blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

So you have Microsoft 365 up and running in your organisation. But have you also thought about its governance? The word Governance often conjures up visions of big, stuffy documents. But the point of governance is not to generate such documents, but to keep your environment up and running smoothly. So you need to ask yourself and answer some questions, as to how you want to do that. This is not a complete checklist, but rather a high-level sketch of the sort of things you should consider.

Your goals

You are rolling out or have rolled out Microsoft 365 for a reason. For example, you want to empower your employees, to collaborate, communicate and share knowledge effectively, efficiently and safely, offering them a smooth and convenient experience. To reach your goals, you not only need to set up your environment properly, but you also need to make sure that it keeps working properly.

So first of all, it it important to be aware of the reasons why you are using Microsoft 365. What are you trying to achieve?

Things keep changing

Things change, so need to keep up-to-speed and keep the environment up-to-date. This is the case for every system, but it is even more pressing for systems that live in the cloud, like Microsoft 365. How do you keep meeting your goals when everything keeps changing?

• The user population changes: new colleagues arrives, others leave or get different roles.
  So:
  • How will you make sure the right people can do the right things, at all times?
  • And how do you deal with externals/guests who are not a member of your organisation?
• The content changes: People are collaborating and communicating in the environment, that is the whole point. They keep adding, editing and deleting content.
  So:
  • How will you make sure that the users don’t get swamped in obsolete old content?
  • How do you strongly protect confidential information, while keeping keep less sensitive content easy to use?
  • And what actually is your confidential information, which “informational crown jewels” do you absolutely need to protect?
• The application landscape changes: Microsoft adds applications to Microsoft 365 and improves existing applications. All the time.
  So:
  • How will you stay up-to-speed with what’s new & what’s hot in Microsoft 365?
  • And how do you determine which standard applications the end-users can use, now and in the near future? What should their default settings be?
  • What are your rules for custom applications?  In particular: who is allowed to create what kind of no-code/low-code solutions using Microsoft’s Power Platform?
• Insights and needs change: When you started with Microsoft 365, you decided what goals you wanted to achieve and how you had to set up the environment to meet those goals. But once you start using the environment, you may get new insights. And even if you interpreted everything perfectly in the beginning, the actual needs may have changed. An obvious example was the massive need for online collaboration and communication that surged when the pandemic hit.
  So:
  • How do you gather feedback on how users like and use the environment, and what they are missing?
  • What’s the procedure for changing the environment? Who decides what to change? And how do you test what it will be like, before you launch it to everyone?
  • How do you make sure that the end-users know about, understand and adopt the evolving applications that are most relevant for them at this time?
  • How do you monitor what’s going on in your environment, so that you can take action when you are moving away from your goals?

These are some things you should consider. And while you are at it, write down what you decided. Not in a stuffy document, but in a Communication Site on the intranet, that users can easily check if they want to know how their environment is governed.