September 11, 2025 • 32 mins
Welcome to Episode 410 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast where hosts Jay Leask and Joy Apple are joined by special guest Ben Stegink for a discussion recorded live from the North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit in Branson. In this episode we focus on how organizations must adapt their change management approaches for the Microsoft 365 cloud environment.We discuss the fundamental shift from traditional IT operations, where organizations controlled software update timing, to cloud-based services with continuous updates outside of their control. Jay and Joy emphasize that successful modern IT requires cross-functional teams where IT partners closely with business units, communications, and training departments rather than operating in isolation. We then talk about the need for a shift in governance models to empower business users while requiring IT to balance user control with necessary oversight.Key themes include the importance of ongoing communication and adoption strategies, using tools like Viva Engage communities for peer-to-peer support, and adopting a "yes, and" approach to business requests rather than defaulting to "no." The episode emphasizes treating technology deployment as an ongoing service relationship rather than a one-time project, which is essential for success in the rapidly evolving cloud environment.
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Show Notes
Joy Apple
Joy is a Microsoft MVP and Director of Success and Enablement at Orchestry. With years of experience as an information technologist, I’m dedicated to helping organizations implement technology with a purpose-driven, “human-first” approach, ensuring tools like Microsoft 365 empower people to do their best work.
Teaching and knowledge-sharing are at the heart of what I do. Whether it’s through volunteering in the Microsoft Community, speaking at events, or writing as the “Joy of SharePoint,” I’m passionate about helping others unlock their potential with modern workplace solutions.
Im also a cohost of the Guardians of M365 Governance podcast, where I explore the challenges and rewards of governance, and a columnist for She is Tulsa, a quarterly magazine celebrating impactful stories from my local community.
Outside of work, you’ll often find me enjoying live music or discovering new spots in Tulsa, Oklahoma, combining my love of connection and creativity wherever I go.
Jay Leask
Jay is a Principal Technical Architect at the Washington DC Microsoft Innovation Hub specializing in Modern Work. Jay facilitates discussions on modern IT practices, using 20 years of IT experience to engage customers in solutions design with a focus on increased the value and decreased risk within collaboration investments. His focus over the last 15 years has been on public sector organizations including state, local, and Federal government, as well as education institutions.
Links
Joy Apple on LinkedIn
Connect with Jay
Microsoft 365 Change Guide
Stay on top of changes in Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 Roadmap
About the sponsors
Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
Welcome to episode 410 of the Microsoft Cloud
IT Pro podcast recorded live on 09/08/2025.
This is a show about Microsoft '3 60
'5 and Azure from the perspective of IT
pros and end users, where we discuss the
topic or recent news and how it relates
to you. In this episode, I somehow lose
complete control
as I become the guest of our podcast
(00:25):
and Joy and Jay become the hosts. The
three of us discuss the changing role of
IT within Microsoft March
and how IT should be thinking about change
management
as the shift from on premises to cloud
continues across many organizations.
Welcome to the MSIT Pro podcast
with Jay Leesk and Joy Apple and our
(00:47):
special guest. Ben Stutching. Ben, thank you so
much. If people wanna see what The behind
the scenes. Behind the scenes of this disaster,
they can. Yeah. But, anyways, Jay, you and
I did a session this week on zero
trust.
Right. So for those of you wondering where
why we're in Branson, we're at the North
American Cloud and Collaboration Summit, formerly known as
(01:07):
the North American Collaboration Summit, which I guess
Mark said something about this being its sixteenth
year Yes. Which is wild. It is. When
it launched, it was SharePoint Alooza.
Oh, that's right. I remember
that. I Yeah. SharePoint Alooza. New? No. It
was I do remember the m three six
five days. Wow. So it was a SharePoint
collaboration What? It's 2025.
(01:28):
SharePoint
well, it was b pause then, not Office
March.
Right. Was what? Probably, like, twelve or thirteen
years ago? Yeah. So it was three. This
was yeah. SharePoint, Luca was like March.
Other people's servers. Well, there were clouds. They
just didn't have anything to do with it
now. Was a cloud.
They were cumulus, not in this. I mean,
you never know. Yeah. So we're in Branson.
(01:49):
We did We did as you asked me,
and allowed me to actually answer the question.
Yes. Joanne and I both did a session
today. Yeah. I've got I've got another session
tomorrow. What's your session today? Today was
people ask me this. I never remember the
titles to my own sessions. What was it
about? What was it about? It was about
seven tips to being, like, a Microsoft three
sixty five admin. If you're an admin, if
you're managing Microsoft three sixty five, what are
(02:11):
seven things you should be thinking about paying
attention to? Just seven. Just seven. 12. But
they were like did you come up with
seven? How did I come up with seven?
As opposed to five or 12. Copilot. You
said Copilot. What number should I use? And
it says Because I can't cover 12. I
can talk fast, but I can't cover 12
in an hour. That's five minutes of topic
if you take out the introduction to any
questions. That's exactly five minutes of topic. And
(02:31):
people likes I've heard people like the number
seven. Yep. If you end prices with seven,
people are more likely to buy at I
heard the nine. Nine's a four Seven tips.
It is. Do you allow curse words on
your program? Not usually.
We might have to make an exception for
Jay.
This one episode, you might rate it r.
For Jay. Yes.
(02:51):
What was your session about today? Yeah. Co
pilot readiness for the real world. I would
know that if I stayed in the session.
I was only there for three days. I
know. He bailed. Wow. My wife called. He
did. Priorities. Right? And she did tell me
I should go listen, and then I pointed
out that your room was full. It's not
like you didn't have an office. Heard that.
You had, like, standing room only. Congratulations.
Thank you. Jo had 40 people in her
room. Wow. Not including her husband and I.
(03:13):
Her husband, who I think we've broken, by
the way. I looked at her earlier. You
just said her husband doesn't count? In the
40 in the 40 people. Okay. I mean,
he counts. He counts. In fact, he's the
one who told me it was 40, so
he counted four counted. He's a counter. Yes.
Yeah. But it was a ridiculous an accountant.
That's a different thing. That is a different
thing. Yeah. Yeah. They count the business. That's
right. They people. They are being counters. Okay.
(03:35):
I don't know if they count, but they
are being Are we is this really your
podcast? Is that satisfied with me? Sack on
topic. I don't know. People may listen to
this and be like, Jay and Joy are
way better than Scott.
Or they may be like, did they make
Ben take drugs before this record?
Or
please get the Scott back. Don't go to
(03:56):
brands whenever he can with Jay and Joy.
Okay. So anyways, we talked about zero trust.
And then afterwards, we were like, we should
do a podcast. Yes. Joy wasn't there at
the time. But one of the things it
comes out from administration. I don't know how
we got on the topic. It was maybe
just topics we could talk about was and
it's a topic I've been dealing with a
client, is change management Yeah. And how that
(04:16):
changes
with Microsoft March.
Yeah. And then Exactly. You were like, oh,
we need to get Joy too because because
Joy and I present on this. So since
we I told you I speak about change
management a lot, and you asked, what is
that? And I said, well, actually, what you
specifically said was, I the challenge that you're
seeing with your customers
is, like, how do they handle
(04:37):
the pace of change in the platform The
change and change management. When it right changes.
Right.
And because in the cloud, right, you don't
control when things release. We used to we
had companies that would be like, I'm skipping
SharePoint 02/2003,
and I'll wait till 2007
comes out, or I'm skipping 02/2010.
No one said that. I'm skipping 02/2013.
(04:59):
Yes. Everyone said that. And I'm waiting for
'16 to come out. Yes. And there was
you had the choice,
and you don't anymore. And so the question
you asked was how do you help customers
talk through
the fact that they don't have that control
link? And that's when I realized, I'm like,
look, I can talk about change management. But
Joy and I actually have a session that
we present on, and we had a workshop
on a couple years back Mhmm. About
(05:20):
how
it's almost an IT as a service model.
