STRATEGY AND SUCCESS WITH OFFICE 365: PRACTICAL TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES FOR THE STRATEGIST, INFORMATION ARCHITECT AND ANALYST

Editor's Notes

• #2: There is a growing trend of organisations moving to “the cloud” to meet their intranet needs. While many organisations are running their Intranets “on premise”, many are considering entirely cloud-based solutions or running them on platforms like Office 365. The question for many companies is “should our intranet be built with Office 365?” In this session Richard Harbridge will explore: • The benefits Office 365 brings to an intranet... • Where the issues and challenges will lie... • When and how you may integrate Office 365 with your existing intranet today...​ You Will Learn: The benefits Office 365 brings to an intranet...When and how you may integrate Office 365 with your existing intranet today...What do the new features mean for Office 365 Intranets?Why go with Office 365 for your Intranet?
• #4: Richard Harbridge is the Chief Technology Officer and an owner at 2toLead. Richard works as a trusted advisor with hundreds of organizations, helping them understand their current needs, their Soon needs, and what actions they should take in order to grow and achieve their bold ambitions.   Richard remains hands on in his work and has led, architected, and implemented hundreds of business and technology solutions that have helped organizations transform both digitally and organizationally. Richard has a passion for helping organizations achieve more; whether it is helping an organization build beautiful websites to support great content and social strategy, or helping an organization leverage emerging cloud and mobile technology to better service their members or the communities that they serve.   Richard is an author and an internationally recognized expert in Microsoft technology, marketing and professional services. As a sought-after speaker, Richard has often had the opportunity to share his insights, experiences, and advice around branding, partner management, social networking, collaboration, ROI,  technology/process adoption, and business development at numerous industry events in around the globe. When not speaking at industry events, Richard works with Microsoft, partners, and customers as an advisor around business and technology, and serves on multiple committees, leads user groups, and is a Board Member of the Microsoft Community Leadership Board.
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• #109: Now onto the difficulties of even coming up with a range of possibilities. One of the hardest parts of estimating is coming up with a range you feel really confident in. Basically when you give an estimate you should give a range that you feel 90% confident that the real value will fall within that range (90% is the suggested optimal confidence level due to the effort involved in getting more than 90%). You don’t have to be perfect but you have to feel willing to bet on it. In other words if you consider giving a range of 2-8 hours on a task as an estimate you should confirm that you are actually 90% confident that the total time will fall between that range. There is a trick (one of many) that Douglas mentions in his book that is easy to remember and use for testing whether you are actually close to 90% confident about an estimate. Imagine that you win $2000 in one of two ways: A) You will win $2000 if the true time it takes turns out to be between the upper and lower bounds you provided. If not then you win nothing. B) You draw a M&M at random from a bag of 9 red M&M’s and 1 blue M&M. If the M&M is red you win $2000. If it is blue you win nothing. Which option would you take? If you choose B) (which statistically most people do) then it means you might not be 90% confident but actually less confident (say 80%, 60% etc). If you choose A) it’s also not really what we want because it means you are probably over confident (especially if you felt strongly geared toward A). So you adjust the bounds (upper and lower) until you find a place where you feel indifferent between option A) and B) – that is ‘probably’ your 90% confidence level for this estimate. It’s not as complicated (or in some ways as effective) as many other methods you can use to calibrate how confident you are about your estimates but it works and is easy to remember and start implementing immediately.
• #110: Now onto the difficulties of even coming up with a range of possibilities. One of the hardest parts of estimating is coming up with a range you feel really confident in. Basically when you give an estimate you should give a range that you feel 90% confident that the real value will fall within that range (90% is the suggested optimal confidence level due to the effort involved in getting more than 90%). You don’t have to be perfect but you have to feel willing to bet on it. In other words if you consider giving a range of 2-8 hours on a task as an estimate you should confirm that you are actually 90% confident that the total time will fall between that range. There is a trick (one of many) that Douglas mentions in his book that is easy to remember and use for testing whether you are actually close to 90% confident about an estimate. Imagine that you win $2000 in one of two ways: A) You will win $2000 if the true time it takes turns out to be between the upper and lower bounds you provided. If not then you win nothing. B) You draw a M&M at random from a bag of 9 red M&M’s and 1 blue M&M. If the M&M is red you win $2000. If it is blue you win nothing. Which option would you take? If you choose B) (which statistically most people do) then it means you might not be 90% confident but actually less confident (say 80%, 60% etc). If you choose A) it’s also not really what we want because it means you are probably over confident (especially if you felt strongly geared toward A). So you adjust the bounds (upper and lower) until you find a place where you feel indifferent between option A) and B) – that is ‘probably’ your 90% confidence level for this estimate. It’s not as complicated (or in some ways as effective) as many other methods you can use to calibrate how confident you are about your estimates but it works and is easy to remember and start implementing immediately.
