The Five Stages of Digital Employee Experience

What is Digital Employee Experience

Digital Employee Experience shows how well the workplace technology in your organization supports your employees.

The more technology the better the experience?

It doesn't mean that the more technology you have – the better your employees are supported.

Take a new employee onboarding, for example. If your new employee has to learn too many tools (some of which they might encounter only once in their job), they may see that as not intuitive and chaotic.

On the other hand, if technology options are too restrictive, employees might be less productive because their technology needs exceed available options.

So what is the sweet spot?
When does the Digital Employee Experience become just enough but not too complicated?

The answer lies in key factors affecting the development of your organization.

In other words, there are at least five factors that determine a stage of maturity in the organization.

Factors affecting Digital Employee Experience

Five factors that affect your Digital Employee Experience are:

• Business Needs: What's needed for an organization to be in business and stay productive

• People and Culture: How is talent acquired, trained, and retained

• Internal Communications: How does organization enable the flow of communication

• Technology: How well does technology help everyone in the organization

• Decision Making / Governance: how are decisions made within the organization

Stages of each of these factors

Each of these factors can be in one of the stages below:

• Ad-hoc: things are done haphazardly

• Emergent: initial processes emerge, but still much of the work is done manually

• Structured: processes are implemented for key parts of the business

• Evolving: processes are measured and maintained to ensure repeatability and efficiency

The stage in which your business needs are will set the requirements for stages for other factors (People and Culture, Internal Communications, Technology, and Decision Making / Governance).

For example, when an organization's business needs are in an Ad-hoc stage, it’s likely going to assess its needs reactively, and operate in a reactive way.

If that’s true for business needs, there is little use to upgrade the technology to stage 2. It may be met with resistance or ignored.

Example: How do these stages affect company’s Employee Experience

Let's look at this example.

Here is the example of the organization where Business needs are in stage 3, meaning this organization is structured and at least these elements are present:

• Key improvements to Employee Experience are underway

• Goals are high-level and written

• The requirements will solve the needs of several departments or teams

Here are other key stages this organization is in:

Although business needs for this organization are relatively mature (stage 3), their decision making and governance process is lagging in stage 2, meaning:

• Some people are interested in making improvements, but implication to the decision is not broadly understood

  • Problem: If improvements are not broadly understood, there will be little or no buy-in from the broader team. This will prevent the requirements to consider the needs of other departments – which is what's desired by the business need above.

• A manager from any department can make a decision alone without consulting others

  • Problem: This will preclude the organization from solving several departments or teams required by the business above.

• Several people from different departments will do the work

  • Problem: Since a single department might have made the decision, other department leaders may not buy into it, resulting in a fragmented Employee Experience.

The technology is also behind, in stage 2. At this stage, employees get access to basic technology:

• File storage and management software

• Essential work tools (email, messaging and job-specific applications)

• Basic Tech support & helpdesk

• Possible SharePoint sites for collaboration

• Potential IT Manager overseeing technology

Naturally, for this organization to deliver to business needs for stage 3, all of the other factors (HR, Internal Comms, and Decision Making/Governance) also need to pick up and move from their lagging stages to stage 3.

In other words, here is where these key factors need to move.

Aligning your Digital Employee Experience with business needs

Overly engineered technology

In contrast, if the organization is trying to provide technology for stage 4, while business needs are not mature enough for this stage, such an organization will end up with an expensive, grandiose vision and no one to use the technology.

For example, a start-up operating in ad-hoc mode may not need an intranet, a chatbot, and any other advanced technology to stay productive. This startup may just need a fileshare and an email system.

In this case, the organization needs to scale back its technology to match the business needs.
We’ll get into the details in just a minute.

Scaling back the technology to align with business needs

This misalignment is mainly due to a lack of understanding of the stage in which the organization is. This is where the next part comes in.

Quiz: What is the right intranet for your company culture?

Right about now, you might be wondering, what stage is my organization?

You take our anonymous 10 min quiz and find out which stage your organization is in now and how you can level up.

Here is a high-level breakdown of each stage; more details are addressed in the quiz.

Stage 1: Ad-hoc

Things are done haphazardly. As far as business needs are concerned:

• Employees use what they're given to do the job

• No clear goals to improve the employee experience

This leads to decision-making having no specific process when selecting a solution. The hope is that someone internal will do the work to improve things, but it's not their primary job. When asked for improvements, leadership is not interested or resistant to improving the employee experience because they too busy operationally.