Mhmm. I know ITaaS is like an officially
branded thing. And whether or not that's exactly
what I'm saying, it's this idea that you
can't just deploy SharePoint and then deploy the
next version of this and then deploy. Like,
you have to partner with the business. You
have to be part of the business. You
think about how organizations run now, HR departments
(05:42):
have an HR business partner, and they don't
just roll out the insurance program every year
and walk away. They actually have someone you
work with throughout the year that understands your
part of the business. And that's really that's
how you get around this.
Business. And that's really that's how you get
around this because
the one man
IT shops,
which I get that they exist and I
feel terrible for the person who is the
(06:03):
m three sixty five person, but, like, they
can't keep up. Right. To be Yeah. Please.
To be fair, even those orgs that have
a very robust
IT team is still a struggle to keep
up, and it's very hard, typically, not always,
to have the personas on that IT team
that's, yes. Let me go partner with the
business. Yeah. Yes. Let me be the agent
(06:25):
that's going forward to help implement this change
to prepare them to communicate.
Hopefully, I mean, if you're really blessed, you've
got a training arm somewhere Right. That's gonna
help partner between IT and the business to
roll out training? Are we socializing
on newsletters,
on the Internet?
What's going on? We as
IT pros are not always the people to
(06:47):
do those things Right. Regardless of the size
of our team. So I think that's something
too. Change
management has got to have partners in various
areas of the business.
IT can say, oh, this is the channel
we're gonna be on with Microsoft. Right? Is
it No. Is the pipeline open or not?
And we can do things like that. But
when is it time to do a pilot
(07:09):
of,
I don't know, loop workspaces? Or I'm gonna
say it. I'm gonna say it. What? Copilot.
Shut up.
There is cursing. We need There is drugs.
There is alcohol on your own. Things. This
whole punch is just going down there. This
is in three six five unhinged right now.
But who's gonna go and say, hey. Finance.
(07:30):
Yeah. When's a good time? Because like you
were saying, how are they dealing with the
rate of change, the pace of change? And
there's some departments that have certain seasons, certain
times when it's like, it can't be now.
We gotta do closeout for the year end.
Right. Yeah. Can't be now or what have
you. Right. And some of the things like
this is what I've been struggling with. Maybe
not struggling with. One of the challenges I've
seen with one of the companies I'm working
(07:51):
with, they're they've been traditionally on prem. Right?
They're Exchange server. They have their SharePoint server.
Yep. They have their active directory identity team,
and they're migrating everything to the cloud. They
just finished email. They're doing Skype. That was
a round of applause. Yes. Skype on prem
with the Teams. They're doing personal drives to
OneDrive. Yeah. Down the road is gonna be
(08:12):
department chairs to SharePoint, all of this. Yeah.
But they're very much network. IT is well,
we're the project team. We just do the
migration, and then we hand it off to
the other teams, and
they have, like, their I mean, very traditional
change management. We have our cap meetings Yep.
And our forms that we fill out. And
those go in on Tuesday, and we make
our changes on Thursday. But then I'll be
(08:32):
on with them and I'm like, that button
moved or this option changed or this and
this. They're like, well, so what do we
do about our end users where we don't
to your point, we can set channels and
we can set Right. Update schedules, but there
are things that go in not necessarily on
a schedule or it's we're gonna start here.
(08:52):
Yep. But over the next three months, it'll
hit your tenant
sometime. And they actually ask me. They're like,
so how can we control when that hits
our tenants? I'm like Oh, no. Don't migrate
to the cloud. But I love the fact
And then how do you go in and
start addressing that? How do you talk how
do you move companies from traditional change management
to not can we modernize? How do you
(09:13):
modernize change management? The appetite for it. I
mean, that's definitely gonna be a cultural shift
in thinking and how they approach things. The
fact that they ask the question Yeah. It's
a good start. That's a really that they're
actually thinking about that. Whoever you are, well
done.
Because
not every company asks that question. Say, how
can we make sure our users are prepared
for this? Part of it is,
(09:34):
Jay, this is kinda like what we do
our workshop. So the one we had, we
used to call it how to win friends
in the business and solve problems. Yes. Part
of it is ensuring that there is a
good relationship
between the business and IT. Yep. So that
they're comfortable. Both sides in that relationship are
comfortable coming together and say, okay. Things are
about very different. Yeah. And we are here
(09:56):
for you. This is how we're gonna this
is how we're gonna reach out to you.
This is how we're gonna prepare you as
best we can. But Microsoft
controls the clicking of that button. Yep. Having
and I'm not talking about help desk tickets.
This could be super uncomfortable for them, but
we're not talking about, hey. The button's different.
Put in a ticket.
As soon as someone notices, maybe they have
(10:16):
there it is, maybe they have a community,
like a Veeva engaged community where someone could
see something, say something Yep. And go, hey.
I just saw this. Check it out. Here's
a picture, and all kinds of stuff like
that. Yep. Or ways to help gently
Yeah. Repair. The primary key, and maybe you're
sensing this theme as we're talking about it,
is it is no longer just IT's responsibility
(10:40):
to own the technology.
It is, first of all, a group responsibility.
Like, IT is in charge of configuring the
technology. They're in charge of making sure they're
picking the right technology. They're in charge of
deciding who gets to use the technology. But
most
medium to large sized organizations, you have a
communications team. They have spent money
(11:03):
deciding and studying
and analyzing
and executing on the best ways to communicate
to people. IT should own the communication. IT
should own what we need to get. Communication
should own Yeah. How do we communicate.
Learning should own what mechanism should we have
for deploying it. And I go back to
what we said earlier, which is, okay. You're
an IT shop of wonder. You're a company
of 20 people. Like, these don't all exist,
(11:25):
but these are the roles
that someone has to take on. And so
what you're trying to decide, well, how many
staff do I need for this program? You
need to look at these different roles and
say, okay, Who do I have that can
analyze
the, communications from Microsoft about what changes are
coming out to my tenant? Mhmm. And what
are the tools that exist for that? And
that's a big area. Like, most of your
(11:47):
IT admins of one can't keep up with
that stuff. So Right. I I you build
a PowerApp to look for certain types of
changes. You build notification systems. You the community
is a great way of getting this information
out there. And for people that, like you
said, I I noticed this change happen. And
then, yeah, now you've got the community talking
to themselves. I was in on, Sarah Haas'
(12:10):
session this morning on SharePoint and intranets in
Veeva. She said her
bank uses Veeva,
connection Veeva Engage. Okay. I just totally did
what she did. I blanked on which one
was which. Her bank uses Veeva Engage, and
she said if they push something out to
the and they use SharePoint and they use
connections. If they push something out to Veeva
(12:32):
connections, they can get it in front of
58,000 sets of eyes in one day. Like,
that's insane. Are they using Amplify for that?
They're using Amplify for that. Yep. So all
of these combined things together, like, this suite
is relevant.
But, yeah, it's hard to get to a
point where, like, you can take the step,
but you have to Right. Ultimately, the question
(12:52):
that you asked is, how do we start
to manage the incredible rate of change that
we're gonna see, and how do we help
users understand it? The answer becomes
you use the tools that are available to
you and you build a team that actually
dedicates time to it because you can't do
it otherwise. Yeah. And I would say that
a cross functional team. Yeah. Yes. And that's
(13:12):
one thing I saw, like, to your point
about the communication. This particular client, they did
a great job, but they had a communications
team. Okay.
As they were deploying everything, there was a
person on the communications team assigned to it.
I don't know. She sent out, like, 50
or 60 emails Mhmm. Over the course of
it, alerting different users.
