide usage from day one and accept that adoption will be slower and uneven.
2. We decide to keep existing SharePoint team sites authoritative because this gives us continuity of ownership and avoids disruption of established workflows instead of declaring the new site as the primary source of truth and accept that information will remain distributed across multiple locations.
3. We decide to frame the site explicitly as a complement rather than a replacement because this gives us political safety and reduces defensive reactions from teams instead of positioning it as a consolidation or cleanup initiative and accept that redundancy and parallel documentation will persist.
4. We decide to allow teams to use the site for both cross-team and team-specific content because this gives us flexibility in real usage patterns instead of restricting the site to strictly organization-wide topics and accept that boundaries of relevance will be less clear.
5. We decide to treat pages as the primary artifact rather than files because this gives us better contextual knowledge capture and navigability instead of organizing the site mainly as a file repository and accept that some users will find this less familiar for document-centric work.
6. We decide to allow decision proposals as first-class artifacts because this gives us visible decision preparation and traceability instead of limiting the site to static knowledge pages and accept that incomplete or unresolved proposals will remain publicly visible.
7. We decide to allow anyone in the organization to create pages because this gives us low entry barriers and decentralized contribution instead of requiring prior approval or role-based creation rights and accept that inconsistent quality and structure will occur.

Leadership sponsorship

1. We decide to launch the site without a named executive sponsor because this gives us speed and avoids dependency on leadership availability instead of delaying launch until a sponsor is secured and accept that the initiative has less political protection.
2. We decide not to require sponsor approval for rules or templates because this gives us operational autonomy and faster iteration instead of routing governance decisions through executive review and accept that rule conflicts cannot be escalated upward for resolution.
3. We decide to treat sponsorship as optional and additive rather than required because this gives us flexibility to evolve the site experimentally instead of binding the site to a fixed leadership mandate and accept that legitimacy must be earned through use rather than endorsement.
4. We decide not to assign any operational responsibilities to a sponsor because this gives us clarity that governance stays with the custodial team instead of creating shared or ambiguous accountability structures and accept that sponsors cannot be used to enforce compliance.
5. We decide not to schedule recurring sponsor reviews because this gives us continuity of operating rules without leadership cadence constraints instead of formal periodic executive oversight and accept that governance drift must be handled internally.
6. We decide to exclude leadership from approving individual pages because this gives us distributed ownership and avoids bottlenecks instead of introducing hierarchical content approval flows and accept that leadership cannot directly intervene in content disputes.

Operating model & Ownership