BRK2099 Creating opportunities through Office 365

Editor's Notes

• #2: No spoken content
• #3: A private word for ‘Second screen’ users Hello and thank you for your interest in this session You can see everything that I wanted to say by viewing the notes accompanying each slide.
• #4: Welcome + Ignite observation Find out who went to the earlier sessions: BRK2097 - Drive Office 365 adoption: methodology, best practices, and resources from Microsoft BRK3065 - Accelerate your Office 365 deployment with FastTrack Find out if they can hear me!   Narrative Welcome to ‘Opening opportunities with connected thinking. Driving adoption of Office 365 at Mott MacDonald’! [Placeholder for Ignite related comment dependent upon session time, ease to find room, weather etc.] Can I get a quick show of hands who went to the earlier sessions: BRK2097 - Drive Office 365 adoption: methodology, best practices, and resources from Microsoft BRK3065 - Accelerate your Office 365 deployment with FastTrack
• #5: 14-years a Civil Engineer Shifted into IT Office 365 Responsible for solutions and most importantly their adoption MVP   Narrative So who am I? My name is Simon Denton and I’m not a techie and my background is not in IT. I work for a global engineering, management and development consultancy called Mott MacDonald. For 14 years I was a Civil Engineer. I was involved in a diverse range of projects from building shopping centres in the Middle East to stabilising aging parts of the London Underground. But thanks to the 2008-2012 global recession I had to change direction and I took a sideways move into IT. About 18-months ago, the decision was made to rollout Office 365 throughout Mott MacDonald. My role was to use my business knowledge to shape the solutions to be provided. In the last 12-months, I’ve become both architect and evangelist for Office 365 at Mott MacDonald. I am responsible for the solutions we that we develop and most importantly their adoption. In the last 6-months I became a Microsoft MVP. Now as MVP’s go, I’m in a small but special group as my award category includes Yammer as well as the remainder of Office 365. So I stand before you as someone who Microsoft believes in, understands the products and most importantly knows what business looks like from the outside of the bubble that is IT. Ok, so that’s enough about me. The real star is the company I work for: Mott MacDonald.
• #6: Quite a lot of potential content Focus on three areas that helped us drive adoption: fast track material launch video Examples how we weaved Office 365 into our fabric Narrative There is a lot that I could share but I am conscious of the length of the session. Therefore, I’m going to focus on three areas that helped us drive the adoption of Office 365. fast track material launch video WITFM Image credit Mott MacDonald Troja Bridge https://www.mottmac.com/article/3386/troja-bridge-czech-republic http://teams/sites/groupphotolibrary/Images/Transport/Bridges/Troja%20bridge%2C%20Czech%20Republic/Professional%20photos%202015/IMG_7951.jpg
• #7: $2bn [Video] People based 16,000 Sell knowledge, know how Leverage our internal networks Pretty good, Office 365 has helped us get better and better Opening opportunities through connected thinking Deliver Office 365 – not outsourced   Narrative Mott MacDonald is a $2bn engineering, management and development consultancy. The video provides a glimpse into the work we’re involved in: solving some of the world’s most urgent social, environmental and economic challenges helping governments and businesses plan, deliver and sustain their strategic goals responding to humanitarian and natural emergencies improving people’s lives We are a people based business, employing over 16,000 people across the globe, and what we sell is our knowledge and know how. What we like to think we do better than lots of other organisations ;-) is to create links between experts which allows us to harness the collective power of all of our employees. We have always been pretty good at fostering people networks and sharing information and knowledge but we have got much better at this in recent times and this has been supported and partly enabled by Office 365. Our business thrives as we have a culture of openness, friendliness and personal commitment that you might associate with a much smaller business. We describe what we do as ‘opening opportunities through connected thinking’. Our Office 365 service is delivered by our in-house IT department.   Image credits Mott MacDonald Video https://www.mottmac.com/ Troja Bridge https://www.mottmac.com/article/3386/troja-bridge-czech-republic http://teams/sites/groupphotolibrary/Images/Transport/Bridges/Troja%20bridge%2C%20Czech%20Republic/Professional%20photos%202015/IMG_7951.jpg
