Why are Microsoft Office 365 Projects so complex?

The following is an extract from my self-published book "The SharePoint Governance Manifesto - Disruptive Governance Thinking for the Masses" available from LeanPub and Amazon.

Why are Office 365 projects so complex?

My experience, over the last decade is that in way too many instances, SharePoint and Office 365 projects fail to deliver true business value.

They’re delivered as though they are just another Microsoft Office productivity solution (Word, Excel etc.), implemented as a technology project with a huge and catastrophic assumption that “If you build it, they will come” (Field of Dreams, 1989).

Dave Snowden’s ‘Cynefin Framework’ (Snowden, 2012 https://bit.ly/Cynefin) is immensely useful in sensemaking the complexity of delivering collaborative and social solutions, such as Office 365, to my clients. I apply the Cynefin Framework to demonstrate why we can’t just assume that a technology solution on its own will deliver value and solve our organisations business problems.

Originally developed in the context of knowledge management and organisational strategy, ‘Cynefin’, a welsh word, literally translated to mean ‘habitat, or place of multiple belongings’, is now applied in many diverse ways, including complex adaptive systems, decision making, cultural change, organisational strategy and community dynamics.

As you can see in the previous sketch, we have a typical four quadrant diagram, with each quadrant sensemaking particular scenarios, one of which I feel is most appropriate to Office 365 and collaborative or knowledge management projects.

In the Simple quadrant, life is very much cause and effect. As you can see by the character, every time they drop the ball it falls to the ground, that action is infinitely repeatable with the same predictable effect.

Have you ever implemented an Office 365 solution that you could repeat in any team, company, or sector that would always have the same repeatable and predictable cause and effect?

Nope, I didn’t think so!

So Office 365, collaboration and knowledge management solutions don’t live here in this quadrant.

You know all the focus in Office 365 land on ‘Best Practice’?

It’s an oxymoron.

Think about that for a second…

Moving up to the Complicated quadrant, this is where the previously simple and repeatable relationship between cause and effect requires investigation, analysis or the application of expert knowledge in order to be effective. Here we can see from our characters that an expert is analysing the situation, the consultant character is reading about that knowledge and implementing a solution influenced by that thinking. The result being the end user character is walking away happily. Now we may see this kind of behaviour in more infrastructure based projects such as Microsoft Exchange, but not for collaboration, knowledge management and Office 365 scenarios. True, most technology projects are implemented as ‘good practice’ or even worse perhaps using ‘best practice’, but if we analyse those projects we will see that the projects are deemed failures because they do not deliver the outcomes required by the business.

What I have found, in my experience, is that projects delivered with the assumption that the business problem they are solving is in the ‘Complicated’ or ‘Simple’ domain, although outwardly they do fail, they do make some positive steps towards the goal. The challenge is that the implementers, very often do not see things with a perspective of learning and continuous improvement and therefore the one-shot project cannot hope to capitalise on the value that has already been delivered.

Now things get interesting in the Complex quadrant. As you can see from the characters, we have music playing in the background and we have two emergent behaviours:

1. The first person is dancing
2. The second person is listening intently.

Both characters are happy and are deriving value from the music in different ways, perhaps ways we had not imagined or expected.

From a Cynefin perspective the relationship between cause and effect is only perceived in retrospect, never in advance. For our characters, that implies that depending on whom they are, what they are doing and even their mood, different behaviours will emerge from the same music playing.

In terms of our work around Office 365 Governance, this fits nicely with what we experience every day. We implement a solution based on what the business stakeholders state their requirements are, they use it for some period of time and then we start to hear about the users’ unrest:

• It doesn’t quite work right
• A particular team “doesn’t work like that”
• When I said I wanted this I meant that
• Can you move the search box over there?
• But in this situation, we want it to work like this…

Familiar?

Is that what tends to happen to your Office 365 projects?

What we are seeing are emergent requirements, emergent behaviours and emergent use-cases. Implementing the solution based on what they think they want helps the user community to further evolve their understanding of the problem or goal. It is through continuous improvement that we can work with them to evolve the solution to meet their goals.

Finally, for completeness, although a little out of the remit for this book, is the Chaotic quadrant. There is no relationship here between cause and effect at a systems level, so behaviour is unpredictable and although at times that may feel true of our Office 365 user community it isn’t the reality!

So let us remember, Office 365 projects are people projects and people projects are emergent and therefore they are most definitely not a one shot, one project, one sprint solution.

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