What if you had 24 hours to prepare before your team or workforce was locked out of the office? What would you set up to ensure co-workers could continue working and stay engaged?
REgarding 365 ran a virtual hackathon in March 2020 to illustrate how organizations can set up the essentials required to send an entire workforce home in the wake of Coronavirus. We know organizations vary widely in their preparedness for remote working and that business continuity plans differ. While the ideas presented in this hackathon aren’t a one-size-fits-all strategy for every organization, we hope the ideas presented give you a jump-start on your planning efforts.
The hackathon, hosted and led by the fabulous Darrell Webster, broke down Microsoft 365 planning efforts into several teams:
Each team worked together during the hackathon to ideate and build solutions. Together, we demonstrated how Teams, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Power Automate, and Microsoft Forms can be used to create a modern workplace.
We hope this virtual hackathon gives you real-world ideas for mobilizing your employees to work from home in these difficult times. Stay safe, stay home, and #FlattenTheCurve.
I sat down with Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) recently to record an episode of #MVPbuzzChat. We had a great conversation about enterprise Office 365 and SharePoint adoption and governance. Topics covered include:
Growth in end-user adoption content and sessions in the SharePoint & Office 365 space
The challenge justifying technology’s value to the organization (and how technology utilization and value differ)
How to connect with your end-users to drive interest and engagement
How innovation games can help you gather requirements, build consensus, and drive strategic discussions with your end-users and decision makers
Why companies should adopt a practical model for SharePoint and Office 365 governance that reflects your organizational culture and industry you’re working in
Microsoft Teams will now support creation of organization-wide teams for small-to-medium sized companies. Org-wide teams can be created by Office 365 global administrators, but are limited to organizations with no more than 1,000 users. The org-wide public team will automatically incorporate all company users, pulling Active Directory information for everyone who joins or leaves the organization.
This new capability is generating some interesting discussions about how to best facilitate org-wide dialogue. Is Microsoft Teams best suited to host this type of open communication? And how would this new feature impact use of the All Company group in Yammer? The REgarding 365 team has assembled some thoughts on these questions. Check out our latest video:
Microsoft announced today that big user interface changes are on the way for Microsoft Office. The changes will be coming to Office Online first, but will eventually impact the desktop applications as well. Several members of the REgarding 365 team (myself, Loryan Strant, Daniel Glenn, and Darrell Webster) reviewed the changes and discussed organization strategies to drive adoption. Check out the video recording below
It’s time for another REgarding 365 debate! Many of you may have seen our first debate, where we evaluated whether end-users should be able to create their own Office 365 groups. Now we’re back with a new topic: Are intranets still relevant?
We’ll be streaming the debate live on April 19th at 3pm Central time. If you join us live, don’t forget to share your thoughts via the debate chat. We’d love to hear what you think.
In March 2018, I had the opportunity to participate in REgarding 365’s first panel debate. The debate was recorded at Microsoft’s Production Studios in Redmond and centered on the question of whether end-users should be able to create their own Office 365 groups. You can view the full debate below. For background on how the debate came about, check out my earlier post. You may also want to read Cogmotive’s recap of the debate.
I’m thrilled to be participating in REgarding 365’s first panel debate. The debate will be recorded at Microsoft’s Production Studios in Redmond and will live-stream on March 13, 2018 from 12-12:45pm PST. The topic for this initial debate is “End users should be able to create their own Office 365 Groups.” The debate will include 8 panelists that represent either the end-user or the IT Pro point of view. The panelists are listed below (broken out based on the point of view they’re representing).
Darrell Webster, Microsoft MVP and REgarding 365 host, conceived this debate idea and will be refereeing. Check out Darrell’s LinkedIn article for more information on the debate. And don’t forget to subscribe to the REgarding 365 channel and set an alert to receive a reminder for the live-stream on March 13th!
Driving user adoption for SharePoint/Office 365 requires a thorough understanding of your user base–their business needs, their technology acumen, their preferred methods for learning and their motivational drivers. While many of my other blog posts focus on business needs and methodologies for engaging your user base, this post is dedicated to understanding motivation. Understanding the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators (and how the types of tasks being performed impact the success of motivating factors) will help you understand your users and design adoption strategies that engage, delight and inspire.
Daniel H. Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us provides an in-depth review of how human evolution and technological advancements have driven major shifts in personal motivation. Pink’s assertions will change the way you think about incentives (both for your Office 365 users and for your kids). The RSA Animate video below provides a quick summary of Pink’s findings. I recommend reading the book for more detail–it’s a quick and insightful read.