Talk about h drive to OneDrive. Right. This
(13:33):
is the time period you're gonna get migrated.
This is the time you're gonna get migrated.
Helping them prepare. Expectations matter. What I don't
know like, they have the whole project team.
I think the other important part is once
it's done,
continuing that. Yeah. What? Right. She was assigned
to join the project. Yep. But now it's
okay. This is not We're the stakeholders in
(13:53):
each of those business areas. Keep this going
forward. So that gets to the other part
of the conversation we always had in our
win friends conversation, which was
it's rolling out the cloud
is not a one and done thing. It
is I get it. You're gonna have a
product, a project team
that is dedicated to, like, high priority execution,
(14:14):
and you don't want them to stick with
something for five years. But you have to
have a team that is in charge of
over five years and beyond Yeah.
Managing expectations
and evaluating the new capabilities that are coming
out and communicating out those changes.
(14:34):
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Continuing communication after the project. Ship it and
forget it. You've got to teach it because
you give them the tool. You give them
(15:44):
the SharePoint. You give them the OneDrive. You
give them the Teams. Yeah. And, yes, there
has to be that support throughout that adoption
uptick rate. How do you use it? Mhmm.
What are your use cases in your business
area as compared to all the other business
areas? Right. What's the same? What's different? Get
them going there. The more people use things,
the more questions they will have Yep. The
(16:05):
more ideas they will have, which contrary to
some IT people that I have worked with
in the past, that's a good thing. It's
a good thing. That. Wow. Right? When your
users ask questions and want things. Yes. If
you can see the face on this podcast
We are recording video. We'll see if we
ever that ever sees the light of day.
Yeah. It is. And the other thing about
that is if you want them to actually
(16:26):
understand the change, you have to make it
about them, which means you have to understand
what they're trying to achieve, which brings me
back to the entire conversation, which is you
have to partner with the business. Yeah. And
I think that's a challenge. I think if
we were gonna talk about one of the
biggest
mindset shifts Yeah. For IT
in a cloud world and modernizing
(16:48):
some of that change management
is the need for IT to partner
much closer with the business. And I think
this is something you brought up when we
were talking about, hey. Here's stuff we could
talk about on the podcast. Right. Traditional IT,
you were just there. You stood up servers.
You patched servers.
You didn't have to talk to
the business as much. You were just kind
(17:08):
of there, and that's even the traditional IT
person. Right? They're, like Yeah. Hide in their
little cubby. They don't wanna talk to people.
They don't wanna interact with people. They want
the lights off. Right. I do like all
of those things. By the way. It's fair.
It is fair because
none of that I can disagree with. And
Right. There are times when I don't wanna
talk to people anymore. But I think it
becomes more and more of a need for
(17:29):
IT to be able to talk to Yes.
People that aren't IT. Right. Because you want
it to be successful. You have you've paid
for the licensing. You've paid for the infrastructure.
You have committed time, efforts, resources for this
project. Yep. So then we don't support it.
We don't follow it up, and we've let
it fail. We then we go by box
(17:49):
because we didn't take time to teach people
how to use OneDrive. Right? That makes no
sense.
It absolutely makes no sense.
So, yeah, 100%.
Doing these things, it's a continuation
of the next phase of the project, and
it's how it becomes successful. And I would
say too sorry. I know that you Please.
One of the things we have to remember,
(18:11):
we contend in IT to have a little
bit of the little g god complex. We
know what the tech does. We know how
to use it. We know what it's for.
We set it up. We do all these
things. But that doesn't mean we understand how
operations,
how contracts,
how security,
how finance, how human resources need to use
it day by day. Yep. They're experts in
their fields. We're experts in ours. That has
(18:33):
to come together. Which I appreciate
how Microsoft has pushed the technology
to enable
the people who are experts about their business
to own that part of the business. Right?
If you think about how Teams governance works,
right, they took the SharePoint site admin and
really destroyed the concept.
And instead, you have Teams owners. And who
(18:55):
is the team owner? The person who created
the group. Who is the likely person to
have created the group? The person from the
business who needed the group. They know that
thing. And while I don't necessarily agree completely
with they should be the technical admin, the
fact that gives them the right to say
who should be a member and who should
not is important. Like, I no longer have
(19:16):
to call Ben from IT
to get someone added to or removed from
my SharePoint side. I can just do it
myself. And if you look at the way
the third party tools have done governance, it's
putting that in the hands of that business
owner. And
so Joy's absolutely right. Like, the business owner
knows the business. They know how to do
their business. If you want to technologically
support them, you bring that vacuum cleaner right
(19:38):
into the room while we're oh, they turned
it off at the point.
Then you have to really partner with the
business to Yeah. To communicate to them how
does this work in their line. So that's
I mean Yeah. And I think
that's a mindset
shift for IT too to be able to
let go of that. Yes. Like, me, especially
(19:59):
coming more from the admin side of it,
the security side of it, I like to
be in control. I like to know who's
getting into the site,
who who are we giving access. And a
lot of companies in the past do need
access to a file share. Right. Yep. It's
not the business that does it. They open
a ticket with IT. Right. IT goes and
adds them to the appropriate security groups, then
they get their GPOs deployed, then they get
(20:20):
drives mapped, or they now start seeing the
file shares show up. Yep. So part of
that whole thing is I think there's a
couple of conversations. There's one, how do you
help IT
let go of that and say, no. It's
okay for somebody else to manage security of
this team. There's obviously training them how to
do that. Sure. Yes. I think the other
(20:40):
aspect of it that you run into is
some companies still have certain security regulatory, all
of that. Absolutely. How do you make sure
you're still auditing some of that Yes. To
make sure that these owners aren't misbehaving Yeah.
In Teams and people are not getting access
to stuff they shouldn't as a part of
all of this. Again, it's changed, man. It's
changing production, changing security. It's still part of
(21:02):
that organization. Think about the difference from managing
on prem Azure Active Directory
to moving to the cloud with intra, intra
Azure, however you call it these days. Purview,
sensitivity labels, DLP, all that stuff. That's a
big shift too just for those people in
IT. So,
hopefully, we have good security minded organizations out
(21:23):
there that are supporting that training for their
security people on the IT team because that's
a huge shift. Yeah. Huge.
But either of you guys ever been the
SharePoint army of one against the business or
that admin role. Right? I Thankfully, no. I
can remember getting calls, and it would be
Bill from business development.
(21:43):
Sorry. I've been wanting to say that. Like,
it's like the third time I've wanted to
say it from State Farm. Jane. I almost
had a bang from State Farm earlier.
Not wearing a red shirt, but okay.
But it's yeah. I need access to my
site. Okay.
Who are you, and what's your site? And
under what authority? Right. I don't know who
(22:03):
you are,
but yet at that point in time, this
is back in the lost days, I was
the one granting access because we hadn't trained
it. We were in a very sensitive area
industry at the time, so in the government.
So untrained people couldn't manage their SharePoint sites,
and there'd been no training.
Yeah. And in the okay. So I'm coming
at all of this from a very idealistic
(22:24):
perspective. I totally get that. Yeah. But if
you work in an industry that's highly regulated,
that has highly sensitive information, guess what? The
cost of doing business means spending more money
to protect that, which means, hey. Maybe the
native tooling doesn't fit your need, and maybe
you need to bring in a third party.
There are plenty of them out there that
can help to automate that governance, that can
(22:45):
help to automate the auditing beyond what the
native capabilities can do. Yes. I'm the Microsoft
guy in the conversation saying, look at a
third party tool because
they exist for a reason. That's true. There's
third party tools that do governance, Joy. There
absolutely
are. There I mean, I've heard of this
little one called Orchestry that is actually pretty
amazing, but we can talk about that. I'll
(23:07):
let you put a little plug in for
your I appreciate it.
