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Richard Harbridge: Insights


SHARING INFORMAL BUSINESS THOUGHTS, ADVICE, AND EXPERIENCES


MAKE YOUR TECHNOLOGY & DIGITAL WORKPLACE ROADMAPS MORE ACTIONABLE: JOIN ME AT
THE SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE

by Richard Harbridge on March 10, 2019

In this post, I want to share a couple of quick recommendations around
Technology Strategy (like Office 365), Digital Workplace strategy (Intranets,
Extranets, Collaboration, Meetings, etc.) and roadmaps, some resources for
further reading and highlight the opportunity for us to connect at the
SharePoint Conference in May this year.


HAVING AN ACTIONABLE ROADMAP IS IMPORTANT!

After spending years helping customers envision, develop, and implement digital
workplace strategies I have learned that the issue often isn’t motivation,
interest, or even budget related, but having tactical knowledge of what to do,
how to do it, when to do it, and why to do it. In other words, organizations
need to have more detailed and more comprehensive roadmaps that are actionable
first and foremost.

What Is A Digital Workplace Or Digital Roadmap?

So first let’s clarify what I mean by a roadmap. Roadmaps have a few consistent
elements. They have typically phases, tracks/focus areas, time frames, and
activities. These activities are often represented as actionable steps/things to
do, projects or even programs of projects depending on how high level the
roadmap is. Below is a simple sample for reference:



One of the challenges here is that many organizations think it’s more
complicated than it needs to be to develop and create a roadmap for a digital
workplace, an Intranet, or for some specific area of digital excellence within
an organization. Most roadmaps are quite simple – they essentially are a way of
visually showing recommended actions (or sets of actions). By visualizing these
actions we can at a glance communicate priority, urgency/order, dependencies,
estimated effort/how long things take, and more.

Why Don’t More Organizations Have Actionable Roadmaps?

Coming up with the recommended actions to go from your organization’s current
state to the organizations envisioned future state or aspiration state could be
difficult. This is why many organizations employ experts who work with other
customers (like myself or the company I work with 2toLead), or why they look at
what other organizations are doing and how they are framing their strategy.

If you aren’t sure how to write a recommendation or what the right
recommendations are – then start by documenting pain points, and user needs. A
skilled expert can take those needs (especially if they are specific) and map
them to potential solutions (your recommendations). Anyone can elicit pain
points, and user needs related to digital tools and technology – but do keep in
mind that more experienced analysts may be able to get a richer understanding of
these based on their technology expertise and skill set.

Below is a simple diagram of how a typical customers needs/pain points might be
represented.



Getting Started On Your Own Roadmap(s)

If you want to develop your own roadmap start with thinking about the categories
or areas of focus where there could be clear recommendations.

You could probably come up with a number of technology recommendations as you
look at your digital workplace portfolio. What’s more, you can come up with many
recommendations quite easily if you explore how Governance, Adoption, or
Technology Excellence could be improved. These categories are often missed in
most roadmaps as far too many focus on the technology projects and just assume
adoption or governance will be considered in each project. However, this misses
looking at things holistically and benefiting from some investments in these
areas directly rather than always being tied to a project, and it’s associated
outcomes (and budget limitations).

Coming up with recommendations is only the start though. Once you have your
recommendations, you need to define the urgency. Is it immediate? Is it near
term? Is it for the future? More importantly are some ‘ongoing’ recommendations
where you are recommending a new motion, activity or exercise that should be
recurring?



If you can frame your recommendations by category and by urgency, you have the
basis for a roadmap.

Making Roadmaps More Actionable & Better Prioritized

The next step is breaking things down further, adding more detail and further
exploring how urgency and the recommendation should be evaluated. In most of
these break downs your goal is to achieve some measure of estimated business
value and estimated complexity. If it’s hard to think of how complex or how
valuable something is? Odds are it isn’t specific or broken down enough.