Here are a few timestamps to help you navigate the video:
00:25 – The “freaky” science behind what drives us
01:17 – Performance motivation (reward top performers/ignore low performers)
02:35 – Rewards don’t work that way! It’s a weird socialist conspiracy
04:20 – The key to leveraging if/then motivation
05:06 – The 3 factors that drive performance and engagement
08:08 – The reality of mastery (and how it will drive people to produce incredible results on their own time)
I recently had the pleasure of joining the REgarding 365 team for a discussion on driving inter-generational adoption of Office 365. The conversation focused on the challenges of bringing diverse teams together to drive new productivity behaviors.
Our work teams are growing increasingly dynamic, with significant contrasts in education/background, age, technological aptitude, personality and work habits. Our technology capabilities are also growing more varied, offering a plethora of choices on when and how to collaborate. The opportunity (and the challenge) is figuring out how to bring diverse people together to build new productivity habits that leverage rich technology capabilities like Office 365. This can be challenging when individuals on the team have natural preferences for some technology solutions over others (e.g. “I love email” vs. “I love chat and OneNote”). But when you add in other personal factors (e.g. preferred work rhythms, willingness to learn and adopt new technologies and willingness to openly share information), finding the right unifying tool/technology can be an arduous process.
The full version of our conversation is available on YouTube–check it out below. And don’t forget to watch Regarding 365’s weekly show Msg Center: The week that was, held live at Noon Central each Monday.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with Erica Toelle, Product Evangelist for RecordPoint, about how Office 365 is changing the landscape of information architecture. We discussed how the launch of Microsoft Teams, the ramp-up in usage of OneNote and the shift away from formal site hierarchies and metadata structures in SharePoint is driving new business data management needs. This change requires librarians and information managers to shift their focus. Instead of leading card-sorting exercises to build out formal taxonomies and data models, we need to build strategies for user engagement and technology adoption. The goal is to help our users make sense of the data that is being surfaced to them every day while adapting to new methods of working and collaborating.
This shouldn’t be a difficult transition. Librarians and information managers evaluate information architecture needs for unique audiences every day. The evolutionary step is applying this knowledge to constructing user-centric adoption and education campaigns that reflect company cultures and user behaviors while also accounting for appropriate governance controls. If librarians and information managers can make the leap, they’ll drive user engagement and pioneer new information architecture methodologies that support Office 365’s growth.
Interview Transcript
Erica Toelle: Hi, I’m Erica Toelle, Product Evangelist for RecordPoint.
Sarah Haase:
Hi, I’m Sarah Haase, Information Architect and Corporate Librarian.
Erica Toelle:
Perfect. You have traditionally been in the information architect space being a librarian.
Sarah Haase:
Right.
Erica Toelle:
I think as we were just talking about before we started recording, we’re going through this shift now, where in the old SharePoint world we’d think of things in terms of hierarchies and-
Sarah Haase:
Exactly.
Erica Toelle:
… really over-designed information architectures, but in the modern SharePoint world, where we’re focused on contacts and experiences, it’s a little bit different.
Sarah Haase:
Very different.
Erica Toelle:
So, with your perspective, how are you thinking about approaching these new spaces?
Sarah Haase:
Right. I think it is really key, if I could even back up one second from there, I think librarians in general are something where we have had to make a big tangential shift over the last 10 or 15 years. From thinking about things in a library, in an electronic database, or in a file stack, and Dewey decimal system and all those perspectives into thinking about things from a data classification perspective in SharePoint, right? That’s where we built those information architectures that were detailed, hierarchical, they were taxonomies, right?
We had content-type hubs, and we had managed meta-data, and we were trying to control all of our term stores and really trying to manage that and now, it’s all shifted. It’s all experiences, so it’s much more about where does my content naturally belong for different types of users and different user groups? For one user group, that might be an instant message experience or a Skype experience embedded in Teams and for another group it might be a OneNote experience and for another group, it really might be a SharePoint team site or a SharePoint community site experience.
It’s really transitioning from those hierarchical methodologies to having more of an experience and it’s more of a where than a how. The how being that hierarchical data set. It’s an important switch for us to make as information architects and librarians because we have to continue to evolve our way of thinking.
Erica Toelle:
That makes complete sense. If every group might be different, how do scale helping them figure that out in a larger organization?