Well, it's something and I think we all
know this. And so even at Orchestrey, we
do webinars. We try to do them useful
for everybody. Mhmm. You could
absolutely invest in training your people, digging into
Power Platform, Power Automate, PowerShell.
Figure out what you can do with the
tools you already are paying for
(23:29):
and the human resources you already have at
your organization.
Decide, is that where you wanna invest,
or do you need those people to be
doing something else? And it makes more sense
to invest the dollars
in that third party product? Yep. I think
we know even if we've never internalized it,
because I used to be very anti third
party tool. If certain areas of governance are
(23:50):
not automated, it's just a wish list. Yeah.
If you If all areas of governance aren't
automated in some trying to be generous.
I'm trying to be like, because I'll be
the Microsoft guy and say it. Who has
tried to
enforce a naming convention policy without any kind
of automation? It works for a day? Yep.
Yep. There there has to be, oh, yeah.
Sure. We don't need policies. Just when we
(24:12):
stop using our site, we'll go ahead and
archive it. Oh, yeah. That's what happens. Sure
you will
as IT writes another check to Microsoft for
more storage.
That was rude. I know. It was unnecessary.
So so, yeah, it's there it's complicated.
Like, that's the thing.
It is it is not when we used
(24:33):
to say SharePoint was complicated, like a SharePoint
stand up or a SharePoint migration is complicated,
like, sure. But it ends, and you're done,
and you move on to the next thing.
And that's not a It's not realistic. I
have a new phrase, a new saying for
that now. Is it Instead send Microsoft more
money again? Not yet. Okay. We'll get there.
No. It's send consultants more money. Yeah. Do
it their time.
(24:53):
Oh, god.
But it's like that it's much like an
onion. It's layered Mhmm. And sometimes makes you
cry.
Genius. Where's the lie? Yeah. No. Tell me
where's the lie. Valid.
That that could be like the podcast title.
It could make it sometimes it makes you
cry. Sometimes it makes you cry. Sometimes it
makes you cry. Like, ten minutes of will
(25:14):
make people cry. So Well, it might. It
may be some creative editing. I don't know.
But, no, it's it is complicated, but I
was in Atlanta at TechCon three six five
a couple of weeks ago, and I did
the solo version of mine and Jay's session
of winning friends in the business. And there's
a phrase, I say we probably said it
too when we were doing it as a
workshop over and over again. The way you
(25:36):
implement this kind of change, the way you
build or perhaps rebuild that business IT relationship,
the way you implement continuous improvement, it's just
like how you eat an elephant. It's one
bite at a time. Have you ever heard
that phrase? I'm just saying. Like One bite
at a time. Who ate an elephant? Because
someone must've taken up with that phrase. Right?
(25:56):
One bite at right? And that's you've had
these guys. Why am I here? Why did
I sign up for this?
You were terrible. Yes. But,
is it what are your priorities? And your
priorities might be be different than the business
down the road. Right? But if you can
at least say, these are our top, I
don't know, you you did seven topics in
your thing. What are your top seven things
(26:18):
that you know you need to do to
be successful?
How are we gonna approach those things? And
break them down into
stretch, simple,
steps. Steps consumable. Bite at a time steps
and start knocking those down. I was description
that you're gonna say the seven layers of
an onion and you're gonna run it with
the there. Layer of onion. Seven layers dip.
(26:39):
Oh, boy.
Seven's coming up a lot here. Okay. Well,
listen. I only have five. So we have
the set we've talked about seven a lot,
but I have five things that I think
cover the majority of the topics. We talked
about three of them in-depth. We talked about,
let's say group ownership. And by group ownership,
I'm talking about, like, change management is not
just IT. It's not just legal. It's not
just communications and training. It's all of them
(27:01):
working together. And then we talked about,
that you're partnering with the business, which leads
to the fact that this is an ongoing
engagement. So those are, like, the three big
buckets that we've talked about so far. The
other two things that we haven't really talked
about so far are the fact that you
you have to say yes. That is a
Richard Harbridge said it during our one of
(27:22):
our work at workshops in, Dallas. And he
pointed out, like, if you can't say no
all the time, you have to lead yes.
Now can we implement the massive change they
just asked me to implement? Like, a VIT
person in me wants to be like, no.
We can't do that. But the answer is,
ultimately, yeah, we can do that. Here's the
(27:42):
bill. Like, here's the Yes. Twelve month timeline
it's gonna take. Right? So it's a yes
and so you have to lead with yes
if you want business to actually pay attention
when you communicate. Yeah. And I think that's
a huge thing that we miss. I remember
in that workshop, the reason Richard even spoke
up was the there was the, the help
desk of one, and they're like, I keep
having to say no to people, and so
(28:03):
they just go buy their own software. I
was just gonna say that. Like, that no,
as soon as you say that, they're like,
well, I need to. If you're not gonna
They have to do their job. Right. I'm
gonna go buy something else. I might go
use a third party. Yep. We end up
with Yep. Shadow IT because 100%. We said
no instead of saying, yeah. We can do
that. Let's sit down with the business. Let's
(28:24):
figure it out. Let's figure out how to
roll this out, how to implement this, how
to do it Yeah. Yeah. Within the guidelines
and the boundaries of our business,
and it leads to a more secure,
better functioning. And well, in her example, they
were wanting to put, like, drastically customize classic
SharePoint sites. Yeah. She's like, nope. Whereas,
yeah, you can do that. This is how
(28:45):
much it costs, and this is the expertise
that needs to be on hand. And this
is the process for when Microsoft changes something
and it breaks. And
and so, yeah, we could. If you're willing
to take this risk and pay us this
much money, what's your cost center's charge code?
Yeah. And, eventually,
you lead the business to understand in making
their own decision of Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's
(29:05):
not the best idea. Like, maybe I don't
need the submit button to be paid, which
I understand now is a seven month process
and will break the next time SharePoint changes
anything. Yep. So that is a big thing
is the yes and because that that establishes
trust and empathy, which is important if you're
dealing with the conversation we're dealing with. It's
a relationship. The other part of that and
(29:26):
what works towards the saying yes is you
have to have a feedback. So Joy actually
talked about the communities.
Like, communities are a great way to build
feedback.
But simply having a ticketing system ticketing systems
are what you need directional.
I know
that you can go back to the ticket
and you can put a comment in, and
then they get that comment back, but that's
(29:47):
not a conversation.
Right. That's simply yeah. I read that, and
it's stupid. That's not helpful.
And sometimes, like, the question I have, I
don't think it needs a ticket. I just
wanna ask a question. Yes. Or I want
someone to guide me on something. And help
desks are not big scary things, but, like,
they have a connotation to them. They're very
transactional.
(30:08):
Yeah. They're not a contact feel like the
help desk very much has a process.
Like, this is we have to follow these
steps. Yep. It's not a free flowing
Right. Forum for
discussing a question. Who is trained? Forum for
you broke it. You had four f's in
a row. Free flowing Forum.
From four
(30:28):
Feedback.
Joy came up with a much better Joy
was asking for Alice. I'm staying on target.
Staying on target. Someone has to.
That's why we put her in the middle
to keep us going. Yes. Yeah. Yes. But
pop quiz. Has the help desk been trained
on the technology they're supporting? Probably I mean,
(30:50):
they have materials that tell them how to
do things. Learn.microsoft.com?
No. Someone sent them the link to the
learn article. Right? I mean,
it's not Yes. So if I need to
ask a theoretical question about the best way
to do something, it's not fair to put
that help desk tech in that position. Yep.
They're not equipped for it. And then everybody
else in the back of ITs are going,
not it. Yep. Yeah. So got it. It's
(31:12):
So that feedback loop, it needs to be
multimodal.
Right? Mhmm. Obviously, we're not telling you to
get rid of your help desk technical system.