From people and culture, employees are provided resources as they need them, performance reviews are inconsistent, and no formal talent acquisition, retention, or training processes exist.

As far as internal communications go, various email announcements are sent to all employees as needed, and no specific resources are dedicated to internal communication.

The technology mainly consists of file storage and management software and some essential work tools (email, messaging and job-specific applications). There is some form of basic tech support & helpdesk and no formal IT department.

Stage 2: Emergent

Initial processes emerge, but still, much of the work is done manually.

Business needs are often shaped by:

• Leaders asking and taking steps to improve Employee Experience

• Goals are socialized but not written

• The requirements will solve the needs of one specific department or a team

This often results in some people being interested in making improvements, but the issue is not broadly understood. Decisions are made in silos, where a manager from any department can make a decision alone; as a result, there is no clear understanding of who from which department will do the work.

As far as culture is concerned, employees have access to track performance, and some initial documented policies and procedures exist. HR starts to manage talent acquisition and retention for key resources.

With a growing focus on employee needs, some people are assigned to internal communication, but it's not their primary job. A regular employee newsletter sent to all employees is the primary vehicle for all company communication.

IT now has a dedicated IT Manager basic tools an ad-hoc organization has. In some cases, SharePoint sites are starting to be used primarily for document management and for collaboration.

Stage 3: Structured

Processes are implemented for key parts of the business. Strategy starts to shape how the organization works, and the business begins to see that:

• Critical improvements to Employee Experience are needed and underway

• Goals are high-level and written

• The requirements will solve the needs of several departments or teams, not just a siloed team

Decisions are more streamlined; for example, IT starts to work with the department(s) to make a decision that will benefit the longer-term strategy. Organization starts hiring people to implement the strategy. HR teams add employee self-evaluation and career growth programs.

Some leaders view improving employee experience as a strategic priority, but some skeptical leaders aren't convinced.

A regular employee newsletter is sent to all employees, and in more advanced cases, when the intranet is available, Internal Communication is posted on the intranet. Someone specif is assigned to internal communication, and it's their primary job.

IT plays a big role in organizational transformation. HR systems for performance and career management are being implemented. Remote access becomes available. Company Intranet is being implemented, and senior IT leadership is established.

Stage 4: Evolving

Processes are measured and maintained to ensure repeatability and efficiency. This stage is not something you achieve once and keep, consistent work is required to keep it, and business knows it.

Business needs become focused on:

• Digital Employee Experience being consistently revisited and improved

• Goals are specific and written

• The requirements will solve the needs of the entire organization

The decisions become focused on the long term, so often, a business case is prepared and reviewed by executives who make a decision. Company leaders at the highest level view improving employee experience as a strategic priority. The organization understands that all that is not possible to achieve in-house alone, so external consultants work with internal resources to do the work.

HR is focused on establishing Learning & Development, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs.

To manage all of the initiatives efficiently, information is posted on the intranet, employees actively post comments on a company intranet, and a dedicated internal communications team is involved.

To support the initiatives, IT implements a learning management system. In larger organizations, internal Development or Engineering team is established. In more distributed workforce environments where many applications are involved, Enterprise Architects become part of the IT team.

What does it all mean?

Projects can fail or partially fail due to misaligned business and technology needs. Digital Employee Experience projects, like an intranet implementation, are no exception.

Take a quiz above to get an assessment on which stage you’re at and recommended steps to what kind of Digital Employee Experience is best suited for your needs.

Even if you’re clear which stage your organization is at and what it needs to evolve, have others self-assess where they think the organization is at. This will provide clarity to your team and set your project for success.

We offer a variety of consulting projects to help you assess and improve your Digital Workplace Experience. To speak with an expert book a free consultation.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Digital Workplace Advisor at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.

Why focusing on apps and widgets can really make your intranet fail?

Summary:
Focus on apps and widgets is quite common in many intranet projects but it doesn’t yield results that business users are after. Successful intranet is all about the content and helping users access this content in quick and intuitive way.

As you design your intranet, perform content audit to make your intranet centered around content relevant to your users. Have a good representation of stakeholders in your workshop. Treat each app as a helper to serve content scenarios and not take over the stage.

Finally think about the maintenance of your apps if you’re considering building custom ones.

It’s about the content

Let me be very clear about one thing:

Your users come to your intranet because they need content they think they can find there.

That’s it. Everything else is a bonus.

When we talk to users about the biggest issues they face with their intranets - issues related to content are at the very top of the list, the middle of the list, and at the end.

