Fabulous Introduction
It is great to be back, and writing once again. I have been mulling over the content of this blog post for quite some time now. We are one full year into the world wide situation known as a pandemic. No matter what your views are around the current state of the world, here we are. We, all of humanity, are rising to the challenge and will overcome this obstacle just like we have in the past. Just like the world is changing, I am dedicating myself to changing as well. Though my love for SharePoint is still strong, I have evolved and become quite adept with the M365 (previously known as O365) universe and will continue to forge forward. I tend to be episodic in nature so this will be the first of two posts. This post will be to identify the common problem across the entire globe for companies due to the pandemic. The second will take you through the steps I took to approach M365 Adoption despite the hurdles.
Current State of Affairs
Currently I work in the retail space and the pandemic has made things very real. Just like every other company, corporation, restaurant, shop, mechanics garage, etc. we have had to reinvent ourselves and change with the times. Like most companies, in order to remain in business, tough business decisions had to be made by leaders around the world. People lost jobs to either layoffs or temporarily to furloughs. It was no different for us. We too, had to tighten our belt several loops tighter. For those of you who fell on the receiving end, I hope that you land on your feet in a better place than before the pandemic hit.
Please understand, it is not just the company I work at. It is most likely every company around the globe that currently does not have the appropriate staff to deal with the instant need to support their staff working from home. I would be totally shocked if not every IT across the globe has taken hits in their staff count. Why? We are infrastructure. We are not the ones in most cases to make money for the company. Not directly any ways. As much as it hurts, the fact of the matter is, “Business is business.” The safety of the many fall on the shoulders of the few. This is what I tell myself at least, lest I lose sight of the bigger picture. It just does not mean I have to like it. The companies that have been able to weather the storm have areas being held together with a skeleton crew that metaphorically has osteoporosis of a 100 year old person who never had milk or calcium in their diet ever.
A few years back, I found myself in a place where my knowledge was needed to be shared with everyone in the company. The need did not overwhelm as the use of the tools was not needed or mandatory. Going into the office was the norm and working from home, not so much. Despite being short staffed for the size of the company, our team was able to handle the workload.
Enter the COVID-19 pandemic. People who had never used SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams or even logged into M365 portal even once, found themselves being forced into working from home. They needed to use this tool called M365 to help drive business and continue to thrive during these sparse times due to the lack of traffic flow to brick and mortar stores. Working from home became the instant norm for everyone except essential workers. Fortunately, with the assistance of my director, more than 3 years ago, I came up with a way to make myself available to nearly 25,000 fellow associates (employees) to teach and train them up on how to use the tools available in M365. I was fortunate to have started this foundation before the quarantine. To totally steal, I mean permanently borrow a famous movie quote, “If I build it, they will come.” (Psst! We will go over this in the next post)
Conclusion
IT staffs before the pandemic were already wearing multiple hats. Fortunately the focus for the IT worker was to maintain the status quo, with well planned and thought out projects to allow for expanding or improving what was already in place. Once the pandemic hit, there was no planning, no gathering of resources, nor careful time allotment. The only choice was to move forward and require employees to work from home. Even if that was never on the radar to begin with. It was either work from home or the business would ultimately fail and have to close it’s doors. Reinvention was the new norm, but how do you train such an influx of individuals to use M365 when they were used to going into the office, having their mapped drives readily available? In part 2, I will go into the solution our company used in detail.