• #8: In order to set the context 2014, business improvement Started on premises stopped and went all in Narrative [Quotes on slide will switch automatically after about 10 seconds] “I think that’s one of the main selling points of Office 365. Yes, you’re going to save money if you do it right, but the real key is that it’s going to release your staff to do what they do best, do it better, and get more done.” “We don’t need to innovate around Office 365. We’ll leave that to Microsoft. Our job is to adopt the technology as quickly as we can and to stay focused on using it to deliver value to our clients. ” Our Office 365 journey started early in 2014 as part of a wide reaching programme for business improvement and transformation. It fell to the IT service to deliver SharePoint 2013 as a replacement to our existing Document Management System and Intranet amongst a raft of other tools and services. It’s not to say that our Document Management System was not good. It was just that we saw this as an opportunity to change. In the case of the Intranet we had allowed the platform to stagnate. As we dabbled with SharePoint 2013 it became increasingly clear that the ‘cloud’ was where it was at. We stopped all SharePoint 2013 development and switched our focus to Office 365. Quotes Darren Russell, Digital Transformation Director Image credit Mott MacDonald Digital Transformation Director, Darren Russell, introduces GoDigital to shareholders http://teams/sites/groupphotolibrary/Images/MM%20Group/People/Events/AGM%20-%202016/Event%20High%20resolution/Mott-MacDonald-AGM-090416-403.jpg
• #9: Slide based on Microsoft research Where are we Roughly around the * Could go one of two ways Narrative The figure is based upon Microsoft research. It serves to demonstrate that without an adoption programme, following the initial launch and flurry of communications, staff disengage and keep on doing things the way they always have. This is a phenomenon that we witnessed in our organisation. One of the primary reasons for this is that staff will naturally gravitate to the path of least resistance and by its very nature change will generate varying degrees of resistance. Image credit Microsoft / Mott MacDonald / Simon Denton The original Microsoft research has been augmented with the phases that the adoption curve.
• #10: Had a communications plan (which served us well) Needed more detail to respond to questions from the business Had a gap in knowledge – ability to map requirements etc. to workloads Needed a framework within which to product it Fortunate timing CSM and Fast Track EXO migration Supported by Yammer Narrative From the outset of the programme we had a detail communications plan which has served us well. But it lacked the depth to allow us to respond to questions from the business – especially the ‘what’s in it for me’. As a team we had a gap in our knowledge centred around the Office 365 tools – we were on the same journey as our staff when it came to learning about them. At the time we had access to a Microsoft Customer Success Manager and a Technical Strategist. They suggested we look at material emerging from the Microsoft Fast Track service. We had previously worked with Fast Track, not on the planning for Office 365, but on a piece of heavy lifting that we knew we had to do. We knew that moving 16,000+ mailboxes from Exchange on premises to Exchange Online would be a challenge and that Exchange Online played a crucial part in the Office 365 experience. It was a task that we had to tackle early in the migration. Over the course of 3 months, in the latter half of 2014, we went (virtually) from office to office performing   . Image credit Microsoft http://fasttrack.microsoft.com/office/onboard/50
• #11: Pro-formas Generic Mixture of information and questions to explore 2-days rewriting the language and developing content Changed language to make them more accessible Serve two purposes – adoption and focus on relevancy   Narrative The Fast Track service offered a number of pro forma PowerPoint decks that when combined formed a plan for driving the adoption of Office 365 and serving to answer some of the “what’s in it for me”. The trouble was that the decks where…, well…, unsurprisingly generic. On first impressions they did not look like they were going to help. Over the course of 2-days I went through the decks, changing the tone to be more personal and relevant to an employee of Mott MacDonald. I made the changes as I felt that it would be easier for people to engage if they were being addressed directly. With the invaluable help of our CSM I then developed relevant and credible use cases and ‘what’s in it for me’ scenarios for every Office 365 workload. The completed plan would go onto serve two purposes: to inform our adoption initiatives and to focus us upon relevancy. This is what it looked like. Image credit Microsoft http://fasttrack.microsoft.com/office/resources/envision
• #12: At this point I’d thought I briefly show you what it looks like. Vision statement Mapped to aims Use cases
• #13: [Here some I made earlier…] Through the Fasttrack programme Microsoft have made a number of resources available. As mentioned earlier, I’ve taken the resources and tailored them to our situation.