Hard to believe? You be the judge. Here is what we hear when we start a new project and do a content audit in a form of a test:

• “Actually quite hard to find things, some things are not obvious”

• “I found that I had no idea about where to find half of the things on the site“

• “The menu titles are really vague“

• “Some of the resources took a few attempts to find what I’m looking for“

What to do:

• Invest time in content audit.

  • Involve various content representatives in your workshop. They will be the authors of what’s going on the intranet, and they need to be there to tell you that.

• Group your content by a function and not department/ownership.

  • If I’m looking for a template, I expect to find it in “Templates“, I don’t expect to have to figure out who would be the author of that template and then check out the site of that department. This also solves issues with content owned by multiple departments.

• Include tools and apps that help finding information.

  • Focus on what users would look for not what you’d want them to look for.

  • Avoid generic roll ups such as “Recent Documents“, “Recently Updated Forms“. Ensure your forms are really the most popular before you start promoting them as such.

• Allow to provide feedback easily.

  • If this means putting “Page Contacts“ app on your page, make sure you also include FAQ section, so authors of the page can actually post those questions they get most often and reduce the burden of answering the same things multiple times.

Apps as ingredients

Does this mean you shouldn’t have any apps? No. Think of your apps as ingredients to an amazing dish, and that means:

• Adding everything can lead to surprises … often unpleasant ones

  • Just because you see an app on Office 365 “spice rack” think whether you add value by using it. Adding more apps to your pages just because they’re available will leave your users confused and lost.

• Think of your customers

  • Intranet is not a meal you will enjoy all on your own. You share it, so remember to accommodate other stakeholder’s needs. The best intranets are well balanced with needs of entire organization.

• Trust the recipe

  • It’s fine to improvise but be honest with yourself whether you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone. There is a recipe to a successful dish and there is a method to a successful intranet. Following proven methodology will save you time and money reworking the costly mistakes.

• Trust the experts

  • Watching a YouTube video on “what’s information architecture“ doesn’t mean you can fully put one together. It’s best to acknowledge that and get qualified help before everyone starts unfavorably judging your work.
    

What to do:

• Start with the content on sticky notes before you start building the site.

  • We often see this common mistake. People start adding pages and content without fully understanding what else is going in this area. You end up with disjoint site impossible to find anything on.

  • Build your content map on a pager using sticky notes or electronic boards. Refine, test it, and update it until it’s ready. Then you’re ready and can take to one level down and start creating sites and pages.

• Use apps that help you deliver needed content.

  • Apps are there just to simplify access to the information not create new information that is not needed. If your users don’t need a stock ticker on the home page - don’t add it.

Think about the maintenance

Every time you think about building an app think about its maintenance, and that includes

• Updates that keep it running as Office 365 changes over time

• Performance.

• Compatibility with evolving dependencies such as services.

• Troubleshooting.

• Data retention.

What to do:

• Determine whether you need a custom app to serve up your specific content.

• Does the app have an owner and optionally a contributor?

• Determine who will maintain and troubleshooting the app.

• Does the app require content moderation, is there an owner for that?

• If the app has critical information, what’s the fallback plan?

• Is the app compatible with the Office 365 platform in a foreseeable future or does it use approach and modules that are becoming obsolete?

  • What about app performance?

• Does the app have consistent user experience with the rest of the site?

As you design your intranet, you will come across various alternatives, chose options which are driven by users’ demand. Ensure the demand is real and well represented and your intranet is set for success.

We’re here to help

If you have questions on how to make your intranet more engaging while leveraging your existing Office 365 and SharePoint investment, we’re here to help you make that impact.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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Where does Intranet fit in Your Digital Workplace Strategy

Summary:
Your Digital Workplace is not a single tool. It’s a set of tools that make work possible by complimenting each other. By evaluating new tools that come on the market in terms of their fitness on your roadmap, you can avoid tools that are roadmap-distractions and require costly backtracking. Intranets have some very clear goals and purpose in comparison to other communication tools, but you have to ensure governance and adequate support in order to make the investment worthwhile.

1. Digital Workplace: Understanding

A bit more than a year ago, at Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, I had a chance to speak with Joe Francis who runs a Yammer network for over 200,000 users at Glaxo Smith Kline.

Joe and their MS Partner Leslie provided some real close-up looks on how they manage their Yammer network and how it has transformed communication within their organization.

At the time, Yammer was known in the Microsoft community to be on the “decline“. I spoke with several SME’s in the area and everyone had a nervous feeling what’s going to happen with the product. And yet it does so well at GSK.

