You might be considering moving to the cloud or you have been using these services but not sure what your next step is to making best use of the technology. Let’s focus on Microsoft 365 as the cloud platform of choice and consider each week there are roughly 15 to 20 change notices to this service, even for professionals in the business this is a wicked rate of change to the services – welcome to the new normal. So, first things first, find someone who can help guide you through the every changing technology forest.
The next thing you need to do is stop, look and listen (yes I know, terribly plagiarized):
- Stop – set aside a couple (or more) days with the intent to plan to make your life easier
- Look – during your ‘stop’ time, look at what information you work with, how you work with it and where it is currently stored
- Listen – talk to your key information workers (you know, the people you tend to ask – where is that @#$% file stored?) and you will find out what works and what doesn’t
Armed with the above information you should now be able to sort information into two categories: Files and Data. Files are your Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF files (let’s keep your music and home videos out of this for now). Data is likely stored in your many Excel files or can be things you write down in that coiled notebook you carry around or on all those yellow stickies (*sigh*). But we are not ready to build you a solution that will take your business to the next level of efficiency… you will need to spend some time thinking about what works (see above) and building on that and what doesn’t work and fixing that. It’s a great opportunity to do a bit of house cleaning and toss what is not useful and think about a better way to work.
Don’t get discouraged, this is the process (or similar) that all organizations will go through to reap the benefits such as free up time, be more responsive reduce headaches/ulcers and live a happier life (too much?). Your organization will likely fit into two categories when it comes to collaboration: 1) Chatty or 2) Just give me a place to store and track stuff. By chatty I mean people like to message, leave comments, email a lot, like to blog and the like. These sort of activities lend themselves nicely to using Microsoft Teams. The second group of people will find that a more SharePoint centric solution will work better.
The above can be done by you and your team but there is no shame in getting some guidance by a trusted partner. If you have done all the above work, then the next step is to build the solution that will meet your needs – again if you are not comfortable working in Microsoft 365 building teams and SharePoint sites then seek the help of someone who does this for a living.
Stratacollab Consulting 