author: Jonathan Stuckey
I had an article all ready to go, about how Microsoft Teams provisioning triggered and deployed vanilla SharePoint sites (not a problem) and the setup completely ignored the tenancy global settings for Region and Time-zone an so on.
Well I went to go and get some screen-grabs and make a short-video walking-through the issue, when I found its been fixed!
It is awesome! that problem has been fixed, but extremely frustrating for me as now my clever ways of addressing it are not required. So I needed to write another story.
I took a couple of minutes, but then I realised I already had a great story to tell - just not the way round I had expected it to be...
Cloud should change the way you think
What I realised is its a great illustration of cloud-adoption principles in action. See the paper I wrote for Microsoft a few years ago [Business Adoption of Office 365 Services]. You can download the full whitepaper here [PDF]
Principles
Cloud services changes stuff all the time
We need to be flexible with thinking about how we use them,
and how to running things on them
You absolutely cannot jump to custom-code solutions without really understanding what you are taking on.
Both management of service (i.e. in this case the change in way Templates did-not/do-now work), and how we manage these changes needs to pivot.
Pivoting is no-longer a project management term, its a de facto behavior for many operations and IT shops if you want to do a good job. Pivoting also introduced a strain onto the workforce we have yet to fully comprehend and manage as part of business-as-usual management.
Flexibility in design and use
The other key thing this kind of change rams-home is the need to be flexible in our thinking, our usage and willingness to change.
That does mean we cant use the services for what we want, so avoid them. It means we should be looking at continual review of offerings we use today, and improvement on how we use them.
Some times that means the service evolves away from what is useful for us, and we should and must be willing to either:
change what we do (and potentially why we do it) - OR
change the service we use to do it.
One of the key principles of cloud-adoption is:
Just because you can (do something), doesn’t mean you should
Remember what we are using is delivered "..as a service". The phase: “…as a service”, is not make this thing bespoke or customised, it is something we use as-is - because its fit for purpose (or as close as damn-it).
The supporting actions for this principle:
Learn and Look, before you Leap
Prove before you Move
Adopt Continuous Communications model
are all about continual learning, understanding and reviewing what you have - before you do something. But once you've done this - make a decision and do something.
What does this mean for solution design?
Well, not to appear trite, it means don't over do-it. Microsoft 365 services, and Microsoft Teams / SharePoint in particular are about providing the business users the tools and flexibility to do what they need.
If you wanted a structured, data-processing solution - you'd buy something like Salesforce, SAP or Dynamics365. And do you know what, there are times when you've gone so-far with the service you are using it is no longer fit for purpose and maybe moving to something like one of these others is the right thing to do.
But before you do be really sure you understand, what, why and how (and how-much $) that will impact your organisation and staff.
Solution design on Microsoft 365 cloud-services then needs to be:
lite-weight, information based and user-informed
guided by the platform and user-experience decisions Microsoft made for us
regularly reviewed for appropriateness
Solution design this way relies less on developer-skills, and more on breadth of experience and platform knowledge. It means your solution designers need to be practical, experienced and have time to be continually reviewing | testing | validating ideas, templates and options available.
It also means that the business need to have a stake in their own destiny, and not be so reliant on static-IT landscape - because it isnt. You're not working from your servers and machines anymore. You are working on somebody else's computer. Microsoft's.
A word of caution...
When I say 'Lite', do not let IT read that as "Non-existent". You do need to be able to provide some skills and knowledge, enough to map and design for information-flow, and be able to work with users of environment so you know what does and does-not work.
Believe me - Microsoft provides enough dumb-behaviours in what they give-us, that we do not need to compound them by lazy-IT.
Be a better organisation
A move to cloud-services should not just be clearing out your metaphorical information attic, moving all the crap to a new house and then re-stashing it. It should be thought of as becoming a new organisation. You have the luxury to be able to re-invent what you do, how you do it, and what you let your people do.
Enabling your people has a major impact on future of what your organisation is about. It takes time, continuous conversations and clear communication. Everyone has to be bought in.
Closing note
Anyway enough rambling. Suffice to say Microsoft's evergreen approach to making > breaking > fixing functionality can be very frustrating if you've planned something else but should be taken as a real opportunity for review and improvement.
Anyway - I've just found a whole raft of Microsoft Viva apps for Microsoft Teams, and a bunch of glossy looking modules which may make life easier for end-users. So I'm going to play-now - errr - spend time doing continuous-review and learning ":^)
about the author: Jonathan Stuckey
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