• #14: [Vision statements] One of the first steps was to describe our vision for Office 365 and map it to our strategic aims
• #15: [Mapping use cases] The Fast Track material included some generic use cases. I worked through them at a high-level and developed our own based on feedback we had received. I then mapped the cases to tools and a corresponding vision statement. I presented the mapping in series of reference tables. This is an example of one of the reference tables that can be used to align a specific scenario with the tools in Office 365 and tied it back to one of the vision statements. “For example, in this table the combination of OneNote (for note taking), Outlook for scheduling and Lync allow you to conduct virtual meetings from any location. As mentioned earlier the tools are also complimentary. Outlook allows you to create a page in OneNote that acts as the meeting minutes which can be coedited during the course of the meeting. Outlook can also include the Lync meeting details in the invite and Outlook FindTime can be used to reduce email tennis in finding an acceptable timeslot.” This process really helped as we had a simple ready reckoner
• #16: Launch video Drew strands together Focused on specific relevant task – winning work Wanted something reusable Tested scenarios before their inclusion in the video Our own staff and facilities – helped with connections [Play video] Well received Distributed with Office 365 video Narrative The next area that I want to share with you that helped to drive adoption was our launch video. We drew several strands of the Fast Track plan together and made them into a video. We wanted something short that showcased Office 365 whilst making it relevant to our staff. The relevancy came from focussing the video around a specific task - winning work. We wanted the video to be reusable after the launch and so it was designed to be cut into bite-sized chunks. It was a real challenge to fit everything into 3 minutes! The video was made a while ago and so we have moved on since then. If I remade it I would place more emphasis on Office 365 Video, Groups and Yammer. Weaving each Office 365 workload into the mix did take a little bit of thinking about but we went back to our adoption scenarios and tested them out for real until settling on the one that would work in a short snapshot. The video features our own staff and facilities which staff connect to it. So here it is: {Roll VT, dim the lights, get some popcorn} The video was incredibly well received and we distributed it using Office 365 Video. It was not a one off – we’ve been able to cut it and use elements in other videos. It was definitely a worthwhile investment and we did not spend a great deal on producing it. We have go on to produce other short videos. We distributed the video using Office 365 Video which helped to further reinforce the tools in Office 365.
• #17: 18 months in Small victories like Sway Narrative The last 18 months or so have been a whirlwind of activity. We’ve migrated 16,000+ mailboxes to Exchange Online, we’ve built and launched a new Intranet, we’ve enabled all of the services in Office 365, built solutions for project and knowledge management, the list goes on… The technological change has driven people towards Office 365 nurtured a growing desire to use it. We’ve fuelled the desire through the showcasing of small victories, like the use of Sway to replace mail shots, at every opportunity. The showcasing is being driving by our communications plan. It’s the small victories that are the fuel to the adoption fire. Everyone knows that the best way to light a fire is with kindling and once it is ablaze you can drop on the big logs. Start with the big logs and you’ll end up frustrated and cold. The small victories have served to reinforce our intended use cases and desired behaviours. Image credits Mott MacDonald Oakland Bay Bridge http://www.mottmacamericas.com/article/11562/projects/san-francisco-oakland-bay-bridge Use case from STEP (our way of working) https://mottmac.sharepoint.com/sites/DC-01/_layouts/15/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=DC01-2003068407-843 Yammer Use case catalog http://yammerenterprise.pl/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Yammer-Use-Case-Catalog.pdf