But adding a community if you can, whether
that's in Teams or in Viva Engage or
some other mechanism, just giving people the ability
to share with each other and ask questions
is huge.
(31:33):
Another thing you can do is, especially in
today's day and age, create a help desk
bot.
What?
An agent source. Use the technology. Right? Like,
it's so easy to create an agent right
now and give it a knowledge source. And
then if you do it in something like
Copilot Studio, you can actually add a trigger
so that or an action is the technical
(31:54):
term. So that when someone says this isn't
answering my question, please open a ticket, it
can actually open the ticket for you. So
using the technology that is available to you
to not just increase your capability, but decrease
the amount of stuff you're dealing with that
you shouldn't with becomes part of that feedback
mechanism. Like, go to the bot, ask your
(32:15):
questions, say thanks. That was helpful. Hey. You
should note that an employee said that was
helpful. You should have something in the back
end tracking that interaction. And so all of
that, I think, becomes part of, of heightened
people. Oh, yeah. I agree. 100%. Yeah. Alright.
Goodbye.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a five star rating in iTunes. It helps
(32:37):
to get the word out so more IT
pros can learn about Office three sixty five
and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show, feel free to reach out via
our website, Twitter, or Facebook.
Thanks again for listening, and have a great
day.
Welcome to episode 410 of the Microsoft Cloud
IT Pro podcast recorded live on 09/08/2025.
This is a show about Microsoft '3 60
'5 and Azure from the perspective of IT
pros and end users, where we discuss the
topic or recent news and how it relates
to you. In this episode, I somehow lose
complete control
as I become the guest of our podcast
(00:25):
and Joy and Jay become the hosts. The
three of us discuss the changing role of
IT within Microsoft March
and how IT should be thinking about change
management
as the shift from on premises to cloud
continues across many organizations.
Welcome to the MSIT Pro podcast
with Jay Leesk and Joy Apple and our
(00:47):
special guest. Ben Stutching. Ben, thank you so
much. If people wanna see what The behind
the scenes. Behind the scenes of this disaster,
they can. Yeah. But, anyways, Jay, you and
I did a session this week on zero
trust.
Right. So for those of you wondering where
why we're in Branson, we're at the North
American Cloud and Collaboration Summit, formerly known as
(01:07):
the North American Collaboration Summit, which I guess
Mark said something about this being its sixteenth
year Yes. Which is wild. It is. When
it launched, it was SharePoint Alooza.
Oh, that's right. I remember
that. I Yeah. SharePoint Alooza. New? No. It
was I do remember the m three six
five days. Wow. So it was a SharePoint
collaboration What? It's 2025.
(01:28):
SharePoint
well, it was b pause then, not Office
March.
Right. Was what? Probably, like, twelve or thirteen
years ago? Yeah. So it was three. This
was yeah. SharePoint, Luca was like March.
Other people's servers. Well, there were clouds. They
just didn't have anything to do with it
now. Was a cloud.
They were cumulus, not in this. I mean,
you never know. Yeah. So we're in Branson.
(01:49):
We did We did as you asked me,
and allowed me to actually answer the question.
Yes. Joanne and I both did a session
today. Yeah. I've got I've got another session
tomorrow. What's your session today? Today was
people ask me this. I never remember the
titles to my own sessions. What was it
about? What was it about? It was about
seven tips to being, like, a Microsoft three
sixty five admin. If you're an admin, if
you're managing Microsoft three sixty five, what are
(02:11):
seven things you should be thinking about paying
attention to? Just seven. Just seven. 12. But
they were like did you come up with
seven? How did I come up with seven?
As opposed to five or 12. Copilot. You
said Copilot. What number should I use? And
it says Because I can't cover 12. I
can talk fast, but I can't cover 12
in an hour. That's five minutes of topic
if you take out the introduction to any
questions. That's exactly five minutes of topic. And
(02:31):
people likes I've heard people like the number
seven. Yep. If you end prices with seven,
people are more likely to buy at I
heard the nine. Nine's a four Seven tips.
It is. Do you allow curse words on
your program? Not usually.
We might have to make an exception for
Jay.
This one episode, you might rate it r.
For Jay. Yes.
(02:51):
What was your session about today? Yeah. Co
pilot readiness for the real world. I would
know that if I stayed in the session.
I was only there for three days. I
know. He bailed. Wow. My wife called. He
did. Priorities. Right? And she did tell me
I should go listen, and then I pointed
out that your room was full. It's not
like you didn't have an office. Heard that.
You had, like, standing room only. Congratulations.
Thank you. Jo had 40 people in her
room. Wow. Not including her husband and I.
(03:13):
Her husband, who I think we've broken, by
the way. I looked at her earlier. You
just said her husband doesn't count? In the
40 in the 40 people. Okay. I mean,
he counts. He counts. In fact, he's the
one who told me it was 40, so
he counted four counted. He's a counter. Yes.
Yeah. But it was a ridiculous an accountant.
That's a different thing. That is a different
thing. Yeah. Yeah. They count the business. That's
right. They people. They are being counters. Okay.
(03:35):
I don't know if they count, but they
are being Are we is this really your
podcast? Is that satisfied with me? Sack on
topic. I don't know. People may listen to
this and be like, Jay and Joy are
way better than Scott.
Or they may be like, did they make
Ben take drugs before this record?
Or
please get the Scott back. Don't go to
(03:56):
brands whenever he can with Jay and Joy.
Okay. So anyways, we talked about zero trust.
And then afterwards, we were like, we should
do a podcast. Yes. Joy wasn't there at
the time. But one of the things it
comes out from administration. I don't know how
we got on the topic. It was maybe
just topics we could talk about was and
it's a topic I've been dealing with a
client, is change management Yeah. And how that
(04:16):
changes
with Microsoft March.
Yeah. And then Exactly. You were like, oh,
we need to get Joy too because because
Joy and I present on this. So since
we I told you I speak about change
management a lot, and you asked, what is
that? And I said, well, actually, what you
specifically said was, I the challenge that you're
seeing with your customers
is, like, how do they handle
(04:37):
the pace of change in the platform The
change and change management. When it right changes.
Right.
And because in the cloud, right, you don't
control when things release. We used to we
had companies that would be like, I'm skipping
SharePoint 02/2003,
and I'll wait till 2007
comes out, or I'm skipping 02/2010.
No one said that. I'm skipping 02/2013.
(04:59):
Yes. Everyone said that. And I'm waiting for
'16 to come out. Yes. And there was
you had the choice,
and you don't anymore. And so the question
you asked was how do you help customers
talk through
the fact that they don't have that control
link? And that's when I realized, I'm like,
look, I can talk about change management. But
Joy and I actually have a session that
we present on, and we had a workshop
on a couple years back Mhmm. About
(05:20):
how
it's almost an IT as a service model.
Mhmm. I know ITaaS is like an officially
branded thing. And whether or not that's exactly
what I'm saying, it's this idea that you
can't just deploy SharePoint and then deploy the
next version of this and then deploy. Like,
you have to partner with the business. You
have to be part of the business. You
think about how organizations run now, HR departments
(05:42):
have an HR business partner, and they don't
just roll out the insurance program every year
and walk away. They actually have someone you
work with throughout the year that understands your
part of the business. And that's really that's
how you get around this.
Business. And that's really that's how you get
around this because
the one man
IT shops,
which I get that they exist and I
feel terrible for the person who is the
(06:03):
m three sixty five person, but, like, they
can't keep up. Right. To be Yeah. Please.
To be fair, even those orgs that have
a very robust
IT team is still a struggle to keep
up, and it's very hard, typically, not always,
to have the personas on that IT team
that's, yes. Let me go partner with the
business. Yeah. Yes. Let me be the agent
(06:25):
that's going forward to help implement this change
to prepare them to communicate.