Just 5 years ago, Yammer was considered a disruptor and many claimed it will displace SharePoint as a communication tool. But it didn’t. Now, similar disruptor stories are told about Microsoft Teams.

Many organizations are struggling to figure out how Microsoft Teams and other tools in Office 365 suite will fit their digital landscapes.

How do you know when a new tool is right for the organization?

First, let’s understand what a Digital Workplace is:

A Digital Workplace is a cohesive set of tools and environments which help the company operate successfully and drive towards a business goal.

Few key characteristics:

• Each tool must have its purpose and audience in your organization

  • For example: you’re not trying to do project management with Yammer, just as you wouldn’t use Microsoft Project for employee communication

• There is a governance around each tool and business users are not confused

  • Users are not mistakenly putting confidential files onto an externally accessible network

• The tool belongs to a roadmap

  • It’s not a rogue tool installed out of someone’s impatience. Even if it’s an ad-hoc solution, it needs to have a roadmap and transition plan

2. Is the Tool a Distraction or does it belong to a roadmap?

Now that we know what the Digital Workplace is and that it can have several tools in its arsenal, let’s define the “distraction” on a roadmap.

The Roadmap

Your roadmap is a way to go from point A (now) to point B (say, 3 years from now).

A tool that is a distraction will take you on a side road and lead nowhere so you’ll have to backtrack to get back on the right path.

There are a few characteristics of a digital tool that make it a distraction.

Tool is a distraction if

• It’s a short term “band-aid”; not tied to solving a business goal for the company

  • Example: A team needs to collaborate with a contractor who doesn’t have a corporate account, so they create a Dropbox account for them to share files with.

    • This action does not create a strategy for sharing files externally, it’s simply a band-aid for this one case

• It doesn’t fit core values or policies of the business

  • Example: Help-desk team using email to ask customer for passwords

    • This action can result in breaches and customer information leaks

• It doesn’t scale with growing demand

  • Example: Using Microsoft Teams channels to store project documentation

    • This decision might make sense temporarily but as more projects you’re assigned to, the more channels you’ll have and searching, archiving, and accessing relevant deliverables will become a nightmare as the team grows

• It has visible negative impact on business goals

  • Example: Email blast company news

    • This clogs people’s email. They stop paying attention to newsletters and miss important announcements resulting in disengagement

3. Where does the intranet fit into all this?

Intranet revolves around these key goals:

1. Be a hub for reliable corporate communication (leadership communication, KPIs etc)

2. Be a one-stop-shop for corporate knowledge (templates, samples, Knowledgebase, How to’s)

3. Be a central spot for resources that employees need to get their job done (manuals, policies, request forms)

4. Be a one-stop-shop for collaboration (including: document management, findings skills and expertise through directories, launching key forms such as HR forms)

Additionally, if you don’t have any overlapping tools such as HRMS systems, your intranet can also be a place for:

• Employees to connect (employee news, events, and ideas contributions)

• Staff Engagement (shout-outs and kudos)

4. Setting up your intranet for success

As Joe mentions in his interview about Yammer, you have to plan for success.

Here are the key steps to implement your intranet successfully:

Solutions

• Obtain Executive buy-in

  • Propose a pilot project. Set targets, measure outcomes, report results

• Avoid the trap of Planned Obsolescence

  • Planned Obsolescence has several shades, here are few examples

    • Example 1: Instead of maintaining the service subscription companies do not renew it hoping the software will just work. Instead, the software becomes stale and users become dissatisfied with its performance

    • Example 2: No budget assigned for an internal resource to collect employee requests, prioritize, and action them

    • Example 3: No budget for increased demand on helpdesk resources when rolling out a new software

• Equally represented content

  • Content on the intranet is often heavily tilted towards communications with very little representation for the areas of the business. This reduces your audience and engagement.

• Build intuitive information architecture

  • Not being able to find things on the intranet is one of the most common frustrations that users report

  • Reorganize your intranet information architecture

  • Test efficiency of your information architecture

  • Lock down major areas

• Target your communication

  • Split news into global and targeted. Separate people news/watercooler from company news. Separate company-wide alerts (ex.: outage alerts) from news

• Launch and Post launch activities

  • 34 Intranet Launch Ideas for the Best Adoption Results

We’re here to help

Struggling to understand how Office 365 toolset fits the digital landscape in your organization?
It’s not always simple, and requires expertise to help you gain insight in the roadmap Microsoft has for its products. We’re here to help you.
We’d be happy to help you with a transparent and objective consultation to get you on the right track and maximize your existing Office 365 investment.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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Building a Business Case for a new Office 365 Intranet

Summary: Building an intranet business case solely focused on numbers is logical but rarely convinces decision-makers to take the next steps. Tie your intranet business case to customer experiences, and show how having a robust intranet helps your organization serve customers better. Start small, embrace iterative stages, and evolve with the Office 365 toolkit.

