One of the most common SharePoint and Office 365 failures is deploying the platform without a pilot. The collaboration pilot is an essential step for any enterprise deployment – and there are most definitely “best practices” you should consider. Presentation given by Beezy Chief Evangelist and 6-time Microsoft MVP Christian Buckley walking through a repeatable process for running successful collaboration pilots, from management buy-in through to customer adoption planning.

1. Online Conference
June 17th and 18th 2015
Moving from Collaboration Pilot
to Successful Implementation
Christian Buckley
Chief Evangelist
Office Servers and Services MVP

2. Christian Buckley
Chief Evangelist at Beezy
6-time Office Servers and Services MVP
www.beezy.net
@buckleyplanet
cbuck@beezy.net
www.buckleyplanet.com

3. Online Conference
June 17th and 18th 2015
Beezy is the Intelligent Workplace for Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint,
extending the feature set and improving the user experience for on-premises,
cloud, and hybrid deployments. We are on a mission to transform the way
people work, and to help employees be more connected, innovative, and happy.
Learn more at www.beezy.net or @FollowBeezy on Twitter.

4. Why Pilot?

6. Social collaboration
has become the
business “norm”

7. The most typical reasons to run a pilot include:
 No prior experience with collaboration solutions
 Top management unsure about collaboration business value
 Decide the purchase of specific collaboration software or features
 Test out new capabilities before releasing to the broader organization
 Get key stakeholders on-board first to help adoption later

8. Another reason to pilot

9. Outlook Groups
Skype for Business
Yammer
Microsoft Teams
SharePoint Social
ISV solutions

10. Why so many options?

11. REINVENTING COLLABORATION,
TRANSFORMING PRODUCTIVITY

13. Knowledge
 One of the greatest failures within most
organizations is the inability to adequately
document, catalog, and make retrievable the
processes and experiences of employees.
 Enterprise collaboration is all about capturing
collective experiences – and sharing them.
 When properly employed, the result is a
greater retention of institutional knowledge.

14. Collaboration
 “The whole becomes greater than the sum
of its parts.” (Aristotle)
 Social collaboration capabilities, specifically,
when applied to document and task
management, make collaboration much
more efficient.
 They also make your system more rewarding
and engaging by allowing people to connect
and work together in different ways.

15. Communication
 Empowering employees and getting them to
move in the same direction demands open,
fresh, and cross-hierarchical communication.
 Increased communication helps employees
stay aware of what is going on in different
locations, departments, or management tiers.
 High levels of awareness and strategic
alignment lead to better decisions from the
entire workforce.
 Employees that are aware of the company’s
direction – and are given the ability to
contribute their opinion or experience – show
higher levels of loyalty and engagement.

16. Running a Successful Pilot

18. Step 1. Define your business goals

19. Where is your focus?

20. Outcomes
Acquisition
Quality Engagement Content
Support
What is your desired business impact?
Customer

21. What are your business outcomes?
Engagement drives
business outcomes
Acquisition
Reduce
churn
Community
Advocacy
Happy
customers
Brand
Word of
Mouth
Peer to
peer
education
Real-time
interaction
Connect
to Devs
Visibility

22. Examples of specific business goals might include:
 Reduce on-boarding time for new recruits
 Minimize travel time and cost
 Improve customer satisfaction
 Reduce time spent searching for information
 Avoid duplication of work across departments (or locations)
 Develop cross-hierarchical communication
 Increase employee empowerment and/or engagement
 Improve talent recruiting and retention
 Improve meeting efficiency and effectiveness

23. Step 2. Refine your
target use cases

25. Use case examples might include:
 CEO’s assistants book board meeting dates & times in a shared calendar
 Assistants updates the meeting agenda
 The system sends reminders to CEO about deadlines to upload documents
prior to the meeting
 CEO uploads documents to be presented
 All attendees can open and edit the documents in their laptops during the
meeting, without need to print
 A list of action items is created and agreed to
 After the meeting, documents are approved and moved to a read-only status
 All content is made accessible for future search
 Access to content respects current privacy policies

26. Make it Real and Focus on Actual Business Problems
 The most common reason a pilot fails is that its key users decide to “play
with the tool” rather than take the planning process seriously, avoiding
going through the steps defined in this guide.
 The lack of goals and purpose quickly leads to low levels of engagement
and superficial usage. Without clear goals and engaged users, you’ll never
gain a clear assessment of the pilot results.
 A pilot is as serious as a rollout. You will be using other people’s time to
make your decision. Make good use of it.