Hopefully, I mean, if you're really blessed, you've
got a training arm somewhere Right. That's gonna
help partner between IT and the business to
roll out training? Are we socializing
on newsletters,
on the Internet?
What's going on? We as
IT pros are not always the people to
(06:47):
do those things Right. Regardless of the size
of our team. So I think that's something
too. Change
management has got to have partners in various
areas of the business.
IT can say, oh, this is the channel
we're gonna be on with Microsoft. Right? Is
it No. Is the pipeline open or not?
And we can do things like that. But
when is it time to do a pilot
(07:09):
of,
I don't know, loop workspaces? Or I'm gonna
say it. I'm gonna say it. What? Copilot.
Shut up.
There is cursing. We need There is drugs.
There is alcohol on your own. Things. This
whole punch is just going down there. This
is in three six five unhinged right now.
But who's gonna go and say, hey. Finance.
(07:30):
Yeah. When's a good time? Because like you
were saying, how are they dealing with the
rate of change, the pace of change? And
there's some departments that have certain seasons, certain
times when it's like, it can't be now.
We gotta do closeout for the year end.
Right. Yeah. Can't be now or what have
you. Right. And some of the things like
this is what I've been struggling with. Maybe
not struggling with. One of the challenges I've
seen with one of the companies I'm working
(07:51):
with, they're they've been traditionally on prem. Right?
They're Exchange server. They have their SharePoint server.
Yep. They have their active directory identity team,
and they're migrating everything to the cloud. They
just finished email. They're doing Skype. That was
a round of applause. Yes. Skype on prem
with the Teams. They're doing personal drives to
OneDrive. Yeah. Down the road is gonna be
(08:12):
department chairs to SharePoint, all of this. Yeah.
But they're very much network. IT is well,
we're the project team. We just do the
migration, and then we hand it off to
the other teams, and
they have, like, their I mean, very traditional
change management. We have our cap meetings Yep.
And our forms that we fill out. And
those go in on Tuesday, and we make
our changes on Thursday. But then I'll be
(08:32):
on with them and I'm like, that button
moved or this option changed or this and
this. They're like, well, so what do we
do about our end users where we don't
to your point, we can set channels and
we can set Right. Update schedules, but there
are things that go in not necessarily on
a schedule or it's we're gonna start here.
(08:52):
Yep. But over the next three months, it'll
hit your tenant
sometime. And they actually ask me. They're like,
so how can we control when that hits
our tenants? I'm like Oh, no. Don't migrate
to the cloud. But I love the fact
And then how do you go in and
start addressing that? How do you talk how
do you move companies from traditional change management
to not can we modernize? How do you
(09:13):
modernize change management? The appetite for it. I
mean, that's definitely gonna be a cultural shift
in thinking and how they approach things. The
fact that they ask the question Yeah. It's
a good start. That's a really that they're
actually thinking about that. Whoever you are, well
done.
Because
not every company asks that question. Say, how
can we make sure our users are prepared
for this? Part of it is,
(09:34):
Jay, this is kinda like what we do
our workshop. So the one we had, we
used to call it how to win friends
in the business and solve problems. Yes. Part
of it is ensuring that there is a
good relationship
between the business and IT. Yep. So that
they're comfortable. Both sides in that relationship are
comfortable coming together and say, okay. Things are
about very different. Yeah. And we are here
(09:56):
for you. This is how we're gonna this
is how we're gonna reach out to you.
This is how we're gonna prepare you as
best we can. But Microsoft
controls the clicking of that button. Yep. Having
and I'm not talking about help desk tickets.
This could be super uncomfortable for them, but
we're not talking about, hey. The button's different.
Put in a ticket.
As soon as someone notices, maybe they have
(10:16):
there it is, maybe they have a community,
like a Veeva engaged community where someone could
see something, say something Yep. And go, hey.
I just saw this. Check it out. Here's
a picture, and all kinds of stuff like
that. Yep. Or ways to help gently
Yeah. Repair. The primary key, and maybe you're
sensing this theme as we're talking about it,
is it is no longer just IT's responsibility
(10:40):
to own the technology.
It is, first of all, a group responsibility.
Like, IT is in charge of configuring the
technology. They're in charge of making sure they're
picking the right technology. They're in charge of
deciding who gets to use the technology. But
most
medium to large sized organizations, you have a
communications team. They have spent money
(11:03):
deciding and studying
and analyzing
and executing on the best ways to communicate
to people. IT should own the communication. IT
should own what we need to get. Communication
should own Yeah. How do we communicate.
Learning should own what mechanism should we have
for deploying it. And I go back to
what we said earlier, which is, okay. You're
an IT shop of wonder. You're a company
of 20 people. Like, these don't all exist,
(11:25):
but these are the roles
that someone has to take on. And so
what you're trying to decide, well, how many
staff do I need for this program? You
need to look at these different roles and
say, okay, Who do I have that can
analyze
the, communications from Microsoft about what changes are
coming out to my tenant? Mhmm. And what
are the tools that exist for that? And
that's a big area. Like, most of your
(11:47):
IT admins of one can't keep up with
that stuff. So Right. I I you build
a PowerApp to look for certain types of
changes. You build notification systems. You the community
is a great way of getting this information
out there. And for people that, like you
said, I I noticed this change happen. And
then, yeah, now you've got the community talking
to themselves. I was in on, Sarah Haas'
(12:10):
session this morning on SharePoint and intranets in
Veeva. She said her
bank uses Veeva,
connection Veeva Engage. Okay. I just totally did
what she did. I blanked on which one
was which. Her bank uses Veeva Engage, and
she said if they push something out to
the and they use SharePoint and they use
connections. If they push something out to Veeva
(12:32):
connections, they can get it in front of
58,000 sets of eyes in one day. Like,
that's insane. Are they using Amplify for that?
They're using Amplify for that. Yep. So all
of these combined things together, like, this suite
is relevant.
But, yeah, it's hard to get to a
point where, like, you can take the step,
but you have to Right. Ultimately, the question
(12:52):
that you asked is, how do we start
to manage the incredible rate of change that
we're gonna see, and how do we help
users understand it? The answer becomes
you use the tools that are available to
you and you build a team that actually
dedicates time to it because you can't do
it otherwise. Yeah. And I would say that
a cross functional team. Yeah. Yes. And that's
(13:12):
one thing I saw, like, to your point
about the communication. This particular client, they did
a great job, but they had a communications
team. Okay.
As they were deploying everything, there was a
person on the communications team assigned to it.
I don't know. She sent out, like, 50
or 60 emails Mhmm. Over the course of
it, alerting different users.
Talk about h drive to OneDrive. Right. This
(13:33):
is the time period you're gonna get migrated.
This is the time you're gonna get migrated.
Helping them prepare. Expectations matter. What I don't
know like, they have the whole project team.
I think the other important part is once
it's done,
continuing that. Yeah. What? Right. She was assigned
to join the project. Yep. But now it's
okay. This is not We're the stakeholders in
(13:53):
each of those business areas. Keep this going
forward. So that gets to the other part
of the conversation we always had in our
win friends conversation, which was
it's rolling out the cloud
is not a one and done thing. It
is I get it. You're gonna have a
product, a project team
that is dedicated to, like, high priority execution,
(14:14):
and you don't want them to stick with
something for five years. But you have to
have a team that is in charge of
over five years and beyond Yeah.
Managing expectations
and evaluating the new capabilities that are coming
out and communicating out those changes.
(14:34):
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Continuing communication after the project. Ship it and
forget it. You've got to teach it because
you give them the tool. You give them
(15:44):
the SharePoint. You give them the OneDrive. You
give them the Teams. Yeah. And, yes, there
has to be that support throughout that adoption
uptick rate. How do you use it? Mhmm.
