This Blog is inspired by a Podcast from Steve and Marijn but without the Whisky. www.MarijnandSteve.com
Teamwork inspired collaboration should be stimulated at all levels of the organisational structure 😊. This is a typical innuendo from Steve and Marijn in their Podcast, Office365distilled! But it is an excellent description of MS Teams and how personae are crucial to driving collaboration as a Digital Way of Working.
Personae represent the groups of employees working together using specific M365 functionality as they share their knowledge and skills to accomplish organisational vital goals and milestones.
It is essential to ensure that your Personae need come from all aspects of the business, and each should have the common trait of wanting to help the company change and improve.
It would help if you did not forget that your company will be multifaceted, so your Personae must be the same.
Every team finds value in M365, centering on specific tools that drive the three core functional elements.
• Content
• Communication
• Collaboration
Collaboration of efforts can be achieved to create synergies by mixing the tools in M365 that define these three elements in the right proportion for the Personae across the company.
This is where Focused Usability starts to add value—defining the functionality from the M365 tools set that will drive value for the identified Personae across the business. Make them aware of the benefit and focus your training on the value which will drive a desire across the company.
The several years of practical experience and service in diverse business roles have established that technology plays an active role in almost every part of business operations.
As innovative tools like Microsoft Teams have also revolutionised such collaboration.
As we celebrate Microsoft Teams’ 5th birthday in 2022, there are now over 270 million active users per month. This productivity and work management toolset has from a simple chat-based collaborative platform to a solution that drives collaboration with real-time document sharing, interactive online meetings and real-time collaboration with the introduction of Loop components.
Being part of the Microsoft 365 family of integrated products, MS Teams shared workspaces allow users to quickly achieve goals and objectives with remote accessibility options.
However, organisations need to drive adoption through a change program to take maximum advantage of this multi-purpose productivity software, and Focused Usability can assist.
This means that value from the tool can only be achieved if we understand the personae of the users. By individualising Focused Usability, we increase the desire for Personae to extract value from MS Team or SharePoint Online when combined with the communications of Exchange.
Therefore, focused on the usability of Content, Collaboration & Communication, identifying the value from the essential tools Exchange, SharePoint Online, and MS Teams ensures the value is understood.
The key points to keep in mind in this regard are:
Adoption is necessary for ensuring that users of the platform accept every new tool associated with MS 365 proactively and efficiently. Employees need to be prepared, trained, and educated about this change for effective adoption.
Research recently proved that people with the correct change attitude can take up a new set of tools and work differently in just 66 days, not the misconceived 21 days to learn and 90 days to change.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311908.2022.2041277
Business entities and their managers must focus on the functional usability of software and tools that drive value.
Functional usability can give people with specific business needs and backgrounds (Personae) the right operational capabilities that will help these groups work together and create superior value from their efforts.
Final Thoughts
Like all things around change and adoption, identifying the right people and the balanced delivery of content, communication, and collaboration are achieved by the Personae themselves. Obtaining the maximum value from the MS 365 Products with lesser effort is inevitable.
With the desire of the personae met and the governance and configuration in the right direction, the tool will provide greater value for the business.
BUT… things will change, and the process of defining the right tools for the personae group will vary with the success of your adoption program.
If one thing is true in the world, Enough is Never Enough, and once a group has understood the value they have now, they will look for other values from the M365 toolset.
Finally, consider the timeline, Microsoft365 is constantly improving, and Change and Adoption programs take time to complete (at least 66 days). Do watch for changes being issued by Microsoft, which could be new values and increase the desire of the personae and training you need to deliver.
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www.MarijnandSteve.com has lots more Microsoft365 thought-provoking subjects. Listen to a chilled out podcast from a (virtual) bar in Belgium that closes with a Whisky not always easy to find.
Mickey Mouse takes the front of the stage on EP89 with a business diagram that looks at Collaboration (face) Content (right ear) and Communications (left ear). The model identifies the FOCUSED USABILITY of Content, Collaboration & Communication with the key tools being Exchange, SharePoint Online and MS Teams. Steve has not always been a believer in the default view about personae but in this podcast, he explains that like a complex whisky there is value in personae. With FOCUSED USABILITY the audience value is understood and focused for the personae. And then S&M bring in lots of silence whilst they savour a fabulous Islay whisky created for a 200-year-old anniversary.
