BEST PRACTICE ARTICLE
Filed under: Digital employee experience, Digital workplace
Office 365 is the only show in town when it comes to depth and breadth of enterprise functionality. Features range from personal productivity (Word Online, OneDrive) to collaboration (Teams, Yammer) and business solutions (Flow, PowerBI). It’s no surprise that many organisations are therefore currently deploying or planning to deploy Office 365.
(Editors note: there has been some new terminology introduced by Microsoft, with “Microsoft 365” now defined as Office 365 + Windows 10 + mobility. This methodology is focused on the Office 365 component, not the other elements.)
The challenge is to ensure that the Office 365 rollout leads to meaningful adoption, and concrete business benefits. Too often, businesses take a technology-first approach Office 365, which can fail to fully engage with staff needs and strategic priorities.
Instead, businesses should take a business-first approach to Office 365, working out the ‘why’ and ‘how’ before getting stuck into the ‘what’. This brings the whole organisation on the journey, from the C-Suite down to frontline staff.
Avoid common pitfalls
There are now enough deployments of Office 365 around the globe to uncover common pitfalls and dead ends, such as:
- Launch and leave, where the platform is turned on, and announced to the business, but without any work on adoption usage. The result is patchy and underwhelming usage levels.
- All about adoption, where the sole focus is on training staff to use the new tools. While this work is needed, the absence of clear business objectives means that engagement with business leaders and staff is low.
- Unclear pilots, that focus on trialing popular tools such as Teams. Without a clear scope or purpose, the tools can ‘escape into the wild’ before the pilots produce a clear result.
- Platform up, that focuses just on the ‘under the hood’ work required to move a business into the cloud. This work is critical, but by itself it doesn’t provide a clear approach to business adoption and use.
- All about the tools, promoting the many features that are provided by Office 365. However, no amount of ‘what to use when’ models will provide a clear business purpose and direction.
- Tactical, not strategic, focusing on fixing technology problems or reacting to ‘shadow IT’. Moving to Office 365 will be highly disruptive to staff, so staff and business units will be reluctant to dive in without a clear business purpose.
A business-first methodology
While the introduction of Office 365 can be exciting and daunting in equal parts, there is a practical approach that ensures you make the most of what’s on offer.
This business-first methodology works as follows:
- Understand the business context, from top-level business objectives down to the day-to-day needs of staff.
- Describe the desired digital employee experience, building stakeholder consensus around a concrete future and direction.
- Determine a digital workplace strategy that outlines what needs to be delivered and provides a concrete plan of action.
- Establish the technology platform, conducting the behind-the-scenes work to bring Office 365 into the business.
- Launch Office 365 capabilities in waves to the business, with a strong focus on adoption and use.
- Conduct strategic projects, to deliver new business products or to update existing business solutions.
- Progressively establish governance, putting shape around ownership and management to ensure a sustainable outcome.
Each of these steps is outlined in the following sections.
1. Understand the business context
The starting point for any project or initiative is to deeply understand business priorities and staff needs. This requires strong stakeholder engagement as well as robust field research that targets key staff groups.
This research doesn’t have to be huge in scope, but it must take a holistic approach that delves into the day-to-day work of staff without getting caught up in asking ‘what staff want’. (This is not about gathering ‘business requirements’ or following a ‘tick the box’ approach to the research.)
This activity produces:
- Clear articulation of business and user needs, highlighting the key challenges and issues that must be resolved first.
- Potential business opportunities that can be targeted by the deployment of Office 365.
- Fleshed-out user scenarios, which describe key patterns of staff activity that can be improved by the use of Office 365.
2. Describe the desired digital employee experience
Digital employee experience (DEX) provides a powerful way of capturing and articulating how staff will be working in the future. (What is DEX?)
More than just a ‘blue sky’ or ‘science fiction’ description of an exciting future, a DEX vision puts meaningful shape around how all the business systems and platforms need to come together to enable staff to be productive and engaged.
What makes this powerful is that the DEX vision encompasses more than just Office 365. It recognises that Office 365, while new, will always be just one of the enterprise platforms or products within a business. The DEX vision therefore encompasses core business systems, as well as other products (eg Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, etc).
This activity produces:
- DEX vision that provides a meaningful and tangible description of how staff will be working in the near future.
- Stakeholder engagement and alignment, which provides the foundation for the establishment of governance.
- Clear business objectives that determine priorities and provide the basis of a strong business case.
3. Determine a digital workplace strategy
There are many tools within Office 365, and many groups within a business that could use them. What’s needed, however, is a digital workplace strategy that pulls together many elements to describe a business-first approach to delivering desired outcomes.
The DEX vision provides the ‘why’, and the digital workplace strategy then outlines the ‘how’. The strategy determines which areas and problems to tackle, and the order in which to proceed. It also describes the key components of the digital workplace, and outlines how they must work together.
This activity produces:
- Overall shape of the desired digital workplace, outlining how all the various elements fit together from a business (not purely technology) perspective.
- Targeted business needs that the rollout of Microsoft 356 will address in the early phases.