What are your use cases in your business
area as compared to all the other business
areas? Right. What's the same? What's different? Get
them going there. The more people use things,
the more questions they will have Yep. The
(16:05):
more ideas they will have, which contrary to
some IT people that I have worked with
in the past, that's a good thing. It's
a good thing. That. Wow. Right? When your
users ask questions and want things. Yes. If
you can see the face on this podcast
We are recording video. We'll see if we
ever that ever sees the light of day.
Yeah. It is. And the other thing about
that is if you want them to actually
(16:26):
understand the change, you have to make it
about them, which means you have to understand
what they're trying to achieve, which brings me
back to the entire conversation, which is you
have to partner with the business. Yeah. And
I think that's a challenge. I think if
we were gonna talk about one of the
biggest
mindset shifts Yeah. For IT
in a cloud world and modernizing
(16:48):
some of that change management
is the need for IT to partner
much closer with the business. And I think
this is something you brought up when we
were talking about, hey. Here's stuff we could
talk about on the podcast. Right. Traditional IT,
you were just there. You stood up servers.
You patched servers.
You didn't have to talk to
the business as much. You were just kind
(17:08):
of there, and that's even the traditional IT
person. Right? They're, like Yeah. Hide in their
little cubby. They don't wanna talk to people.
They don't wanna interact with people. They want
the lights off. Right. I do like all
of those things. By the way. It's fair.
It is fair because
none of that I can disagree with. And
Right. There are times when I don't wanna
talk to people anymore. But I think it
becomes more and more of a need for
(17:29):
IT to be able to talk to Yes.
People that aren't IT. Right. Because you want
it to be successful. You have you've paid
for the licensing. You've paid for the infrastructure.
You have committed time, efforts, resources for this
project. Yep. So then we don't support it.
We don't follow it up, and we've let
it fail. We then we go by box
(17:49):
because we didn't take time to teach people
how to use OneDrive. Right? That makes no
sense.
It absolutely makes no sense.
So, yeah, 100%.
Doing these things, it's a continuation
of the next phase of the project, and
it's how it becomes successful. And I would
say too sorry. I know that you Please.
One of the things we have to remember,
(18:11):
we contend in IT to have a little
bit of the little g god complex. We
know what the tech does. We know how
to use it. We know what it's for.
We set it up. We do all these
things. But that doesn't mean we understand how
operations,
how contracts,
how security,
how finance, how human resources need to use
it day by day. Yep. They're experts in
their fields. We're experts in ours. That has
(18:33):
to come together. Which I appreciate
how Microsoft has pushed the technology
to enable
the people who are experts about their business
to own that part of the business. Right?
If you think about how Teams governance works,
right, they took the SharePoint site admin and
really destroyed the concept.
And instead, you have Teams owners. And who
(18:55):
is the team owner? The person who created
the group. Who is the likely person to
have created the group? The person from the
business who needed the group. They know that
thing. And while I don't necessarily agree completely
with they should be the technical admin, the
fact that gives them the right to say
who should be a member and who should
not is important. Like, I no longer have
(19:16):
to call Ben from IT
to get someone added to or removed from
my SharePoint side. I can just do it
myself. And if you look at the way
the third party tools have done governance, it's
putting that in the hands of that business
owner. And
so Joy's absolutely right. Like, the business owner
knows the business. They know how to do
their business. If you want to technologically
support them, you bring that vacuum cleaner right
(19:38):
into the room while we're oh, they turned
it off at the point.
Then you have to really partner with the
business to Yeah. To communicate to them how
does this work in their line. So that's
I mean Yeah. And I think
that's a mindset
shift for IT too to be able to
let go of that. Yes. Like, me, especially
(19:59):
coming more from the admin side of it,
the security side of it, I like to
be in control. I like to know who's
getting into the site,
who who are we giving access. And a
lot of companies in the past do need
access to a file share. Right. Yep. It's
not the business that does it. They open
a ticket with IT. Right. IT goes and
adds them to the appropriate security groups, then
they get their GPOs deployed, then they get
(20:20):
drives mapped, or they now start seeing the
file shares show up. Yep. So part of
that whole thing is I think there's a
couple of conversations. There's one, how do you
help IT
let go of that and say, no. It's
okay for somebody else to manage security of
this team. There's obviously training them how to
do that. Sure. Yes. I think the other
(20:40):
aspect of it that you run into is
some companies still have certain security regulatory, all
of that. Absolutely. How do you make sure
you're still auditing some of that Yes. To
make sure that these owners aren't misbehaving Yeah.
In Teams and people are not getting access
to stuff they shouldn't as a part of
all of this. Again, it's changed, man. It's
changing production, changing security. It's still part of
(21:02):
that organization. Think about the difference from managing
on prem Azure Active Directory
to moving to the cloud with intra, intra
Azure, however you call it these days. Purview,
sensitivity labels, DLP, all that stuff. That's a
big shift too just for those people in
IT. So,
hopefully, we have good security minded organizations out
(21:23):
there that are supporting that training for their
security people on the IT team because that's
a huge shift. Yeah. Huge.
But either of you guys ever been the
SharePoint army of one against the business or
that admin role. Right? I Thankfully, no. I
can remember getting calls, and it would be
Bill from business development.
(21:43):
Sorry. I've been wanting to say that. Like,
it's like the third time I've wanted to
say it from State Farm. Jane. I almost
had a bang from State Farm earlier.
Not wearing a red shirt, but okay.
But it's yeah. I need access to my
site. Okay.
Who are you, and what's your site? And
under what authority? Right. I don't know who
(22:03):
you are,
but yet at that point in time, this
is back in the lost days, I was
the one granting access because we hadn't trained
it. We were in a very sensitive area
industry at the time, so in the government.
So untrained people couldn't manage their SharePoint sites,
and there'd been no training.
Yeah. And in the okay. So I'm coming
at all of this from a very idealistic
(22:24):
perspective. I totally get that. Yeah. But if
you work in an industry that's highly regulated,
that has highly sensitive information, guess what? The
cost of doing business means spending more money
to protect that, which means, hey. Maybe the
native tooling doesn't fit your need, and maybe
you need to bring in a third party.
There are plenty of them out there that
can help to automate that governance, that can
(22:45):
help to automate the auditing beyond what the
native capabilities can do. Yes. I'm the Microsoft
guy in the conversation saying, look at a
third party tool because
they exist for a reason. That's true. There's
third party tools that do governance, Joy. There
absolutely
are. There I mean, I've heard of this
little one called Orchestry that is actually pretty
amazing, but we can talk about that. I'll
(23:07):
let you put a little plug in for
your I appreciate it.
Well, it's something and I think we all
know this. And so even at Orchestrey, we
do webinars. We try to do them useful
for everybody. Mhmm. You could
absolutely invest in training your people, digging into
Power Platform, Power Automate, PowerShell.
Figure out what you can do with the
tools you already are paying for
(23:29):
and the human resources you already have at
your organization.
Decide, is that where you wanna invest,
or do you need those people to be
doing something else? And it makes more sense
to invest the dollars
in that third party product? Yep. I think
we know even if we've never internalized it,
because I used to be very anti third
party tool. If certain areas of governance are
(23:50):
not automated, it's just a wish list. Yeah.
If you If all areas of governance aren't
automated in some trying to be generous.
I'm trying to be like, because I'll be
the Microsoft guy and say it. Who has
tried to
enforce a naming convention policy without any kind
of automation? It works for a day? Yep.
Yep. There there has to be, oh, yeah.
Sure. We don't need policies. Just when we
(24:12):
stop using our site, we'll go ahead and
archive it. Oh, yeah. That's what happens. Sure
you will
as IT writes another check to Microsoft for
more storage.
That was rude. I know. It was unnecessary.
So so, yeah, it's there it's complicated.