Why do you need an intranet

Before jumping into how will the intranet be built and what features will it have, we need to start with basics and supply relevant evidence on why do we think we need an intranet.

Go beyond Comparison

When building an intranet business case, it’s natural to try and appeal to decision-makes only in a very quantifiable way. However, this approach only covers surface issues and misses the opportunity to address more complex scenarios.

Say an organization uses file share to collaborate and manage files and other information. Your decision makers are very familiar with the existing file share, what it does, and costs associated with it.

Let’s say existing problems with file share have been identified as:

• Cost of growing and maintaining storage

• Lack of proper versioning

• Cumbersome remote access

To address these, you might focus on:

• Up to 1 TB of storage for $X/user/month

• Version control included

• Remote access included

Are these the only challenges your organization can solve with Office 365?

Here are few more to consider:

• Eliminating rework by providing samples and templates

• Reducing reliance on email by improving search

• Reducing errors by introducing How To’s and Procedure Directory

• Simplifying onboarding with the Welcome library

• Eliminate bottlenecks for finding information

• Align inconsistent processes

• Promote knowledge sharing and engagement

Next, let’s see how we can provide compelling evidence to support above claims.

Provide relevant evidence

Regardless of how many benefits implementing a brand-new intranet will bring, you need to supply relevant evidence for your organization.

Here is an example of 2 statements. Which one sounds more compelling?

1. According to LinkedIn study the Cost of Reworking Information on average is estimated 30% of employee effort over a year. In our organization of 300 desktop users, this means 3,600 of hour/week is lost due to people recreating information that could not be found.

2. In a past year we have increased staff count by 50 new employees. With new employees onboarding, quick access to existing samples, processes, how to’s, and templates is needed to reduce the cost of recreating information. According to LinkedIn study, the Cost of Reworking Information on average is estimated 30% of employee effort over a year. In our organization of 300 desktop users, this means 3,600 of hour/week is lost due to people recreating information that could not be found.

Both statements offer industry research. The difference between the two is that second statement provides relevant evidence for the organization and not a generic assumption. In fact, I’d argue that ratio of rework hours is even higher because with 50 brand new employees, the learning curve is much steeper.

Tie your intranet to improving customer experiences

Employee efficiencies are tied to customer experiences whether direct or indirect.

When building an intranet business case, ensure this link is clearly visible.

For example, see the difference:

1. By building a reliable intranet information architecture and testing it prior to launch with the staff, we will improve information findability and reduce errors.

2. Our staff relies on search efficient results to find relevant client documents and deliverables. By building a reliable intranet information architecture and testing it prior to launch with the staff, we will improve information findability and reduce errors and client escalations.

The simple link to client results instantly elevated the value of proper information architecture design and testing, as opposed to ad-hoc site structure rollout.

How will you deliver a company intranet

Now that you have clear evidence why you need an intranet in your organization, we need a plan on how to get there.
Here are key aspects to consider for your intranet business case when describing the “how”.

Focus on iterative nature of the intranet

Long gone are the days when an intranet required a team of 20 stakeholders and 3 years to launch. The timelines have shortened and companies deliver relevant and useful intranet in an iterative fashion.

The benefits of the iterative approach are:

• Reduced risk of timeline and budget slip

• Smaller core teams

• Focus on function, and value; less on widgets and changing features

• Organic adoption

Iterative doesn’t mean barely functioning or bare-bones product. Your intranet roadmap needs to be driven by business priorities.

In your business case, provide the approach of how you plan to determine core scope. In this post on 4 Easy Steps to Effectively Prioritize Your Intranet Scope you will see the diagram on how we get from ideas to action when it comes to scope planning.

It comes down to laying out all of the priorities, and plotting them on the priority and feasibility spectrum.

Embrace diverse toolkit

Any given organization uses a wide set of tools for business. An intranet is not there to replace all of them. It’s important to help guide a clear scope for your intranet, and what the intranet is not.

The decision makers will appreciate a business case which is clear in its goals and embraces diversity of the tools that various teams are using.