When you break recommendations down like this not only can you develop an
actionable roadmap, but you can more easily prioritize things. As an example, by
mapping out the business value and complexity scoring you can put them into a
matrix like the one below to help prioritize certain recommendations first,
especially if some don’t have dependencies or other things that complicate the
order/priority of the recommendation itself.



Keep in mind that you can have multiple roadmaps and roadmaps focused on a
specific phase, category or shorter time window than say a more program oriented
roadmap that shows how these specific, targeted recommended actions connect and
how they might be budgeted/managed.


WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Connect with me for a 1:1, Download Hundreds Of Pages Of Guidance and/or Come
Join Me At The North American SharePoint Conference.

If you haven’t already taken a look at it – we have published quite a few
whitepapers full of free expert guidance and advice on SharePoint and Office
365. Here are a few of them:

 * INTRANETS WITH OFFICE 365 – Explore the benefits of an Office 365 Intranet
   and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
 * DRIVING ADOPTION – Explore the best approach and expert techniques for
   driving and improving Office 365 adoption and usage.
 * MEASURING IMPACT – Find out how to identify and measure the ROI and business
   value Office 365 provides with examples and advice.
 * SHAREPOINT MIGRATION – Learn how to successfully plan and execute a
   SharePoint migration.
 * EXTERNAL SHARING – Learn how to plan for the risks and things to consider
   with external sharing. Learn what you need to know about external sharing in
   Office 365.
 * WHEN TO USE WHAT – Maximize the value of your digital workplace. Learn how to
   help your users make better, more effective decisions on how they get work
   done.
 * OFFICE 365 RESOURCES KIT – We have shared many templates, samples, and
   resources. To simplify the download we have combined our Office 365 resources
   into a kit.

In only 2 and a half months the SharePoint Conference will be back in Las Vegas
on May 21st through the 23rd (with more time if you want to join us for
workshops). This event is one of two major Microsoft events in 2019 where the
Microsoft product team will be announcing their roadmap updates for SharePoint
and the Office 365 collaboration and content services changes that are ahead of
us. This is an amazing conference with deep dive technical sessions, great
networking, incredible perspectives and a significant amount of Microsoft
leadership/announcements.

There will be over 150 speakers at the event and over 200 sessions. Whether your
interest is in SharePoint, Office 365, Planner, Teams, Microsoft Flow, Power
Apps, Yammer or more – this is a great event to block in your calendar and
register to attend. You can save an additional 50$ with code HARBRIDGE. If you
sign up for a workshop package, you can also bring some sweet gadgets home such
as an Xbox One or a Cortana Smart Speaker! Register today at
https://sharepointna.com/#!/register?utm_term=HARBRIDGE




WANT TO KNOW WHAT I WILL BE PRESENTING ON & TALKING ABOUT?

I will be presenting one session at the conference, and I will be conducting one
full day workshop.

WORKSHOP HIGHLIGHT: STRATEGY & SUCCESS WITH OFFICE 365: PRACTICAL TOOLS &
TECHNIQUES FOR THE STRATEGIST, INFORMATION ARCHITECT & ANALYST

I am extremely excited to share that I will be running a FULL DAY workshop based
on the half day ones I have run in the past on this subject. In this full-day
workshop we will have more time to cover EVEN MORE content and practices.

People are complex. Office 365 is complex. Add the two together and you get some
of the most challenging, difficult, and stressful situations, especially if you
are responsible for facilitating shared understanding between them.

Join me to learn about actionable techniques to improve, simplify and amplify
your leadership, business analysis and information architecture efforts with
Office 365. Walk away with improved confidence when dealing with business and
non-technical related challenges of Office 365, and be familiarized with
effective tools and techniques that make Office 365 implementations more
successful.

Our topics, where we will dig into best practices will include:

 * Aligning with The Microsoft Roadmap
 * Planning & Implementing for Scale
 * Aligning with Industry Trends
 * Pro-Active Planning
 * Visualizing & Communicating Better
 * & Much More!