• #111: Now onto the difficulties of even coming up with a range of possibilities. One of the hardest parts of estimating is coming up with a range you feel really confident in. Basically when you give an estimate you should give a range that you feel 90% confident that the real value will fall within that range (90% is the suggested optimal confidence level due to the effort involved in getting more than 90%). You don’t have to be perfect but you have to feel willing to bet on it. In other words if you consider giving a range of 2-8 hours on a task as an estimate you should confirm that you are actually 90% confident that the total time will fall between that range. There is a trick (one of many) that Douglas mentions in his book that is easy to remember and use for testing whether you are actually close to 90% confident about an estimate. Imagine that you win $2000 in one of two ways: A) You will win $2000 if the true time it takes turns out to be between the upper and lower bounds you provided. If not then you win nothing. B) You draw a M&M at random from a bag of 9 red M&M’s and 1 blue M&M. If the M&M is red you win $2000. If it is blue you win nothing. Which option would you take? If you choose B) (which statistically most people do) then it means you might not be 90% confident but actually less confident (say 80%, 60% etc). If you choose A) it’s also not really what we want because it means you are probably over confident (especially if you felt strongly geared toward A). So you adjust the bounds (upper and lower) until you find a place where you feel indifferent between option A) and B) – that is ‘probably’ your 90% confidence level for this estimate. It’s not as complicated (or in some ways as effective) as many other methods you can use to calibrate how confident you are about your estimates but it works and is easy to remember and start implementing immediately.
• #124: Just like in our IT projects it wasn’t really one launch due to the complexity. It was multiple launches to get us on the right trajectory towards our goal/objectives.
• #125: If you think dealing with Attorneys and users is a challenge imagine having to plan for hard Martian soil, extreme temperatures and storms.
• #126: Even after it had landed it had to ‘travel’ away from the landing site in order to start taking samples/getting a better understanding of the area.
• #127: Even after reaching our destination there is still the hard work of gathering the data. Then the hard work of verifying and validating the data.
• #131: Look at launch and the initial 3 months worth of missions compares to the number they actually had!
• #132: It’s critical to understand the importance of not just launch, but the mini launches that adjust our trajectory, and the travel and importance of communication, and finally the landing and it’s importance.
• #175: Provide personalized information and content to users based on employee groupings Dynamic, personalized Navigation that is driven by my usage patterns  personalize company and team news based on my interests
• #191: Your Companies Key Differentiators What makes your company different? What makes your company stand out? Let’s say our fake company has four key differentiators that seemed to stand out and were referenced by leadership and executives in the organization. Community Caring Community Engagement, Involvement & Support State Of The Art Technology Technology, Systems & Products Of Large Enterprise Organizations Incredible Support Staff Personal Service High Touch Attention Strong Customer Relationships Personal & Professional Sales Staff It is important to be able to align new initiatives, technologies and business solutions with these differentiators. To try and help visualize this effect the following objectives were broken down based on the differentiators of the business. Example Company Objectives Grow Organizational Footprint Acquisitions Provide Excellent Customer Service Promote a Positive Work Culture Highlight Exceptional People Have Highly Effective Decision Making Provide Community Support Provide Customer-Transparent Support Functions Have Leadership Greeting Customers By Name These objectives actually map easily to Social Concepts and Features within SharePoint or within related technology. What follows is a visual map of the organization objectives extrapolated above and the ‘solutions’ or social solutions that might directly, or indirectly help achieve those objectives.
• #226: There is no authority in Discovery – everyone is equal