Sarah Haase:
That’s a really key question and it starts with education. It also starts with being able to partner strategically with different groups to figure out your personas and the types of experiences that they have. Right? There are only so many types of different personas that you’re going to run into so if you can figure out for these types of users with these types of business outcomes and needs, here are the three to five or three to seven most likely ways that they’re going to engage in content. Then you can start recommending in almost a matrix style, lining up the type of personas, the type of business teams that they are and the type of experiences that might be meaningful for them. That can give them a running headstart.
You, as a facilitator of outcome and information architecture and a technologist perspective might often be required to step in and help them on their journey to that, but at least it gives you some roadmaps and some guides so it’s not all just based on you or I going in and having that conversation with them one on one.
Erica Toelle:
That makes complete sense. In, kind of, the old hierarchy world, we were building content-types for example, because we wanted standardized templates, workflows, policies, do we just have to give up on that in the modern experience or is there some … What do we do?
Sarah Haase:
Right. Not entirely, luckily, because I still love a lot of those things, but I think it again, depends on the business needs, and what we’re doing. I think that we were really focused on those information management policies and the content types and where is the data and how is the data arranged in a hierarchical sense, and it has shifted somewhat, right? Because OneNote is one of the most compelling tools for my business users and not one of them wants my help categorizing their notebooks, and the sections of their notebooks. Why? Because they’ll do it however they want to and everybody just searches and it works.
The messaging is different and the need is different but there’s still a need for business automation. There’s still a need for those workflows or those flows and those power ops, it’s just that suddenly the mechanics and the tool sets behind it are shifting and we’ve got to be adaptable and flexible to that.
Erica Toelle:
And rebuild our solutions?
Sarah Haase:
And rebuild our solutions where necessary and hopefully redesign them and improve them as we go.
Erica Toelle:
Got it. How about end user adoption. Have those techniques changed in the modern workplace?
Sarah Haase:
User adoption is my favorite thing. I think absolutely they have changed, especially in the last couple of years. One of my favorite things to talk about is the difference between the traditional models for user adoption and the user centric models. Traditional models are the sending out mass communications, one flavor, one style of communications to everyone, and expecting that they’ll even consume it via email, much less that it’s effective for them. Right? Or, a train the trainer approach. Select one person from every department to go to training and then take back what they learned to teach everyone else. Or, even training on features and assuming that business users will make the connection between features and their business outcomes in a meaningful way.
Those are a lot of big assumptions and it doesn’t work anymore. Those types of models really separate IT from their business. I think a user-centric model is more about building strategic partnerships, being able to work with users, building those user personas that we talked about, engaging with key thought leaders and influencers who are also technology advocates and technology innovators in your organization. Partner with them, help them to build the knowledge that they have, set them loose, and have them help you pay it forward to the rest of the organization. It’s much more about how to build a movement in terms of excitement and enthusiasm rather than the traditional approach of trainer the trainer, features, and mass-market communications.
Erica Toelle:
Sure. I know with an audience of record managers and librarians, we have to ask if we’re kind of opening up these user experiences, being more user-centric and experience and context-based, well, what about governance? Is there a place for governance anymore?
Sarah Haase:
No, there absolutely isn’t. Every organization should be talking about governance, no matter where you are on that governance spectrum from the we’re going to be wide open with a lot of things and we’re going to have very few limits, to the kind of company that’s going to have to have some very specific models and fixtures around governance and how that works. I think governance is very important to think about but it’s also important to think about your company culture and how to represent that governance. I’ve worked with organizations before that have big pictures that tell the story or their governance and that’s really worked well for their company culture and for their users as a reminder of that governance. I’ve also worked for companies that had a 47-page manual that got updated frequently with a change log. It’s really about the company culture, the company industry, the type of governance that they need and you’ve got to make it fit the company as opposed to trying to make it fit a rubric or a standardized rule.
Erica Toelle:
Makes complete sense. Any final words of wisdom for librarians or records managers as they make the transition from maybe this more hierarchical on-premise world to the modern workplace in Office 365?
Sarah Haase:
I would say to be open, to be adaptable, and to say it’s okay if you’re not building out formal taxonomies, there’s new fun to be had. So, be open and adaptable to the new kinds of fun because your skill set and your experience are still highly relevant. You just have to be able to figure out how to talk to people about it every day in the new world.
Erica Toelle:
Perfect. Well, thanks so much for joining us here at SharePoint Fest Chicago.
Sarah Haase:
Thank you.
Erica Toelle:
Have a great rest of the conference.
Sarah Haase 