SESSION HIGHLIGHT: INTRANETS AND DIGITAL HUBS WITH OFFICE 365: WHAT YOU NEED TO
KNOW

There is a growing trend of organizations moving to “the cloud” to meet their
intranet needs. While many organizations are running their Intranets
“on-premise”, many are considering entirely cloud-based solutions or running
them on platforms like Office 365.

The question for many companies is not ,“should our intranet be built with
Office 365?” but, “how should we integrate or build our Intranets with Office
365?”. This is even more true today with the emergence of new modern Intranet
capabilities and continued innovation from Microsoft that must be reconciled
with enterprise Intranet/Digital Workplace needs.

In this session, I will explore what is listed below (and more):

 * How to address sprawl issues via improved, dynamic, and personalized
   navigation build based on OOTB capabilities and best practice design
   patterns.
 * How to improve governance and lifecycle with controlled provisioning, default
   metadata and good Information Architecture practices.
 * How analytics are changing, and search is improving and how to best ready
   your organization and integrate your Intranet with the considerable
   innovation and new capabilities in this space.
 * How to handle news, events, and page authoring and how and why to embrace
   modern SharePoint to support these needs.
 * Why mobile needs to take advantage of the first party apps, and how that can
   be done best.
 * How Yammer, Teams and modern social enterprise can and should be integrated
   with your Intranet.
 * How to take advantage of Microsoft Stream, Forms, PowerApps, Flow and more to
   improve your Intranet.

Hope this helps,
Richard 

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IMPROVE YOUR INTRANET & MAKE THE MOST OUT OF OFFICE 365: JOIN ME AT THE
SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE 2019

March 10, 2019 Business

In this post, I want to share a couple of quick recommendations around Intranets
in Office 365, some resources for further reading and highlight the opportunity
for us to connect at the SharePoint Conference in May this year. The
Intranet/Digital Hub Is Still Important!  There is a concern we hear from
customers and colleagues at […]

0 comments Read the full article →


MICROSOFT ANNOUNCED CLOUD DATACENTERS IN CANADA

June 3, 2015 News and Opportunities

Earlier this week Microsoft announced two new Datacenter locations in Canada.
This will provide the world with new regions and datacenter locations and will
provide resolution to Canadian data residency concerns. As a Canadian who has
worked passionately with Office 365 and Azure for many years now – I can
honestly say I have never […]

0 comments Read the full article →


GUIDANCE ON HOW TO DECIDE: WHEN TO USE WHAT IN OFFICE 365

May 27, 2015 Adoption and Engagement

Based on tremendous demand and with the help of Microsoft and community leaders
we wrote a public draft of a whitepaper that provides Office 365 guidance on
when to use what in Office 365. We presented the key findings and research from
the whitepaper as well as guidance at Microsoft Ignite 2015. This post is […]

3 comments Read the full article →


ENTERPRISE SOCIAL: SHOULD I USE YAMMER? WHEN SHOULD I USE SHAREPOINT?

September 29, 2014 Evaluating Technology

There are many conversations we all have around enterprise social. Some of the
most challenging conversations aren’t on the value of enterprise social, but in
how should we go about implementing and delivering social enterprise services in
our own organizations. While this subject deserves many posts I thought I would
start with a topic I am very frequently […]

4 comments Read the full article →


WHEN SHOULD WE USE SHAREPOINT OOTB, LEVERAGE 3RD PARTY APPS, OR BUILD CUSTOM
SOLUTIONS?

March 14, 2014 Help and Advice

Recently at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference I presented a session on when to
build, buy, or customize SharePoint (and when not to). This post summarizes the
session and where you can watch it for free or leverage the slides for your own
purposes. Determining when to use SharePoint, build customizations that extend
SharePoint, buy third […]

7 comments Read the full article →


FULL RECORDINGS OF TWO TALKS: SUCCEEDING WITH SHAREPOINT IN SEVEN STEPS & THE
KEYS TO A SUSTAINABLE SHAREPOINT STRATEGY

October 21, 2013 Business

I recently discovered that the two presentations I delivered at the previous
Microsoft SharePoint Conference are available on Channel9! Out of my 135,000+
slideshare views I know the majority relate the variations of my Seven Success
Factors For SharePoint deck – so in case anyone is ever looking for a recorded
copy – here is […]

3 comments Read the full article →


SHAREPOINT WORKFLOW: WHAT SHOULD WE USE IT FOR? WHAT ARE OTHER PEOPLE USING IT
FOR?