What will you need to support your initiative

The final step in your intranet business case should be the support you require to continue.

Resources

To support the design and rollout activities, you will need adequate attention from stakeholders during the design phase as well s continuous support once the intranet is launched.

Here is the guidance in terms of support you need depending on the size of your company:

Organization Staff Size	Intranet Project Team Size	Operational Team Size (FTE)
100	6	0.5
1000	7	1
10,000	9	2

Technology/Vendor

Over the years, according to Nielsen Norman report on award winning intranets, intranet teams have engaged external resources to help in their redesign projects, both to fill internal team gaps and gain outside experience and perspective.

In recent years, especially for Office 365 intranets, companies realized that using intranet-in-a-box products such as Origami to gain deployment efficiencies, reduce implementation costs, and dramatically increase usability of their intranets.

Budget

To assess your budget, ensure you count the time required from internal resources, vendors, and cost of the product. Remember to account for the operational team once the intranet has launched. Depending on the size of the organization, the team can range from a part-time to a couple of full-time resources as you can see in the table above.

We’re here to help

Building a compelling business case for an intranet sometimes needs a little bit of collaboration. If you’d like to work together to help you build an engaging business case for your organization, we’re here to help. We have a wealth of techniques to help you drive the right support among your stakeholders.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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SharePoint Migration Plan: Key Strategies and Lessons Learned

Since Microsoft’s announcement of SharePoint 2019, many organizations are moving to SharePoint 2016, SharePoint Online, or Hybrid. Here are the most common approaches and strategies we’ve used to help our clients migrate to a new SharePoint environment.

Lift-and-Shift

Often companies choose a lift-and-shift approach, where the solution is moved to a newer version of SharePoint with no functional changes. This approach is cost-effective especially if your previous solution has not been heavily customized, and you just want to take advantage of all the new features available. Lift-and-shift can also be selected as a “phase one” migration, followed by functional enhancements in later phases.

Although this is a relatively straightforward path, here are the key tactics we found crucial with many customers over the years.

Do a trial run / Have a Pre-Production environment

As your SharePoint environment goes through updates, it’s hard to keep track of everything. Small customizations are often implemented by Power Users directly on the page via script. Sometimes it’s a piece of JavaScript, or a workflow built using SharePoint Designer. Those may not easily translate to a newer version of SharePoint and that’s why we recommend doing a trial run on a development environment using DB attach process.

Once you have run the migration, you can involve your key users with a smoke test of their specific areas. This brings us to the next point of having a RACI matrix to know who does what.

Have a RACI

It’s an all-familiar [Responsible/Accountable/Consulted and Informed] matrix. and is an important part of the SharePoint Migration Plan. Here is why we need it:

• To identify who will be doing the smoke test of trial migration and catching any issues on key pages (landing, key areas, and department pages etc

• Know who to contact when things need to be fixed or content retired

• Understand who makes go/ no-go decision, and understands all aspects of the solution

• Identify stakeholders to prioritize issues before migration to production

• Know who will send communication to which users at various stages of the migration

• Know who will support users who are unfamiliar with some new UI present on their pages

• Identify staff and contractors supporting outages after hours or on a day 1 after the migration

• Identify who will track task completion, or who's your project manager

Prioritize Issues

To some people, an issue may not be an issue, and sometimes that’s a big issue :)

With the help of RACI you can determine key stakeholders who can help you drive what’s to be addressed right away or after Go-Live. If there are items on which your team can’t agree, use your Go /No-Go meeting to decide with [Accountable] stakeholders.

Keep track of the decisions for each issue discovered and what resolution should be. It will help you see what was done as you migrate from the development environment to staging and finally to production.

Track Action Items

Sharepoint migrations strictly rely on the correct sequencing of events because they involve switching users from one production system to a new system.

If someone doesn’t complete their task or completes it partially, it’s likely to have a bearing on the next steps in the sequence. For example, if you decide not to set automatic link redirect to a new system, be sure to send an email communication about that as it may impact some users.

We recommend using Trello or Microsoft Planner to track activities and checklists and move them from one bucket to another as they change their state.

Prepare Communication

Having adequate communication sent to users will set their expectations and significantly increase customer satisfaction. As a bonus, your users will feel that you care about their experience.

Depending on the size of your organization, you may want to message things via email, staff meetings or other methods. Chose the method so that no one misses your planned outage window.

Raise awareness of the upcoming change by sending initial communication first, in advance of the migration and more details closer to the migration.

