Office 365, Change Management, and the Impact of Evergreen Services

The only constant in life is change – and if you are a customer of Office 365, then you know all about change, and have likely had to adjust some internal practices to handle the almost constant stream of enhancements, UX tweaks, and adjustments within the platform. Of course, many of those experiences working with O365 and Microsoft in this new world of change has greatly improved.

In a parallel conversation with my good friend Owen Allen, who works in the collaboration space at Microsoft on the sales side, we discussed the power of social collaboration to help improve and extend the change management dialog within an organization, helping to democratize the conversation, making these things much more transparent and allowing everyone to get involved and share their input and concerns. Owen added:

Office 365, Change Management, and the Impact of Evergreen Services

“I believe that social platforms and communities are a valuable resource to reduce the disruptive effects of change within an organization. These provide a two-way channel for communications between IT and employees, as well as a way for end users to share their experiences and share new approaches to sharing benefits, tips and tricks, and workarounds with each other.”

In the Office 365 ecosystem, it doesn’t matter whether these social interactions are happening in Skype, Yammer, Outlook Groups, the new Microsoft Teams, or in a competitor solution like Beezy — the point is that you’re leveraging these technologies to get people communicating.

In my experience, having built and run project management organizations and having run governance bodies for a number of different companies and industries, the #1 problem for organizations struggling with change management is a lack of communication.

Of course, I do believe that companies that make social collaboration a priority are better able to handle the higher rate of change that comes from moving to cloud services. So get out there and open up some social communication channels!