How to fail a SharePoint Migration to Office 365: An Evil Consultant's Guide
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Everybody can do presentations on how to migrate from SharePoint to Office 365 successfully. But only our guest speaker from Evil Consulting Corp. can teach you how make a migration take longer, cost more, and reduce user adoption. We'll demonstrate real-life examples of "best practices" to avoid and present success-avoidance techniques such as: - Don't communicate to your users, they love surprises - Training is for babies - Estimates are for losers If you are preparing for a migration and you want to fail, this session is a must. If you want to succeed, you can attend this session and do the exact opposite of what we'll present -- if you must.
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How to fail a SharePoint Migration to Office 365: An Evil Consultant's Guide
- 2. Oguh Reinreb Enterprise Virtual Information Ltd. AboutMe
- 6. Why“fail”?
- 9. Failing?
- 11. Pooruseradoption
- 12. Lossofdata
- 13. Howtofail
- 17. Don’tcommunicate
- 28. Usersarestupid
- 29. BONUSWISDOM
Editor's Notes
- So… Hugo Bernier was originally supposed to do a talk called “How to succeed a SharePoint migration to Office 365”. The presentation was based on the collected best practices from the top Office 365 MVPs out there. But something came up and he couldn’t make it. So he asked me, his evil twin, to present instead of him. (Act annoyed) His only condition was that I have to wear this evil costume so that you wouldn’t confuse me – the superior consultant in every way – with him – the goodie-two-shoes consultant.
- And now, for my favorite part of this session, About Me. I’m Oguh Reinreb, I’m Hugo’s evil twin. It’s weird that our parents gave us different last names, but whatever. I work for a company call Enterprise Virtual Information Ltd.. This is a picture of our headquarters. We don’t allow people to work from home, but we offer free pop and once a week we have frozen yogurt. I specialize in helping organizations migrate to Office 365 in the most costly and inefficient way possible. I’m especially good at ruining migrations from SharePoint on-premises to Office 365 / SharePoint Online
- I’m an inventor. I’m the proud inventor of those pop-up ads that you see on web sites
- I also invented the auto-playable audio on web sites
- And my absolute favorite, I invented those web sites that ask you to re-enter your email address. That way, if someone tries to give you a fake email address, we’ll fool them into entering the right email address the second time.
- So, let’s talk about why you would want to fail a migration. If you’re an evil consultant like me, there are lots of good reasons to fail. For example, job protection; instead of taking 3 months to do something, I can lock myself into a 2 year contract to do the same thing!
- According to the Standish Group – they produce a report called the Chaos report every year – 71% of IT projects don’t deliver on time and on budget. Source: http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/capital-projects-infrastructure/publications/cpi-spending-outlook.html
- And according to PwC, that translates to about $27 trillion dollars between 2016 and 2020. Where does that money go? Migration projects are IT projects, so parts of it goes in my pocket.
- But what do I mean by “failing” (This is a picture that was taken when Steve Ballmer gave a keynote presentation at a Microsoft event. People quickly noticed what computer brand he was using)
- Failing means taking longer and costing more than it should to do the migration. The guy in this picture was an intern when I first started a migration for a client.
- Failing also means having users trying to do everything they can in their power to avoid using your new platform – Office 365 in this case.
- But, probably my favourite, is losing documents and metadata.
- So let’s talk about how you can fail. If you follow all these tips, you are guaranteed to fail your migration to Office 365.
- https://regarding365.com/office-365-as-an-it-only-project-what-could-possibly-go-wrong-d26b77df7e35 Conflict of Objective IT wants smooth operation, never change a running system Business need the freedom to experiment and learn to drive changes Conflict of scope: deploying a new office version vs empowering everyone to streamline & transform business Scratching the surface - Features vs user-centric No embracing the change mindset
- Probably the number one rule to make sure you fail your migration from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online. If you talk to your users, they will whine about the things they don’t like about the current system and they might even tell you what they want.
- If you talk to your users, they’ll just whine. It is better to avoid all that. If you talk to them, they’ll think you want them to be happy. They might explain to you what they do on a day to day basis (yawn!) and help you understand how they’d benefit from using SharePoint Online and Office 365. What’s worse: it’s been proven that when you ask people for their advice, they are invested in seeing you succeed. They might be more understanding and be willing to meet you half-way if you talk to them.
- With that in mind, don’t communicate to your users. Well, you want them to know that you’re planning on moving all their applications and files, but don’t give them any more information about timing, how, or why you’re doing it. Let them make up their own stories about how horrible it’ll be. They’ll instantly start fighting against any migration because they’re just afraid of how they’ll have to change how they work. Don’t explain to them why it’ll be more convenient to use the cloud, or how the information will potentially be more secure.
- If you work in IT, it’s probably easy for you to adapt to new versions of software. Saving your files in a new spot is easy for you. For your non-IT people, however, it can be a huge thing. Imagine if they come in on a Monday morning and you’ve migrated stuff over the weekend. Maybe you upgraded their version of Office as well.
- Every expert will tell you to do an inventory of your content before you plan to migrate anything. What. A. waste. Of. Time! They expect you to identify all the content you’ll have to migrate so you can plan your migration and find potential issues. That’s where the fun is!