Don’t forget the details:

• What will happen (outage, system unavailability etc)

• When will it happen (and for how long!)

• What to expect after (redirect on some page, new login, new UI etc)

• Who to contact if they have a problem (chose method which can handle larger than normal traffic)

Have a Go /No-Go Strategy

Schedule Go /No-Go decision early on to ensure everyone at the table is the right decision maker. It’s important to consider not just technical readiness but also change impact. Short notice change may introduce risk of wider outage so it’s key to chose your options wisely with the right people at the table.

Prepare to handle outages

Continuous testing helps but outages always happen.

This might sound obvious, but have technical resources allocated to work over the weekend or evenings surrounding the migration milestones. Even if you won’t need their help, it’s good to have a backup. It might be permission access to a file-share or incorrect login credentials that will stall entire migration. Same goes for users who will perform smoke test of the migrated system. Having the right people available at the right time is crucial.

We recommend developers and admins clear part of their day the morning following a successful migration to help address anything urgent as users report problems.

In summary

Technical aspects of a lift and shift migration are as important as change management parts of the process. Feel free to adapt some of the tactics above to your organization based on the size and culture. In many cases, you’ll be glad you clarified assumptions and avoided set-backs.

Leave your comments on what are some of the things you're curious about and we'll try to get an expert insight on the topic

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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"Building internal user community of over 100K users, here's what we found"

Recently, I had a pleasure to stop and have a chat with Joe Francis from GSK and Lesley Crook from Perspicuity. They've been able to share something that you can't find out just by reading a book. They've successfully created and continue to manage huge network of over 100K of internal Yammer users. Naturally, the topic caught my attention since many organizations struggle to manage much smaller internal networks.

Here are some of the most valuable bits of our conversation, for more check out the full video

[Yaroslav Pentsarskyy]
How did you come across Yammer as a tool? Did you have to "sell" it?

[Joe Francis]
It was actually an eight-year journey for GlaxoSmithKline - to get to where we are now. Yammer started originally as a disruptive computing experiment. We had students and interns that were challenged to come up with a new way of collaborating and working together and they fell upon Yammer and from those humble beginnings is how we started. Initially we worked through a lot of viral growth and then there was a lot of uptake. IT decided look at this as something that is going to work and decided to put some effort behind it. We partnered with our with our friends in communications and began making it a real thing.

[Yaroslav Pentsarskyy]
Was there a resistance to this new tool and how did you overcome it?

[Joe Francis]
There are absolutely those that get it a 100% and it doesn't matter what part of the organization they are. There are definitely those who don't and have to be
convinced. There's definitely a paradigm: the green dots, the yellow dots, and the red dots. The red dots being the ones that are hardest to convince, the green dots get it automatically and the yellows can be convinced. The challenge is to get those yellows over to green and once you're there, come back and work on the reds and we definitely had to do a bit of that.

[Yaroslav Pentsarskyy]
What are some of the top tips turning those yellows into greens and those red ones into yellows?

[Joe Francis]
It's really all about finding a bit of business fit justification. Putting it out there is not going to
bring most people in, so if you can find out what the pain points are within a group or an organization it helps.

[Leslie Crook]
Doing a yam jam campaign around certain event is one of the ways [...] it's a 24 hour activity on the network in a probably a specific group where you gather together subject matter experts from the company [for example] people from the analyst team in finance, social media, corporate communications.

[Joe Francis]
Another example, for leaders, is to wrap it around a big event like senior leader conference bring it in naturally as part of what are the problems we're trying to solve and how can we support this conference how can we go out to employees whilst we're still at the conference get their opinion about what we're talking about at this conference and then bring it back. It's important to use a hashtag around the event for people to immediately recognize it.

[Yaroslav Pentsarskyy]
Can a network like this run on autopilot once set up or do you need someone to constantly keep the fire going?

[Joe Francis]
It can run on autopilot short period of time, but in reality you're only gonna have success if you've got somebody drive it. Whether it's a group or a division or an individual or different company that are helping out. You really have to figure out ways to keep those topics
that are being discussed, keep them live, keep them active and that takes just going out and actively liking post or putting in provocative responses to try to draw people in. Without the engagement it doesn't work so just having it there it can be it can work but it's not really successful.