Like, that's the thing.
It is it is not when we used
(24:33):
to say SharePoint was complicated, like a SharePoint
stand up or a SharePoint migration is complicated,
like, sure. But it ends, and you're done,
and you move on to the next thing.
And that's not a It's not realistic. I
have a new phrase, a new saying for
that now. Is it Instead send Microsoft more
money again? Not yet. Okay. We'll get there.
No. It's send consultants more money. Yeah. Do
it their time.
(24:53):
Oh, god.
But it's like that it's much like an
onion. It's layered Mhmm. And sometimes makes you
cry.
Genius. Where's the lie? Yeah. No. Tell me
where's the lie. Valid.
That that could be like the podcast title.
It could make it sometimes it makes you
cry. Sometimes it makes you cry. Sometimes it
makes you cry. Like, ten minutes of will
(25:14):
make people cry. So Well, it might. It
may be some creative editing. I don't know.
But, no, it's it is complicated, but I
was in Atlanta at TechCon three six five
a couple of weeks ago, and I did
the solo version of mine and Jay's session
of winning friends in the business. And there's
a phrase, I say we probably said it
too when we were doing it as a
workshop over and over again. The way you
(25:36):
implement this kind of change, the way you
build or perhaps rebuild that business IT relationship,
the way you implement continuous improvement, it's just
like how you eat an elephant. It's one
bite at a time. Have you ever heard
that phrase? I'm just saying. Like One bite
at a time. Who ate an elephant? Because
someone must've taken up with that phrase. Right?
(25:56):
One bite at right? And that's you've had
these guys. Why am I here? Why did
I sign up for this?
You were terrible. Yes. But,
is it what are your priorities? And your
priorities might be be different than the business
down the road. Right? But if you can
at least say, these are our top, I
don't know, you you did seven topics in
your thing. What are your top seven things
(26:18):
that you know you need to do to
be successful?
How are we gonna approach those things? And
break them down into
stretch, simple,
steps. Steps consumable. Bite at a time steps
and start knocking those down. I was description
that you're gonna say the seven layers of
an onion and you're gonna run it with
the there. Layer of onion. Seven layers dip.
(26:39):
Oh, boy.
Seven's coming up a lot here. Okay. Well,
listen. I only have five. So we have
the set we've talked about seven a lot,
but I have five things that I think
cover the majority of the topics. We talked
about three of them in-depth. We talked about,
let's say group ownership. And by group ownership,
I'm talking about, like, change management is not
just IT. It's not just legal. It's not
just communications and training. It's all of them
(27:01):
working together. And then we talked about,
that you're partnering with the business, which leads
to the fact that this is an ongoing
engagement. So those are, like, the three big
buckets that we've talked about so far. The
other two things that we haven't really talked
about so far are the fact that you
you have to say yes. That is a
Richard Harbridge said it during our one of
(27:22):
our work at workshops in, Dallas. And he
pointed out, like, if you can't say no
all the time, you have to lead yes.
Now can we implement the massive change they
just asked me to implement? Like, a VIT
person in me wants to be like, no.
We can't do that. But the answer is,
ultimately, yeah, we can do that. Here's the
(27:42):
bill. Like, here's the Yes. Twelve month timeline
it's gonna take. Right? So it's a yes
and so you have to lead with yes
if you want business to actually pay attention
when you communicate. Yeah. And I think that's
a huge thing that we miss. I remember
in that workshop, the reason Richard even spoke
up was the there was the, the help
desk of one, and they're like, I keep
having to say no to people, and so
(28:03):
they just go buy their own software. I
was just gonna say that. Like, that no,
as soon as you say that, they're like,
well, I need to. If you're not gonna
They have to do their job. Right. I'm
gonna go buy something else. I might go
use a third party. Yep. We end up
with Yep. Shadow IT because 100%. We said
no instead of saying, yeah. We can do
that. Let's sit down with the business. Let's
(28:24):
figure it out. Let's figure out how to
roll this out, how to implement this, how
to do it Yeah. Yeah. Within the guidelines
and the boundaries of our business,
and it leads to a more secure,
better functioning. And well, in her example, they
were wanting to put, like, drastically customize classic
SharePoint sites. Yeah. She's like, nope. Whereas,
yeah, you can do that. This is how
(28:45):
much it costs, and this is the expertise
that needs to be on hand. And this
is the process for when Microsoft changes something
and it breaks. And
and so, yeah, we could. If you're willing
to take this risk and pay us this
much money, what's your cost center's charge code?
Yeah. And, eventually,
you lead the business to understand in making
their own decision of Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's
(29:05):
not the best idea. Like, maybe I don't
need the submit button to be paid, which
I understand now is a seven month process
and will break the next time SharePoint changes
anything. Yep. So that is a big thing
is the yes and because that that establishes
trust and empathy, which is important if you're
dealing with the conversation we're dealing with. It's
a relationship. The other part of that and
(29:26):
what works towards the saying yes is you
have to have a feedback. So Joy actually
talked about the communities.
Like, communities are a great way to build
feedback.
But simply having a ticketing system ticketing systems
are what you need directional.
I know
that you can go back to the ticket
and you can put a comment in, and
then they get that comment back, but that's
(29:47):
not a conversation.
Right. That's simply yeah. I read that, and
it's stupid. That's not helpful.
And sometimes, like, the question I have, I
don't think it needs a ticket. I just
wanna ask a question. Yes. Or I want
someone to guide me on something. And help
desks are not big scary things, but, like,
they have a connotation to them. They're very
transactional.
(30:08):
Yeah. They're not a contact feel like the
help desk very much has a process.
Like, this is we have to follow these
steps. Yep. It's not a free flowing
Right. Forum for
discussing a question. Who is trained? Forum for
you broke it. You had four f's in
a row. Free flowing Forum.
From four
(30:28):
Feedback.
Joy came up with a much better Joy
was asking for Alice. I'm staying on target.
Staying on target. Someone has to.
That's why we put her in the middle
to keep us going. Yes. Yeah. Yes. But
pop quiz. Has the help desk been trained
on the technology they're supporting? Probably I mean,
(30:50):
they have materials that tell them how to
do things. Learn.microsoft.com?
No. Someone sent them the link to the
learn article. Right? I mean,
it's not Yes. So if I need to
ask a theoretical question about the best way
to do something, it's not fair to put
that help desk tech in that position. Yep.
They're not equipped for it. And then everybody
else in the back of ITs are going,
not it. Yep. Yeah. So got it. It's
(31:12):
So that feedback loop, it needs to be
multimodal.
Right? Mhmm. Obviously, we're not telling you to
get rid of your help desk technical system.
But adding a community if you can, whether
that's in Teams or in Viva Engage or
some other mechanism, just giving people the ability
to share with each other and ask questions
is huge.
(31:33):
Another thing you can do is, especially in
today's day and age, create a help desk
bot.
What?
An agent source. Use the technology. Right? Like,
it's so easy to create an agent right
now and give it a knowledge source. And
then if you do it in something like
Copilot Studio, you can actually add a trigger
so that or an action is the technical
(31:54):
term. So that when someone says this isn't
answering my question, please open a ticket, it
can actually open the ticket for you. So
using the technology that is available to you
to not just increase your capability, but decrease
the amount of stuff you're dealing with that
you shouldn't with becomes part of that feedback
mechanism. Like, go to the bot, ask your
(32:15):
questions, say thanks. That was helpful. Hey. You
should note that an employee said that was
helpful. You should have something in the back
end tracking that interaction. And so all of
that, I think, becomes part of, of heightened
people. Oh, yeah. I agree. 100%. Yeah. Alright.
Goodbye.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a five star rating in iTunes. It helps
(32:37):
to get the word out so more IT
pros can learn about Office three sixty five
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If you have any questions you want us
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