- I actually have that exact same outfit. If you’re migrating from Sharepoint on-premises to SharePoint online, you probably have files from a few years ago. In some cases, you could have files from 20 years ago! Experts will tell you that you should not migrate everything, that you should identify content that has no business being migrated because of retention rules, privacy rules, etc. Or because they say that most business evolve to meet changing business needs and their document structure should evolve the same way. I say move everything exactly as is. Including all the duplicates and obsolete content. If you’re lucky, you can even get another engagement to go through a cleanup process after you finish your migration and get paid even more!
- If you’re migrating content and applications from older versions of SharePoint, there can be a few things that won’t work anymore in SharePoint Online. Access databases, Delve blogs, sandboxed web part solutions. A gap analysis is what experts say is a good way to identify what you have and what you’ll get once you migrate, and identify any gaps in between. I say skip that.
- If you do your content audit, clean up your content, and plan things you’ve identified you’ll need to do during your gap analysis, you’ll probably be able to get a good estimate of how long it will take to migrate everything. You might even be able to do a plan. But if you have a plan, people will know when they can expect to see their stuff migrated and they might even hold you accountable. Don’t do estimates. If they want timelines, tell them whatever time they want to hear so they leave you alone. Once you’ve started the migration, they can’t stop you, can they!?
- There are amazing migration tools out there. Some of there are available for free from Microsoft, some you have to pay (like ShareGate). DON’T USE THEM! They actually do your job for you and make you look bad. They can analyze your content, give you reports on what will break and what will migrate successfully. Some will give you estimates and allow you to do delta migration. It is much better to copy everything from scratch, by hand. The picture you see behind me is a migration plan they found in a cave from one of the first ever SharePoint migrations that was done by hand. I hear that they’re almost finished their migration.
- Every lame expert out there will tell you that you should plan your migration to be iterative. Don’t do everything at once, just take small chunks and migrate it. Test every migration, blah blah blah. I say: migrate everything all at once. Take down the servers for a long time (depending on how much stuff there is to migrate) and move everything all at once. If something fails, you get paid to re-do it all over again!
- If you have a plan and you have tools, you can predict when you’ll migrate stuff. You might even be able to schedule your migrations and tell your users when their content will migrate. Good thing we’re not doing any of that! Some people will ask to schedule your migrations so they are predictable. They’ll want maintenance windows in case you affect the servers or their content while they’re doing work. That’s what lunch breaks are for! When people are out having lunch, reboot the servers, no one will know! If you try to plan a maintenance window, people will start making whiny demands. The Finance people will be like “Oh yOu CaN’t mIgRaTe mY sTufF nOw BeCaUsE iT Is fIsCaL yEaR EnD” or some other lame excuse. Keep ‘em in the dark.
- When you migrate to Office 365, you’re asking your users to learn a whole new set of tools and working paradigms. They’ll cry and ask for training. Experts will tell you that preparing your users in advance with some communication and training will help prepare users and remove that fear of the unknown. From my perspective, training users makes them soft and prepares them too much. I much prefer to be paid to fix issues AFTER the migration is completed because users are doing the totally wrong thing. One time training will do Throwing technology to people will do the job
- After all, users are stupid. You should treat them as such. Don’t teach them new features or new ways to do things, they won’t understand. In fact, you should disable all features that people never experienced before. Things like teams, onedrive, planner, turn that stuff off, because users are too stupid to handle new things. Sure maybe one or two groups might need the features and learn to use it, but that’s too much of a risk to take. Better treat everyone as if they’re stupid.
- Ok, I’ve imparted so much wisdom to you… but get ready for the rapid-fire bonus wisdom round….
- Remember that people are stupid and they’ll NEVER figure out that contoso.sharepoint.com is part of your Contoso sites. I encourage you to waste precious time (at your client’s expense) to try to find a way to rename it to sharepoint.contoso.com. Here’s a secret: you can’t do it. They don’t need to know that.
- Forget Microsoft best practices and try to change the way SharePoint looks COMPLETELY. Most importantly, make sure that the company logo occupies the most area possible in the top of the page, because people might forget who they work for.
- Experts will tell you that if you design your SharePoint to meet the user’s needs, it will automatically become the first place people go to every day. They’ll go to the SharePoint Home or their SharePoint feed to see what’s new. The best thing to do is to force people’s browsers to launch to your company’s home page every single time people log in. That’s the only way you can serve company news. Experts will say that you take the risk of creating “banner blindness” and people will instantly turn off their brain and not pay attention, but what do they know!?
- Hugo wanted me to show you the most common best practices he found. If you want to waste your time with that, you can go to this URL https://tahoeninjas.blog/2019/04/05/compilation-of-sharepoint-to-office-365-migration-best-practices/
- RECAP I showed you what you should do to migrate your SharePoint site to Office 365 and fail. You can cost more money, make users unhappy, and lose important data in the process. Don’t listen to the experts. Go to my blog post and learn more. https://tahoeninjas.blog/2019/03/20/surefire-ways-to-fail-a-sharepoint-migration-to-office-365/ And if you have questions, feel free to go to twitter or to Hugo’s blog. I won’t answer, but Hugo has no friends and he’ll answer everyone he can because he is needy and wants to talk to people. Thank you!