Author: directorcia

The rule of three

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I’m a big believer in systems and doing things for a reason (because doing random things only generates random results, which ain’t good). I also like to keep things as simple as possible.

With that in mind I’d like to tell you about my ‘Rule of Three’. You may have already seen this in action in a previous blog post about designing an initial SharePoint structure for migration:

A basic SharePoint Online Framework

So where did this rule of three come from? Well, in my experience when it comes to change most people can’t handle more than three changes. In essence, they can’t juggle more than three new concepts or changes at a time in their mind.

Let’s view that in light of a migration to Office 365 from a traditional on premises file server. The first change is moving to Office 365 itself, the second change is around the fact that files are now accessed via a browser in SharePoint rather than via Windows Explorer and a mapped drive. The final change is around the structure inside a SharePoint site (i.e. where the hell are my files actually?).

Thus, most people can accommodate three changes but that is their limit. If you add a fourth then this is where the illogical occurs. At the point of mental overload (i.e. four or more changes) not only is the user unable to cope with this last change but they also abandon all the previous changes they had already accepted. That is, at the point of overload they throw their hands up in the air and say ‘this is all too hard’ and throw in the towel, abandoning all change. Like a house of cards, overload a user and their whole adoption acceptance collapses and you have to start again, but typically you are now starting with a bigger mess and face more resistance.

Thus, pushing people to the point of failure results in catastrophic failure of adoption, where they no longer accept any change. That is bad news when it comes to adoption and thus should be avoided at all costs. In many cases, after the point of overload and collapse the user becomes much more resistant to any thing that you propose that is different from what they already know.

So, when you are making changes in people’s lives, especially when it comes to how they use technology in their job, remember my rule of three and don’t overload them. Also keep in mind this article I wrote a while back:

Stop making your users feel stupid

because making them feel stupid is the fastest way to tip them into catastrophic failure and create a rod for your own back.

Keep it simple to start with but don’t give them any more than three things to juggle at a time. As they become comfortable with one thing add another but limit the balls they have in air to no more than three. A lot of small changes in rapid succession are much more likely to succeed than massive jumps.

A great tip to remember

Here’s a great a lesson about accepting work from one of the people I follow, photographer Chase Jarvis.

In essence the lesson is that you’ll never take a $500 dollar client to being a $50,000 client. Why? Because when they have the $50,000 budget they’ll go to the person they could get for $500.

If you also decide to take the $500 offered where you normally charge say $5,000 you are immediately devaluing yourself and your services which is basically a road to ruin.

Again, great short video with plenty of lessons for all. Well worth your time.

You’ll find my thoughts on these topic as it applies to cloud business along with technical information on Office 365 and Azure in my free online training course:

lecture-series

CIAOPS Academy – Cloud Lecture Series

Azure Introduction presentation

https://docs.com/d/embed/D25191341-6377-2372-8840-001349283069%7eMd4186d87-61d5-259a-4d26-00a8bd86cfff

 

Here is the presentation deck that I use when talking to people about Azure. It is designed to provide a simple overview and includes plenty of additional resources.

You can download the presentation from:

https://doc.co/7wZEFY/qcihGm

If you want to actually see the presentation in action then sign up for this free CIAOPS Academy online course:

http://www.ciaopsacademy.com.au/p/cloud-lecture-series

There are also lots of additional ‘goodies’ in that course and I’m adding content there regularly.

Office 365 Introduction presentation

https://docs.com/d/embed/D25191341-6503-6506-3250-001846717594%7eMd4186d87-61d5-259a-4d26-00a8bd86cfff

Here is the presentation deck that I use when talking to people about Office 365. It is designed to provide a simple overview and includes plenty of additional resources.

You can download the presentation from:

https://doc.co/7wZEFY/qcihGm

If you want to actually see the presentation in action then sign up for this free CIAOPS Academy online course:

http://www.ciaopsacademy.com.au/p/cloud-lecture-series

There are also lots of additional ‘goodies’ in that course and I’m adding content there regularly.

Need to Know Podcast–Episode 143

Marc and I have a chat about the latest developments in the Microsoft Cloud. There is plenty of both Office 365 and Azure news to cover this week so listen in for all the latest updates.

Don’t forget to send us your feedback at feedback@needtoknow.cloud

You can listen to this episode directly at:

https://ciaops.podbean.com/e/episode-143-cloud-news/

or on Soundcloud here:

Subscribe via iTunes at:

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/ciaops-need-to-know-podcasts/id406891445?mt=2

The podcast is also available on Stitcher at:

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ciaops/need-to-know-podcast?refid=stpr

Don’t forget to give the show a rating as well as send us any feedback or suggestions you may have for the show.

Resources

@marckean

@directorcia

Azure news from Marc

New Office 365 Health Dashboard available

New Yammer integration with Groups rolling out

Visio for Office 365 now available

Domain joining servers to Azure AD

Random content for SharePoint

This episode is brought to you by:

 

 

https://cpem.io/tJ01Hzu2k.js

Adding value

image

I recently purchased a stand up desk from Varidesk because sitting is the new smoking don’t you rknow. However, this post is about the little extra item that I discovered inside.

After opening up the Varidesk I discovered these nifty Velcro ties, very handy indeed.

It is a great example of something small that provides value add for the customer. What are the ways that you are adding value for your customers? As these cables ties show, it doesn’t have to be expensive it just needs to be thoughtful.

Office 365 adoption spreadsheet

https://github.com/directorcia/Office365/blob/master/o365-azure-usage.xlsx

One of the challenges with Office 365 is that it needs to be seen as a platform rather than a single product.

Unsurprisingly, the most common service implemented in Office 365 is email. This is mostly because people don’t know what else their suite contains.