27. Step 3. Select your pilot users

29. Selecting your pilot users
 It is important to choose users from among the employees that need
collaboration features the most in order to get their work done.
 Look for those groups that are exchanging heavy load of emails,
documents or links on a daily basis.
 Do not bring in users to the pilot because they are mere enthusiast
of the new technology. Bring them in because:
 they have a real need for the solution, and
 they are involved in the business processes you have identified
as improvable in the first step of this section.

30. Selection considerations
 Many customers tend to be too shy in pilot participant selection. They
don’t want to bother people who are busy with “actual work” and so
they try to run their pilots under-the-radar.
 You need to take into account that enterprise collaboration capabilities
work better at scale.
 As a rule of thumb, you should avoid pilots under 100 users
(depending on the size of your organization, of course).
 Additionally, we recommend covering a minimum of 10% of your
potential user base through one or more pilots.

31. Include Top Management
 Implementing enterprise collaboration usually implies a corporate cultural
change. Decision making will become more transparent, information and
knowledge will flow more freely, and top contributors will surface over the
course of time.
 Your management team needs to be aware of what is ahead, but more
importantly – they should support this new corporate culture right from the
start and throughout the pilot phase.
 Moreover, the success of collaboration heavily depends on the adoption and
usage by top management. Executives need to lead by example, which helps
create a culture of participation and sharing.
 One way they can show their support is to hold regular Town Hall sessions,
online or in-person, where they answer employee questions in real-time.

32. Step 4. Define your KPIs

33. You cannot manage what you cannot measure.

34. • SharePoint
• Office 365
• Internal social collaboration tools
• External tools
HOW you measure depends
on WHERE you measure

35. How will you decide if the pilot is successful?
 Know your evaluation criteria before you start!
 Set specific goals and indicators related to your business goals.
 Put in place mechanisms to collect data and measure your success
(or failure…) at the end of the pilot.
 For example, if one of your business goals is to “reduce internal
communication and email overload” you might measure success by:
 Creating a baseline of current activity
 Measuring email volume today and then again after the pilot.
 Comparing the email open-to-read ratio
 Tracking the volume of “Likes” and other metrics based on the
collaboration features being used within your pilot.

36. But don’t over analyze
 On the opposite side of the spectrum we have customers who take their pilots
“so seriously” that they are unable to make a decision for a real rollout.
 When it comes time to deploy enterprise collaboration solutions, over-thinking
the pilot process can be also extremely damaging.
 Collaboration solutions go along with changes in the way people work, so you
should always leave room for unpredictable behavior.
 Set specific timeframes for feedback and target metrics – and stick to the plan.
 There will be some negative feedback from those who prefer the data to action,
but the majority will appreciate well-defined timelines.
 Remember, at some point you need to move forward.

37. • Specific
• Meaningful
• Action-Oriented
• Realistic
• Timely
SMART Goals
What do you want to achieve
in your area of focus?
Why is this goal important
to you?
What steps will you take to
achieve it?
How do you know that you
can achieve this goal?
By when do you want to
achieve this goal?

38. • Activity within communities
• Interest in content, keywords, ideas
• Level of engagement
• Overall platform adoption
• Measuring the increase in innovation
• Decreasing the cycle of new
product introduction
• Sharing of content and expertise
What does this mean within social collaboration?

39. The basic adoption and usage analysis
Some of the options provided through CardioLog Analytics

40. Usage Engagement
Social Analytics - Community
- Active discussions, communities
Shift from content usage to community engagement

41. Page Views
Influential
Content
Social Analytics - Content
- Likes, followers, ratings, comments & replies.
Shift from basic metrics such as page views to social
metrics

42. Unique Users
Influential
Users
Social Analytics - Users
- Followers, posts, comments, popular profiles, discussions
Shift from what employees are viewing to how they are
interacting with each other

43. Step 5. Establish a clear time
period for evaluation

45. Step 6. Operationalize

46. Make it part of your ongoing support model
 Due to the fluid nature of social collaboration platforms, organizations today find that
implementing a true change management program to monitor and adjust based on analysis
provides the structure and flow necessary to maintain governance.
 Formation of a ‘Center of Excellence’ to both manage change and administrate the platform is
becoming the standard approach.

47. The Enterprise Social Collaboration Progression Model http://bit.ly/2fZt1bN

48. In Summary

49. In my personal experience, this is what works:
 Organic growth through pilots is the most sustainable model for
successful social collaboration
 Make governance and change management the priority
 Look at your systems holistically (a business view), regardless of where
the servers sit (on-prem or in the cloud) and tools used
 Define what policies, procedures, and metrics are needed to manage
your environment, and then look at what is possible across your social
tools and platforms
 Be prepared to regularly iterate on your strategy

50. Share these points with
your entire team!
Download the eBook
http://hubs.ly/H04_-P_0

51. Christian Buckley
cbuck@beezy.net
@buckleyplanet
Thank you very much!