April 18, 2013 Business

We all know that we should always aim to automate and improve our business
processes more. Many organizations reap enormous benefits from improving the way
they work alone or with other people through enabling technologies like
SharePoint. The big question is how do we start? Or perhaps which processes or
workflows should we automate and […]

35 comments Read the full article →


SHAREPOINT INTRANET EXAMPLES RESOURCE

April 16, 2013 Intranets

On a regular basis I have had people ask me for examples of SharePoint branded
intranets. The challenges are that A) most customers don’t want to share their
intranets, B) many designers and partners have this in their own managed
portfolios, and C) great contests/orgs have collections of them for paid
subscription/purchase. The purpose of […]

10 comments Read the full article →


TOUGH MIGRATION DECISIONS: MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICES

March 5, 2013 Evaluating Technology

Based on many migration engagements Portal Solutions and I wrote a short and
easy to read free SharePoint migration guidance document that is now available
for download. If you struggle with understanding what you need to think about,
consider, and plan for when preparing for a SharePoint migration hopefully this
document will help you and save you time. SharePoint content migration can […]

0 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

 * 


 * USEFUL PAGES
   
   * Governance Documents Listing
   * Intranet Component Listing
   * Intranet Design Examples
   * SharePoint 2007 vs 2010
   * SharePoint 2013 vs SharePoint 2010 vs SharePoint Online (Office 365)
   * SharePoint Diagnostics (Questions)
   * SharePoint Glossary
   * SharePoint IA Resources
   * SharePoint Standards
   * User Adoption Activities Listing
   * What is SharePoint?
   * When To Use What In Office 365 Whitepaper


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 * RECENT POSTS
   
   * Make Your Technology & Digital Workplace Roadmaps More Actionable: Join Me
     At The SharePoint Conference
   * Improve Your Intranet & Make The Most Out Of Office 365: Join Me At The
     SharePoint Conference 2019
   * Microsoft Announced Cloud Datacenters In Canada
   * Guidance On How To Decide: When To Use What In Office 365
   * Enterprise Social: Should I use Yammer? When should I use SharePoint?


 * RECENT COMMENTS
   
   * 2toLead on Guidance On How To Decide: When To Use What In Office 365
   * RobertoSumter on Guidance On How To Decide: When To Use What In Office 365
   * FrederikLeksell on Guidance On How To Decide: When To Use What In Office
     365
   * Richard Harbridge on SharePoint 2007 vs SharePoint 2010
   * Richard Harbridge on Enterprise Social: Should I use Yammer? When should I
     use SharePoint?


 * THINGS I TALK ABOUT
   
   Allin Business Intelligence Cloud Computing Comparison Consulting Industry
   Trends IT Change IT Services Measurement Office 365 Old Blog Reference People
   Planning Presentations Sales Sentiment Analysis SharePoint SharePoint 2007
   SharePoint 2010 SharePoint 2013 SharePoint 2013 Preview SharePoint
   Alternatives SharePoint Business Community SharePoint Cloud SharePoint
   Community SharePoint Conferences SharePoint Content Standards SharePoint
   Development Standards SharePoint Governance SharePoint Governance Teams
   SharePoint Intranet Standards SharePoint Online SharePoint ROI SharePoint
   Social SharePoint Social Standards SharePoint Standards SharePoint Survey
   SharePoint Tip and Trick SharePoint Upgrade SharePoint User Adoption Social
   Networking Technology Tips and Tricks User Adoption Yammer

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