Slides from my presentation at SPTechCon Boston 2018. Some ideas for planning and thinking more holistically about your Office 365 digital workplace.

1. Future-Proof Your
Digital Workplace
Use Office 365 and Organizational Change Techniques to Plan
and Manage Workplace Growth

2. Owen Allen
O365 Solutions Architect
Zones
owen.allen@zones.com
@owenallen
owen-allen.com
Solutions Architect Zones
SharePoint Consultant
SharePoint Directions
Alpine Lakes Digital
Conference Speaker
MSFT Partner Conference, SharePoint
Conference (3), SharePoint Fest (3),
SPTechCon (2), SharePoint Saturday
(16+), others
Community Organizer – 12+ years
Microsoft Employee
SharePoint Technology Specialist
Office 365 Technology Specialist
SharePoint Product Manager
Sales Engineer BroadVision
SAP Consultant Deloitte & Touche ICS
Programmer
Deluxe Data
AT&T

3. WHY ARE WE HERE
• Office 365 is a mindset and an
approach
• It’s more than only a bag of
products and technologies
• Just as Organizations need a
Digital Transformation event, so
do individuals.
• I learn via discussions - I have
limited experience, but want to
share it via discussions
• Join the party!

4. What are the Fears of an Office 365 Leader?
WHO IS AN OFFICE 365 LEADER? DOES AN OFFICE 365 LEADER
HAVE FEARS OR CONCERNS OR
WORRIES?

5. Possible Fears for an Office 365 Leader
Making an
incorrect
architectural
decision
Building the wrong
thing
Being alone Too much growth

6. Speed / Rate of Release
How it Feels When Reviewing Office 365 Message Center

7. Addressing The Fears
The Technology Approach
The Business Approach
Governance / Policy
User Ownership and Rational IT Operations
The Three-Step Process

8. The Three Step
Process
Plan, Plan, Plan
• Understand the Why
• Arrange for the Who
• Test the Pieces
Build and Prove
Launch

9. Stress points in the modern digital
workplace will undermine your efforts.
Embrace the scale points.
Individual
Team
Department
Organization

10. Technologies to
Manage
OneDrive
Site provisioning
Groups
Teams / Channels
Integrations
Power Apps
Content Reuse

11. OneDrive
The most basic – File
Shares in the Cloud.
The Stages of Realization

12. OneDrive
• Recently, Microsoft Increased the Default
Storage Allocation
• OK, Let’s wait for Microsoft to increase
storage again!
• Shall we Include this assumption in our
plans / budgets?
• Should we create a uservoice entry to ask
for an increase in storage or vote up one
that might be there?
• 

13. OneDrive
• User Ownership and Rational IT Operations
• What is the Physical Equivalent? – Filing
Cabinets?
• Ownership
• Reporting and Visibility
• Where do we place the Visibility?
• Local Team?
• One or two manager levels above?
• Across entire business group or division?
• Peer Pressure?

14. Site
Provisioning
The Terrible “+ Create a Site” link
Should we make it Too Easy?
Should we make it Too Hard?
If we didn’t choose one of those,
then what did we choose?

15. Site
Provisioning
What were the Old
Concerns about
Site Provisioning?
…
What are the New
Concerns about
Site Provisioning?
…
What is the real difference?

16. Site
Provisioning
• What will they
choose?
I.T. gets the
1st attempt
at creating
site
choices
• Where would you
prefer to apply the
effort / do the
work?
Do It First
OR Do It
Later

17. Groups
• 3 Types
• Email (DL) Groups; (AAD) Security Groups;
O365 Groups
• How Tempting is it to jump immediately onto
new tech?
• Who remembers when the lumber
standardization took place and the first trailer
full of 2” x 4” lumber shipped?
• Better yet, who remembers the
contractors that chose to use only 2 x 4s to
build their homes? Are any of those
homes still standing?
• Who remembers when Office 365 Groups
shipped and the Office 365 Leaders who chose
to build all of their sites using only Office 365
Groups as the building blocks?