[Leslie Crook]
Model that I use called six Yammer hats which is based on Edward de Bono's six thinking
hats, describes skills of champions or community managers in a social network, so those are:

"Detective" where you might work in a private group. You might be a surveyor where you're doing polls and asking questions right across the enterprise getting a temperature check

"Astronaut" where you're more of a community manager but you're connecting, sharing, solving and innovating which is Simon Terry MPVs model that I'm quoting there

"Fedora hat" you could be working in communications where you're looking for you
you're on the network but kind of in the background and you're picking up grassroots stories that might be coming from manufacturing or from the labs in R&D and bringing those stories that have been bubbling away back to corporate comms to the editorial team to make proper intranet SharePoint stories

"Tiara" for giving praise. One "like" by a leader is priceless

"Baseball cap" is all about having fun with a purpose and there were many groups that. Example: group around the cycling, group for sustainable transport, photography, pets, baking so it's it's having fun at work

[Yaroslav Pentsarskyy]
Did you feel like you have to do a lot of governance planning?

[Joe Francis]
You'll fail if you don't. One of the biggest things to make you more successful is ensuring that you've got legal, security and risk groups on board with you. They're gonna want to know: are there ways to monitor the content and are we protecting ourselves, are we making sure we don't have data leaks. Having support from the legal team is crucial. You need to have that written as a policy that everybody accepts when they go in and there's general awareness this is how you act.

Leave your comments on what are some of the things you're curious about and we'll try to get an expert insight on the topic

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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Your next document management system is going to be perfect!

First, let me give you a scenario:

You have 30 documents in a folder. You need to find a document with an “agreement” as part of its name. Would you use search or look through file names?

Hold that answer!

Here is a scenario 2. You have 30,000 documents and you need to find the one with the word “agreement” in it. Would you still look through file names manually?

Wait, how did I know you’re going to chose “manual answer” for the first scenario?

In one of my projects we tested user’s behavior in a similar sort of way as you did just now. Instead of files, they needed to find case records. We found that users resort to more structured approach when the amount of information they must deal with appears to be manageable. They prefer to look through views, names on a record, file creation date etc.

In contrast, when there is too much to go through, it becomes data. Data is best parsed by our unconscious intuition because our brain relies on finding patters since it understands that there is no match analyzing all the data consciously.

According to this an autonomous driving car processes 100GB of data each second – that's what your brain does and you don’t even bother!

Now, back to designing your document management system. How much data are you presenting to your users? Are you providing tools to help users find what’s in front of them?

Many organizations rely on search to help users find documents, but do nothing to improve it. Is your search contextual? Is content being searched for specific enough? What about draft content or duplicate sources? What about old and irrelevant content?

Here are few approaches to designing better document management systems:

1.       Turn data into information as early as possible. It’s easy to create a document library and drop forms in Excel format into the library, but now the data in those Excel sheets is not readily available until someone opens the file.

Perhaps a better solution is to offer users enter the data in a structured way using a list, CRM system, or an app.

Now that data is safe but you can also report on it, draw pretty graphs, search with variety of filters and tools. I’m not suggesting you should convert every document into a list or an app. Simply identify those high traffic, high value types and automate them. The effort you’ll spend will pay off each time your users interact with the structured data.

2.       Retire obsolete content. Why, you ask? Isn’t storage cheap? Yes, the storage is cheap but not the time your users are going to spend looking for something useful in a whole pile of not so useful, old content.

You don’t have to delete things right away. With SharePoint you can set expiration workflows which will automatically archive and eventually delete content passed their set expiration. You can even have SharePoint send you a report of expired content before you decide on what to do with it. So if those are business expense receipts you’re keeping for the 10th year – it’s time for them to go.

3.       Know your user’s workflow and design the system accordingly. Does your user’s day start with working on documents from yesterday or last month? Perhaps create views to help them see most recently accessed or worked on documents. Perhaps you need a “manager view” to separate some features used mainly by managers and not overburden the interface with too many filters and buttons.

If part of the workflow is for your users to fill in a form and attach a document, help them out by putting related functions together. Minimize button clicks, new browser sessions, tabbing and switching. If it doesn’t seem intuitive for you, and you built it, it probably won’t feel intuitive to others.

4.       Eliminate useless features. Just because something is cool it doesn’t mean it’s helpful. With constant overload of new features in the product it’s important to only introduce the ones that will help your users. Think what’s usable, intuitive, simple, and easy to find.

Best part of all, most of the tools are there out-of-the-box so there is very little configuration investment involved.

What are your thoughts?

We’re here to help

If you have questions on how to make your intranet more engaging while leveraging your existing Office 365 and SharePoint investment, we’re here to help you make that impact.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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