• #18: Weaved into business process Topics in Yammer linked to process [Click to reveal example highlights] Surfaced in Yammer and SharePoint Narrative It’s not just the small victories. It’s items like the video that show how we can weave Office 365 deeply into the fabric of the business and we’ve seized on opportunities to make Office 365 part of the fabric. For example, through a business improvement strand called LEARN we created communities of interest around a specific topic, line of service or initiative. The use of topics was then woven into business process. New opportunities for learning are supposed to be shared using Yammer and tagged using the #learn topic. All staff are encouraged to apply the tag. Opportunities are then subjected to peer review and we encourage the peer review to happen openly in a Yammer group and be conducted by the community that has the most interest in it. Finally working with our Champions we share the learning to other Yammer groups and surface the associated content in SharePoint alongside a #learn topic feed (which is powered by Yammer Embed). [Click to reveal example highlights] This approach serves to drive adoption as it makes Yammer part of the business fabric. It drives adoption through an obligation and through one use case we can demonstrate a number of features and values. Image credits Mott MacDonald Use case from STEP (our way of working) https://mottmac.sharepoint.com/sites/DC-01/_layouts/15/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=DC01-2003068407-843 The screenshot is from our home Yammer network
• #19: Walk through connecting bits of Office 365 togeterh Narrative Early in the SharePoint on boarding process we ran a campaign to cajole staff into picking the communities that interested them. For this we used custom fields in their SharePoint User Profile [Click to reveal] (which as an aside started to introduce them to the power of discoverability through a completed profile and Delve). [Click to reveal] Behind the scenes we established SharePoint sites and Yammer Groups for each of the communities. With a little bit of programmatic magic (and I stress only a little bit), we weaved the three areas together. Choices made in an individual’s profile would automatically subscribe them to the corresponding SharePoint site and Yammer group for the community. [Click to reveal] [Click to reveal] If they had not discovered Yammer before or were new to the company, when they visited Yammer they would have a couple of destinations to check out and a community of like-minded people that they could collaborate with. The benefits of this approach extend beyond the technology as we are not forcing people to join groups aligned with the line of service they work in. The result is that we are getting a cross-pollination effect. For example, staff whose day-job it is to develop training programmes to help nurses in Africa are now mixing with the engineers who design and specify the hospitals. It also serves to break down the silos as the choices extend beyond the boundaries of the department, office or business unit they work in. We’ve cemented the importance of profile completion by including it as a metric in staff performance monitoring. But it does not stop there. The simple act of collecting some basic profile information has enhanced the SharePoint search experience. In turn we’ve been able to use that to provide an experience of our Intranet that is tailored to the individual. Image credits Mott MacDonald The screenshots are from our Office 365 tenant.
• #20: BIM example - 440 delegates from 85 global offices in 20 countries Event cost £50,000 [Click to reveal quote] £5million saved through virtual meetings, forums etc., and reduced our carbon footprint Narrative A final example is where switched our annual Building Information Modelling Forum from a UK venue, which cost approximately £50,000 a year, to a global online event using Lync and Yammer. Sessions including live discussions, presentations and videos ran from 5am to 7pm so colleagues from all time zones could be involved. Over 440 delegates from 85 global offices in 20 countries joined, a big increase in attendance compared to previous years. After the event we noted a marked increase in Yammer group postings by people who had never posted before and the BIM Community group now has more than 1300 global members – that’s a little under 10% of the company with BIM in their SharePoint profile. It’s worth sharing a quote from the Director responsible for our BIM activities [Click to reveal quote] “It really tested and extended our capability to share knowledge both internally and with external partners in a global enterprise. Our new collaboration technologies are intended to encourage and support person-to-person communications rather than replace them. They allowed us to run a highly inclusive event which has helped to build a community” This was not to be a one-off. We have repeated this on a number of occasions though not to the extreme of banning in person contact altogether. Our forums now run as a combination of in-person attendance, streaming using Skype with Yammer providing the conversational fabric. In turn this has contributed towards reduced travel costs, we’ve saved in excess of £5million through virtual meetings, forums etc., and reduced our carbon footprint. Quote Richard Shennan, Global Sector Leader – Buildings Image credit Mott MacDonald Troja Bridge https://www.mottmac.com/article/3386/troja-bridge-czech-republic