18. Groups
Building Blocks
Groups are building blocks.
Here’s the question – when
do you need a new group?
(lots of discussion here)

19. Teams /
Channels
• How many of you, when you first understood
Microsoft Teams, decided that you could use it
like Visio, and model your entire org chart in it?
• And then you realized that channels had the
same membership as their Teams, and so you
went to UserVoice and cried out,
• “Oh, Please, Venerable Product Masters!
Give Us the ability to modify the
membership of special channels so they are
not like all the other channels within the
same Team!”
• And the Product Masters, for Some Incoherent
Reason, decided to say, “We’re Working On It”
• Friends Don’t Let Friends Consider Private
Channels
• PLEASE Create a new Team when you have a
different collection of members.

20. Other Product Planning and Managing Areas
Integrations Power Apps
Content Re-
Use
Line of
Business
Applications

21. Governance
and Policy
Have you met Susan Hanley yet? She is a Thought
Leader around Governance for SharePoint. She is
here this week, I believe… 
• Have the right conversations with the right
individuals at the right time.
• You must have the right players in your
Governance Core Committee
• Other teams:
• Legal / Records Management
• I.T.
• Communications
• HR
• Solution/Business Group Owners
• Security
• DevOps

22. Be an Enabler
or a Blocker
• I.T. gets the first opportunity to make
the right decision.
Once the business makes the case that
they need to be able to go around I.T.,
then I.T. might be broken up into
Business Unit IT groups,
and centralized I.T. might only control the
Azure Storage Encryption Key
Management Systems
for the backups.
Nobody wants that job.

23. Business vs Product
Do we Align our Business Needs to the
Product?
Do we Align our Product Needs to the
Business?
Examples To consider:

24. Organizational
Change
• SUPER IMPORTANT in your plan to grow and
scale and manage your Office 365
environment.
• “In preparing for battle I have always found
that plans are useless, but planning is
indispensable.” – Dwight Eisenhower, a
(O365?) Leader
• ORGANIZATION VISION
• The Right People
• The Right Reason - WHY Are We Changing?
• Understand that Organizational Change is the
Sum of Lots of Individual People Changes. –
Things won’t work unless we gets lots of
individual people to change.
• So… What is the REASON?

25. © Prosci. All Rights Reserved. 25
Organizational change can be represented as
three states of change
States of change
How things
are done today
How things will
be done
tomorrow
How to move
from current
to future
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State

26. © Prosci. All Rights Reserved. 26
The Three States of Change
Typically we take an organizational perspective
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Ad Hoc Processes Documented and Managed Processes
Old Operating Model New Operating Model
Generalists in the Call Center Specialists in the Call Center
No Web Interface for Suppliers Supplier Website Integrated into Supply Chain
Two Different Companies Merged Organization

27. © Prosci. All Rights Reserved. 27
In reality, each impacted employee has
his or her own current and future state.
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Organization
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Individual
How I do my
job today
How I will do my job
after the change is
implemented

28. © Prosci. All Rights Reserved. 28
The organization’s future state is actually the collection of
many individual future states.
Individuals
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Current
State
Transition
State
Future
State
Organization
Future
State
• Documented and Managed Processes
• New Operating Model
• Specialists in the Call Center
• Supplier Website Integrated into
Supply Chain
• Merged Organization

29. © Prosci. All Rights Reserved. 29
Successful change requires both the technical and people sides
Current State
Transition
State
Future State
Technical Side
People Side
Design
Deliver
Develop
Embrace
Use
Adopt

32. How do we make sailors
WANT to get off of one
boat onto another boat?

38. The DigitalWorkplace
www.clearbox.co.uk
info@clearbox.co.uk
+44 1244 458746

39. Thank You
Owen Allen
Office 365 Solutions Architect, Zones Inc.
Owen.Allen@zones.com
@owenallen