It is therefore important, for many reasons, that IT reseller enable every service in Office 365 that customers have access to do. At ther very least, they should be ensuring customer know about everything that is available to them. Unfortunately, I don’t see that being done well. The main reason for that is simply most resellers don’t have a system to help drive adoption. Hopefully, my spreadsheet above, that you can download and use for yourself, might help a bit.

What I have done is created a new tab for each Office 365 service. So for example, there is an E5 tab that lists all the customers in order and then has columns for each of the items in that service. For example in E5 there is Meeting Broadcast, Cloud PBX, Delve Analytics, Power BI Pro, Customer Lockbox and so on. Then there is a tab for Email, Delve, Yammer, Team Sites, etc.

The idea is that for each service you go in and enter a usage number as a percentage. This represents how much of that feature the client knows about and is using. Where do the actual percentage figures come from? In the spreadsheet I have created they are entered manually, however there is nothing stopping you getting them from the Office 365 utilisation stats in the Admin Console or even the Power BI Office 365 adoption content pack. I’d suggest that the idea is to keep things as simple as possible to start with and improve it from there.

Now that there are figures for all the individual items, these are then rolled up into a Summary tab at the front of the spreadsheet. I have also used conditional formatting to highlight those which are below an acceptable level. This allows you, at a glance, to see where you need to placing your energy to lift usage within your customer base.

By converting the lists of items to a table I can now sort by any column I choose. Thus, if I sort the Total column from top to bottom I can see my best and worst users over all. I can repeat that process for any column as well to see which users have the overall worst take up of something like Yammer say.

I can therefore look at the spreadsheet by row, i.e. per customer, to identify what services any individual business is not using. However, I can also look at the results by column, i.e. by service. That would allow me to focus say on Yammer and target the lowest adoption, then move to the next lowest adoption. I could look across all my columns and run a campaign to target the lowest service usage.

Even though the spreadsheet is pretty basic, the concept is rather powerful I reckon. It allows to more easily target those customers with low adoption of Office 365 products. It also allows a IT resellers to start setting goals like – ‘Our aim for this month is to get average Yammer user above 50% for all our customers’. It provides sales and business development types an easy way to target the biggest opportunities in their customer base. And so on, and so on. There are lots of ways that you can use the information that this spreadsheet provides.

Of course, you can take my concept and extend it any way you desire. You can of course simplify it to start out. Use it anyway you want to help your business drive more Office 365 adoption. The important thing is that it gives you a system that you can work to, automate, outsource, delegate, etc. Systems are for winners, so take what I have done, modify it for yourself and go out there and win!

Selling Office 365 Azure options

One thing that many IT resellers don’t appreciate is that when you get Office 365 you also get Azure. You don’t get the “full” Azure that allows you to run things like VMs (that requires a paid subscription), but you get a version with a limited subset of features. These included features that typically relate to Azure AD.

You enable the included Office 365 Azure AD by following these steps:

Enabling your Office 365 Azure AD access

Once you do that you can then use features like:

– Tenant branding

– Single Sign On web portal

– Cloud password reset

– etc

So there are a swag of features in Office 365 Azure that most resellers don’t know exist and are also not generating revenue from.

The above spreadsheet provides a framework to help IT resellers create a product offering around some of these features.

The spreadsheet has a number of tabs:

– Summary = summary of generated revenue

– Setup = costing for the initial setup of these advanced Office 365 Azure features

– Maintenance = costs for the ongoing maintenance of these features

– Extend = costs for extending these features beyond the standard provided

So let’s work through an example to give you a better idea of how to use this framework.

Start on the Setup tab. Start in cell C3 which is the fixed costs for Branding an Office 365 tenant. The figure you’d enter in here is you cost to do the branding. Let’s say that it costs about $100 worth of labour. Thus, we enter 100 here.

Cell D3 is the cost per user of enabling this service. Because branding is tenant wide there is no per user set up so there is probably nothing that can be entered here.

Cell E3 is other incidental costs for setting up the service. In the case of branding that may mean things like graphic design, etc. In this example, let’s enter 20.

Cell F3 is where you enter the total number of users in the tenant. For this example enter 15.

The Total column should now calculate to $120 which is the total cost of you enabling this service for the customer. Cell H3 converts that total cost to a per user cost.

Now in cell J3 you enter the margin (as a percentage) you want to add on top of your costs. Here enter 25.

The Total Sell column should now show $150 and cell L3 shows this sell price as a per user cost.

So that’s the product for setting up tenant branding. You can now move to the Maintenance tab and repeat the process to determine a maintenance product for branding. In this case there is probably not a maintenance product you can create for tenant branding since it is kinda a one shot deal. Likewise, there is probably not a product you can create about extending tenant branding beyond what is provided out of the box.

Therefore, let’s move to the second item – SSO portal.

You repeat the same costing and sell process in the Setup tab. There will however this time be a per user set up cost as each user needs their own unique portal. With that line completed on the Setup tab you now have another product.

Moving to the Maintain tab for SSO Portal you can create an ongoing product because updates will be required to the portal, so enter the costs, add some margin and determine the sell price. There’s your next product.

The SSO Portal can be extended with the addition of an Azure AD Premium license to add more features, thus we can again repeat the process for on the Extend tab for the SSO Portal. Part of the costs here will be the costs of an add on license for Azure AD Premium for each user. When complete, there’s another product.

If you now complete the rest of the spreadsheet you should have quite a few products you can now sell to customers individually or bundle up and include elsewhere. Easy eh?

Here’s you challenge. Use this framework and go out to your existing customer base with the products you have created here and sell at least $1,000 of new “products” you didn’t have before you read this post. You should be able to easily accomplish that within a week without too much effort. Start now and let me know how you go and how much more than $1,000 you actually make!