• #21: There are pain points Narrative Now it might seem that everything is rosy but it would be wrong of me to paint that picture. You may have noticed that I’ve not mentioned the use of roadshows or in person demonstrations etc. This is an area we’ve struggled with in terms being able to do them. It would be our preference that we did them but we are struggling to get the right people and resources to do them. There are definitely pain points: the doubters, the constant challenge of Microsoft induced change, continued lack of participation by some senior leaders, the fizzling out of enthusiasm. These are just some of the challenges we continue to face. Image credit https://www.porttechnology.org/news/shipping_liner_insight_4_evergreen_line
• #22: Metrics is one area that presents a current challenge in informing our adoption drive. We have them for Yammer and for that success in our eyes looks like this: {analytics chart} The spikes correspond to events like: Thirty days A forum A new brand launch The chart shows a steady upward slope of engagement. It shows where we’ve had an impact. It also shows that we believe you cannot drive adoption without data. Sadly, you’ll need to spend some money to get actionable insights for the wider Office 365 (and then it’s not available for all of it). Yes, you can get some data out of Microsoft and hopefully here at Ignite they’ll be revealing more but its more feeds and speeds rather than actual actionable insight. Also do not get me started about how hard they’ve made access to the data… I digress. [Click to reveal PowerBI] We have invested some time in our own analytics using PowerBI and data that’s available from Office 365. Image credits Mott MacDonald
• #23: Do not be afraid to reach out. We are all on this journey together. Image credit Getty/Ian MacNicol *** http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/event/hockey-olympics-day-14-631447391#great-britain-celebrates-after-winning-a-penalty-shoot-outl-during-picture-id592218356
• #25: [ Now it might seem that everything is rosy but it would be wrong of me to paint that picture. There are definitely pain points: the doubters, the constant challenge of Microsoft induced change, continued lack of participation by some senior leaders, the fizzling out of enthusiasm. These are just some of the challenges we continue to face and I’d thought I’d share some of them with you. The first challenge that I’d like to illustrate is the one from Microsoft induced change. By now you probably realise that I like my analogies: The super-freighter in the image moves deceptively quickly – it runs on a schedule, it’s movements within controlled shipping areas are published, it will cross the Atlantic in around 10 days though it is slow to start, it takes a long time to change direction and often needs help doing so, normal waves have no impact upon it, icebergs are foreseen and avoided. The containers it carries change regularly and occasionally a “reefer” falls off and is lost at sea. Now consider Office 365 to be the super-freighter, the containers a mix of product features. The service is evergreen – that is Microsoft updates it on a regular cycle. Some of their Roadmap is published (schedule), some of the changes are communicated (published shipping movements), some of the changes are just imposed (with the outcome that some of the containers simply fall overboard), new features are added whilst others are taken away (containers are loaded and others unloaded.) As customers, the bulk of this is out of our control. In addition, A/B testing or selective First Release can temporarily add / remove functionality for specific users (or in freight terms, a container gets temporarily misplaced when it is unloaded – finding itself in the wrong bonded warehouse). We have had to change our mind-set from “big change projects every x years” to “smaller updates every month”. Our services cannot be super-freighters that take significant time to turn or stop. To stay agile and reactive, we have established our Ships Bridge in yammer and have created an O365 Change and Strategy Group and are trying to #workoutloud. The group contains key stakeholders from across the IT service and we can invite others in as the need arises. We gather our knowledge from a diverse range of sources – from the Roadmap to the Office 365 Network. We have a process that allows us to monitor, react and communicate change The point is that it’s about preparedness (that would make Maddie proud), monitoring the channels you have access to, reacting as quickly as you can when something new is unloaded and not fighting the super tanker. We have technical challenges like trying to estimate the bandwidth to be consumed by the OneDrive Sync Client, unpicking our ‘Hub and Spoke’ network and replacing it with direct internet connections as well as Microsoft’s persistence in releasing new features and apps without administrative controls and the muddled messaging around Office 365 Groups. Image credit Image from https://www.porttechnology.org/news/shipping_liner_insight_4_evergreen_line