M365 Change Management Critical

This is the third in a series of blog posts about the findings in a new MER Merlin report on automated governance in M365. This post will focus on understanding how the pace of change in M365 is a significant challenge and makes the case that effective change management is more important than ever before.

Post 1 — The context for M365 automation — A rising tide of chaos.

Post 2 — The alignment of business, information governance, and M365 governance strategies is increasingly critical → But is sorely lacking in most organizations.

Downloads of the report are free -- and private -- at THIS LINK. We won’t be handing off the names to anyone. We greatly appreciate the following underwriters, who made it possible to do this; I urge you to check out their offerings.

Download link for the report = https://mailchi.mp/merconference.com/merlin-m365

• Active Navigation -- www.activenav.com

• Archive360 -- www.archive360.com/

• Infocycle -- www.infocycle.com/

• Infotechtion -- www.infotechtion.com

• Preservica -- https://preservica.com/

• Protiviti -- www.Protiviti.com/Microsoft

• Quality Associates Inc./DocPoint Solutions -- www.qualityassociatesinc.com

•  -- www.docpointsolutions.com

• Xillio -- www.xillio.com

[For reference, the indented quotes in this post were made by an expert panel of end users; more detail on that can be found in the report.]

SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 -- twenty-one years ago. The same year that SharePoint was introduced, Ray Kurzweil (of Singularity fame) noted, “The future will be far more surprising than most observers realize: few have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.”

The launch of SharePoint began a series of triennial versions and innovations over the course of two decades that seemed swift and accelerating.  But in large-scale organizations, things moved a bit more deliberately. Most surveys taken in the year after one of those triennial SharePoint introductions found a bell curve of users -- 10% on the newest and greatest version, and a long-tail of deployments still stuck in earlier versions. This created a vast number of unmanaged and subsequently abandoned SharePoint sites, leaving a significant gap in records management and increased organizational risk.

The shift to the cloud and M365 -- dramatically accelerated by the pandemic and demands of remote work -- changed everything. Deployment of M365 -- fueled by Teams -- exploded, often with little thought given to the governance implications created by the presence of such powerful tools in so many untrained hands.

“M365 has moved further up the chain. For years, IT has thrown tools out there and didn’t  tell people how to use them. During the pandemic, a lot of people started moving over to Teams. Many departments took everything from their shared drives and just dumped it into their Team’s file location without bothering to clean it up beforehand.”

Information managers now have two sets of challenges: 1) reasserting control over the sprawl that occurred during the pandemic; and 2) keeping up with the pace of change on the M365 platform itself, now freed from the constraints of triennial updates. For 77% of organizations, the pace of change in the M365 cloud is a challenge, creating an additional set of challenges as all of this change rolls down to unsuspecting end users.

“I think the biggest challenge we have is just keeping up with the changes that keep coming constantly from Microsoft. I get the daily change notifications from Microsoft and the weekly summary.  Even with this, I must dig down to figure out exactly what is going on and whether it affects us. You need a full time person to keep up with it, and we just don't have that capability.”

In terms of end users, how are organizations addressing the change management challenge in M365?  Even though the following items are those often found on many change management lists, they are worth reiterating in the context of M365. 

1. Provide direct help and support as soon as the need arises. Through proactive action, organizations can keep isolated problems from becoming a tidal wave of concern. 

2. Do not skimp on end user training, and more specifically end user training that is timely and in the context of the work that is being performed. 

3. Get executives involved in the change you are trying to generate, and do not be shy about enlisting them in making the change happen.

A well-planned change management program not only addresses issues when a system is launched, but before launch when the system is being planned, and well after launch when reinforcement is needed.

• Outcome – Agree with stakeholders on the behaviors that should change.

• Personas – Segment the audience based on personas to ensure relevant and useful training.

• Engaging – Make courses memorable, fun, interactive, and enable attendees to also learn from each other.

• Repetitive – First educate attendees in the why, then the how, and then require them to do it during the training.

• Applicable – Make it easy to remember and use the new knowledge with hands-on exercises, checklists, and on-demand repetition.

• Measurable – Define key performance metrics to identify how well the training changes behaviors.

Download link for the report = https://mailchi.mp/merconference.com/merlin-m365