- Practical roadmap of activities and projects that will deliver the new digital workplace.
4. Establish the technology platform
There’s a lot of important technical work that needs to be done ‘under the hood’ to prepare for the deployment of Office 365. This includes cleaning up Active Directory, configuring the points of interface between on-premise and cloud elements, and determining security settings.
Unless there’s a very strong internal Office 365 team, we recommend that businesses engage one of the technology specialists who work in this space. They have strong connections with Microsoft, and can use the detailed knowledge they’ve gained to ensure the right decisions are made.
This activity produces:
- Office 365 deployed and ready to use by business teams.
- Key behind-the-scenes technical aspects addressed and resolved.
5. Launch Office 365 capabilities in waves
With so much now provided as part of Office 365, it makes no sense to launch it all at once. Staff will be confused by the 15+ applications on offer, and the business will be unsure where to target change management and adoption actions.
A better approach is to launch Office 365 in waves, either rolling out a specific feature (eg Exchange, Teams, Yammer, etc) or targeting a specific business group (eg frontline staff, or project teams). This allows the business to ‘digest’ Office 365 progressively, with clear business benefit delivered at each step in the process.
This activity produces:
- Early wins that come from targeting key business groups or needs.
- Strong adoption of new Office 365 functionality, achieved by targeting change management efforts.
- Progressive increases in digital literacy, by taking staff on a journey rather than via a big-bang launch.
6. Conduct strategic projects
While many things can be launched in waves, there will still be bigger and more complex needs to be met. These can be addressed through a programme of strategic projects that take bigger leaps forward.
These projects may include redeveloping the corporate intranet using one of the out-of-the-box tools available in the marketplace, or addressing document management needs. There may also be a concerted focus on frontline and operational staff, releasing a substantial package of improvements that encompasses both software and hardware.
This activity produces:
- Business solutions that utilise Office 365 to resolve larger and more complex needs.
- Bigger leaps forward that come from well-resourced projects that take an integrated approach to resolving issues.
- Larger business benefits that come from targeting strategic aspects or key staff groups.
7. Progressively establish governance
Governance is critical for ensuring the longer term sustainability of Office 365, and the solutions that are built on top of it. It also provides robust decision-making processes that engage both business and technology teams.
As Office 365 is progressively released into the organisation, governance will help to draw clear lines between different elements, while ensuring they are all heading in the same direction. This positions governance as the mechanism for achieving the digital employee experience (DEX) vision that was outlined at the beginning of the journey.
This activity produces:
- Clear ownership of digital workplace elements, including Office 365.
- Decision-making processes that help to keep projects and initiatives aligned.
- Sustainability of the platform, by ensuring that the business and key stakeholders are aligned and educated.
Seven-step process
This article has outlined a seven-step methodology for taking a business-first approach to deploying Office 365.
While the list as a whole may appear to be daunting, in practice it’s quite the opposite. By breaking down the ‘big beast’ that is Office 365, business and technology teams can take a measured step-by-step process that produces concrete outcomes at every step.
The business-first orientation ensures that benefits are maximised, and that the whole business is involved in the journey alongside technology teams.
What does this look like in practice?
A government agency had decided to move into the cloud, including Office 365 and a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. An early pilot of Teams and Planner was run to try to address ‘shadow IT’, but it wasn’t making clear progress.
When we were engaged by the client, we conducted field research in the Australian offices as well as their overseas locations. This identified that their digital employee experience was fragmented, and poorly suited to use overseas and when on the road.
The agency had restructured into industry-based teams, but there weren’t any practices or processes in place to help these teams work across Australia and internationally.
Clear user scenarios emerged, relating to knowledge sharing within these industry teams, drawing on the KM concept of ‘communities of practice’. We also discovered that documents were often worked on by multiple people, via a clunky check-in, check-out process on their SharePoint 2013 intranet. Document co-creation therefore also emerged as an important scenario.
The digital workplace strategy prioritised the use of Teams to support the communities of practice, as well as redeveloping the intranet on Office 365, using one of the intranet-in-a-box products in the marketplace. The intranet would provide the ‘enterprise front door’, and document management would largely be moved into Teams.
As Office 365 was further rolled out into the organisation, digital literacy skills would be built up among the staff, and strategic projects used to deliver big leaps forward. Behind the scenes, robust governance would clarify ownership and streamline decision-making.
By the end of the project, the agency would be a strong place to deliver its core mission, utilising Office 365 in a truly productive way.
Get assistance early
Step Two has 20+ years of experience in taking business-first approaches to the deployment and use of new technologies. As we speak, we’re helping multiple organisations through the current Office 365 journey.
What we’ve learned is that it’s important to get assistance early, to shape the vision and strategy first before technology decisions get made in a hurry. This ensures that a solid strategic foundation is in place that can guide where effort is directed, and that key stakeholders are deeply engaged.
Get in touch, and we’d be happy to talk through our business-first methodology in greater detail, and then jump in and help!
Learn more!
We will be running “Business-first Office 365” events across Australia in 2019, so please register your interest so we come to your city:
