Habanero: Insights

Beyond Compliance The Business Value Behind Document Management

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0700

While compliance is often cited as the driver for a document or records management program, you need more than that to make it a success. You can have a system but if no one uses it or they use it incorrectly then its value is not realized. People need systems that work for them and help them do their jobs better. The value to the business needs to go beyond compliance.

Organizations tend to be reactive

Many document management or records management initiatives are usually driven by a breach in compliance. Maybe an audit identified some gaps in business processes. Or a health and safety or environmental incident highlighted where your response was slow or incomplete. Or perhaps legal proceedings or information requests are putting pressure on your team.

You are asked to respond quickly, and might even receive a reasonable budget infusion to take care of the issue. The problem with a compliance first approach is that it rarely leads to long-term success.

Is this how you feel?

Again, and again we hear messages like these from the organizations we work with.

"We have the best records management system and our organization is still a mess."

"We have trained until we can't train anymore."

"I don't know if we can make it any clearer for people – we have clearly defined what a record is and how it needs to be managed."

"People make a habit of filing their records once or twice a year but who knows if we are getting the right stuff."

"This used to work because with paper files people ran out of space and were happy to ship their old stuff off for archiving, now there is no incentive."

Let’s solve the right problems

Instead of trying to make compliance a priority, we need to find a way to help people get their jobs done and in turn meet the compliance needs of the organization.

Start by recognizing people’s priorities

Everyone within a business has a core set of responsibilities. For your accounting team, it’s likely paying people, getting paid, and keeping records of those transactions. For someone in recruitment, maybe it’s finding the best people to fill the vacancies in the organization. For sales, it’s being out in the market, making connections, and driving new business.

We know people are busy and so the unfortunate outcome is that managing and filing records is simply a to-do at the end of a very long list of primary responsibilities — an important to-do but still not anyone's priority.

Instead of thinking about the value the compliance brings, let's shift our thinking to the value we can help create to support our peers’ jobs, and in turn to drive organizational compliance.

The greatest challenge to information governance success – lack of confidence

Systems don't get used if people do not have the confidence that they will be able to find the information they need, when they need it.

People can’t find what they are looking for. In the 2014 IDC Report, The Knowledge Quotient, it was reported that knowledge workers spend 16% of their working time looking for information, and they only find what they need 56% of the time.
There is too much data. The 2017 ARMA / Cohasset’s benchmarking survey states that 80% of records and information technology professionals identified this (rapidly increasing volumes of data) as the greatest obstacle to information governance success.

Lack of confidence is the reason most people fail to use document management systems, and instead rely on local copies, personal cloud based tools or even hard copies.

Two ways to create value beyond business compliance

Processes and procedures, as well as tools and technology, play a key role in building an engaged and productive workforce.

1) Improve the searching and finding experience

The priority should be solutions that streamline and optimize the way people find, access, and collaborate on information.

Systems need to support configurable and optimized search experiences to be able to manage the volumes of data. And this findability needs to be supported with user-centric taxonomy and folksonomy structures that are agile enough to keep up with changes in the organization.

2) Give people systems and processes that work for them

The best way to get people using systems is to design the system, and processes associated with it, in a way that works for them. We can do that by:

· Looking for ways to integrate information management systems and align the metadata between them so they can effectively talk with each other.

Asking IT, “hey, can we make this better?”
Considering 3rd party add-ons that can help smooth out the path or even customizations that can significantly help the overall experience.

We need to begin evaluating more fully how a bad experience with processes and technology affects our workplace. AON Hewitt’s annual employee engagement survey – Trends in Global Employee Engagement has a section that specifically calls out the contribution that “enabling infrastructure” has on engaged employees

Use compliance to start the conversation

Compliance might be the start of your conversation but it should not be the end of it.

At Habanero, we pride ourselves in understanding what makes an engaged workforce and being able to harness the power of that engagement. An engaged workforce is more productive, more likely to be invested in the work they do, and more likely to stay with organizations longer. This business value cannot be underestimated and must be specifically called out for a records or information management agenda to get the traction it needs.

If you want a successful records or document management program, you need to ground it in business value that speaks to everyone, and shouts “Good document management solutions = Good business!”

7 Strategies for Managing Change on Your Digital Workplace Project

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0700

This post was co-created with Mumtaz Chaudhary from Pragilis Solutions Inc.

In 2015, Habanero and Pragilis Solutions teamed up with Goldcorp to embark on an ambitious initiative to transform Goldcorp’s digital workplace.

The initiative was driven by Goldcorp’s commitment to workplace innovation and was recognized with both a Nielsen Norman 2017 Top 10 Intranet Design Award and a Step Two Intranet and Digital Workplace Award.

Nearly two years later, we look back to reflect on some of the key insights and strategies that helped the organization successfully manage a massive digital workplace change.

Insight #1: Change management was a priority from the start

The most important change activities occur at the beginning of a project — not the end. Stakeholders from all levels of Goldcorp, from the C-suite to front-line employees, were engaged at the start of the project through a series of interviews and workshops.

Feedback was collected and assessed, and findings were shared with the organization. Before anything was developed, concepts were discussed and a prototype was created for exploration and testing.

As the solution was being built, there were several sessions showing people how the team implemented the capabilities they had requested. These sessions provided valuable feedback to the project team with respect to both the design and technical approach, as well as how we would manage the people side of change.

Insight #2: We understood the effect on each stakeholder group

As the design of the solution was becoming solidified, we spent time with the project team to understand the solution's key capabilities and the potential effect on each stakeholder group. This was paired with our knowledge of the organization and its culture.

A mitigation plan was created for each stakeholder group affected by the initiative. This was essential, as it helped the project team communicate the specific value proposition for each group of stakeholders and garner buy-in, even from the most entrenched groups.

Insight #3: Our plan was flexible

Getting the plan right doesn’t mean it has to be perfect. As the project team learned more about the change itself and the impact the initiative would have on specific stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle, we augmented our change strategy to address their needs.

We also discovered that a handful of our engagement activities were generating the best results. As such, we focused on face-to-face meetings, storytelling activities, and autonomous training.

Insight #4: We leveraged champions to evangelize the change

Enlisting advocates (sometimes called agents or champions) as part of our change management strategy enabled us to communicate with and educate the workforce far more efficiently and effectively. These advocates were essential as they were credible messengers for the initiative and led by example. Executive sponsors, project leadership, and team members were coached on effective change leadership and change implementation, helping to ignite the digital transformation within the company.

Insight #5: We engaged with authenticity and empathy

People worry during times of change and fostering rich two-way dialogue is essential. We focused on being engagement-driven and not just communications-driven, ensuring that we solicited feedback as much as we shared progress.

We also paused on a regular basis to mitigate the risk of change fatigue, despite the timeline pressures observed within most technology projects. Projects should be delivered on schedule, but you must not rush through what’s needed to help people adopt to new ways of working. Not unlike legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, we adopted the philosophy “be quick, but don’t hurry.” We took the time to collaborate and build skills in the organization before going live.

Insight #6: We spoke to the benefits, not the features

Have you heard of WIIFM? Don’t be ashamed if you haven’t. “What’s in it for me?” is an important question to answer as you implement any digital solution.

When Apple first announced the iPod, they didn’t describe it as a “portable media player,” but as something that enabled you to have “1,000 songs in your pocket.” We used this same approach for Goldcorp’s digital workplace initiative. For example, the "consolidated news page" became “a unified view for all employees” and a “distributed permissions model” became “a clear and simple way to grant access to a team site".

Features tell, but benefits sell.

Insight #7: We built a targeted, role-based training program inspired by the governance model

The project’s governance model was born from challenges the organization faced in the current state, such as complicated permissions and "orphaned” content, which resulted in significant support costs for Goldcorp.

We identified new roles that address these challenges, mapped these roles to individuals within the organization, communicated with these individuals (and their line managers) around the revised responsibilities for their role, and trained them to ensure they had the skills required to perform these roles successfully.

We trained our change advocates first and supported them in training their peers and subordinates, ultimately training thousands of people in a few weeks prior to launch. People knew exactly what training to take, how long it was going to take them, and where they could reference additional reference materials online.

The training program also included specialized training for the IT help desk, who would be the first line of support for employees. They received targeted content on important how-tos, frequently asked questions, and resolution and escalation procedures.

The training model also served to sustain the change, because training was delivered by people within the organization who would retain the knowledge after the project ended.

We hope you can use these insights on your next digital workplace initiative. Effective change management is an investment in both your organization and your people and its value proposition is clear when we look at Goldcorp’s successful digital workplace project. By including your workforce in your digital workplace initiative, you guarantee long-lasting, positive change in your organization.

Records Managers honoured with trio of posters

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Habanero created three posters for the 2017 ARMA Canada Conference in Toronto on what it’s like to be a records manager. The posters—which were a big hit at the conference—can be downloaded and printed using the links below. If you have a minute, let me share with you why created this empathetic expression of the role of a Records Manager, and why empathy is such an important part of how we design. As you read, ask yourself, are your systems and processes designed for the way people work, or are they designed around technical or compliance requirements?

Click each poster to download the PDF.

People before technology

At Habanero, we are driven by a shared purpose of helping people and organizations thrive. We've been creating great workplace experiences for over 20 years, by always starting from a perspective of deep empathy for the people that will ultimately use our solutions. Beautiful, usable, and powerful technology can be transformative for an organization, but if we introduce technology into a system that is powered by people without understanding their complex behaviours, goals, motivations, frustrations, pain-points, and your unique culture, the investment made in the technology is at tremendous risk. People will fight against technology that gets in the way of them doing their work and accomplishing their goals, which can be an added challenge for the Records Manager responsible for the adoption of the system.

Systems designed for the way that people want to work

Unfortunately, too many technologies in the workplace are not designed for the way people work, but instead for the way that was most accommodating for the system. We've seen this more often than not in the world of records and document management and we know that there’s a better, more humane way. A system that lets people be records compliant without over compromising on the way they want to do their work and accomplish their goals.

The posters are an expression of respect and empathy

When we were preparing for ARMA we considered who we were coming to meet. The smart, dedicated, unsung, hard-working records manager. Records managers look after us despite our bad habits managing our important information. They are responsible for the systems and rules that keep us organized and safe from expensive litigation and regulatory fines. Yet, most of us have little time for their rules and rhythms. Most of us do what we want to with our documents, while, like Atlas, records managers carry the burden of regulatory risk on their backs for all of us. Ok, maybe that’s a bit dramatic but it’s a tough, important job and we get it, which is why we made the posters.

So if you are a records manager, thank you or looking after all of us so well, even though we are often lazy and non-compliant! We respectfully salute you for your diligence and the burden you carry. If you are not a records manager, but you know one, give them a pat on the back, or a hug if that's not too weird, and maybe one of our posters, and thank them for doing such an important job!

The right way to migrate from file shares to SharePoint

Fri, 12 May 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Improved collaboration, access, findability, and information governance are often goals of moving to SharePoint. Just giving people a team site is not the solution. Successful team site adoption and roll out happens when:

you look at the big picture approach to information in your organization, and
develop a plan for when and how to introduce people to this new way of working.

“Let’s move off file shares and onto SharePoint”

If your organization is planning on executing the migration department by department, you are not alone. I can't blame anyone for using that approach. First, it is familiar. It is how file shares are traditionally set up. And from a change perspective, you only engage with, and get buy-in from a smaller subset of the organization. So, it seems like a much easier approach and way forward.

Don’t recreate your file share problems in SharePoint

My concern with this department-by-department approach is that some of the larger business problems you are trying to solve by moving from file shares to SharePoint will just be perpetuated.

Oranges and Apples — don’t try to treat everything the same

The first stumbling block comes when a department tries to fit all that they do into a single team site.

What belongs on your team site

Some of the work that a department does is collaborative: to build on and improve the work of the team. This includes team meetings, research, and internal project work. This type of work fits nicely in a departmental team site. Try creating some simple templates that you can use to get these departmental collaboration sites started quickly and include items such as a meetings structure, a document collaboration space and a space for keeping resources the entire team may use.

Additional discovery and information design is a good practice to accommodate some of the transactional work that the department does – and is what makes each department site unique.

What might not belong on your team site

Where you need to stop, and consider fit is in the following two scenarios:

When a department is providing an internal service to others within the organization.
When the collaboration is embedded in a bigger organizational business process or bridges across audiences from different departments.

Some common examples of activities that often go beyond a team site include:

Contracts management, purchasing, or bidding processes
People management — hiring, performance evaluations, training etc.
Organizational reporting — such as a KPI program, annual reports
Managing projects — multi-discipline or phased
Governing documents — creation, maintenance, and publication of policies and procedures

Incorporating this type of work into a department team site might make sense when you only evaluate the work that is being done from a single department's perspective. But, if you look at the content experience of the entire organization, it becomes problematic to look at it through that singular view.

Build business process-centric sites or solutions

Business processes that require interdisciplinary collaboration should have specific sites designed to support them. Without them, you risk content either getting buried in departmental sites or duplicate copies of content showing up in multiple places in your portal as people file the same content in their own team sites. Creating project team sites for cross disciplinary projects ensures that all the documentation for that project can be managed and collaborated on together in one location. Project sites can also be easily managed and archived as projects close.

Make sure governance documents are easily accessible

Governing documents in their final form should exist on an easily accessible publishing environment such as an intranet or a safety management portal. This way, the people using your documentation have ready access to the latest, approved policy or procedure. For the creation and approval process, collaboration environments might make sense but may benefit from enhanced workflows to facilitate and capture the lifecycle of those key business records.

Start with the big picture

If not department by department – how do you get started? Start with a holistic overview of the type of content your organization produces and are planning on incorporating into your new sites. This is not a comprehensive content audit.

Identify the big business processes in your organization and the content that is created and collaborated on within those processes. Then identify content that will need the most attention from a risk and compliance standpoint.

You can then create a thoughtful, prioritized plan that outlines when you might start to rollout out sites and for what purpose, allows for coordination with other important business cycles, and ultimately allows you to manage your most important business asset.

When you look at the big picture and plan accordingly, you can get the business value you seek from migrating from file shares to SharePoint.

Workplace awards: how we find our tribe

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0700

One of the reasons we talk about the awards we win is to find you faster than we otherwise would.

I’ll tell you what I mean. Changing the world of work isn't easy, and we can't do it on our own. In my experience, everyone is trying to find their “tribe,” the people who share their values and world-views. And finding them—one Tweet, speaking engagement, or networking event at a time—can be slow.

Unless you use a flare. Flares communicate a location and a message: we need to find each other. Enter the value of workplace awards. In a world where networking (the meaningful kind) occurs at a glacial pace, workplace awards are Habanero’s flares. They’re one of the ways we tell the world who we are and where we are and what we’re thinking.

Choosing the right awards

That’s why we’re deliberate about the awards we participate in. Because we want to connect with like-minded people who share our belief in being purpose- and values-driven, we participate only in awards that reflect this identity. Take Great Place to Work, for example. It’s purpose-driven and aims to change the world. Those ideals are amazing. And that’s inspiring.

Building relationships

Receiving awards has positioned us to have important conversations with people we hadn’t known who also find these ideals amazing and inspiring. We met some wonderful people at Arc’teryx because of the recognition we’ve earned from Great Place to Work. Drummond Lawson, Arc’teryx’s Sustainability Director, and I began cycling together while shooting the breeze about purpose, values, and the dynamics of award-winning workplaces. Fast-forward six months, and we’re now collaborating regularly with Arc’teryx on articulating purpose and seeing its relationship with organizational success. In a few weeks, I’ll be leading a workshop with 75 of Arc’teryx’s most promising leaders where we’ll talk about linking your individual purpose to everything you do. I can confidently say that Arc’teryx won’t be the sole beneficiary of that work. I know I’ll leave the session inspired by stories about how people have engineered their worlds to bring their purpose to life.

Finding our tribe

In other words, awards can connect us. Leaning on them to tell the world who we are and where we are and what we stand for, we can open up possibilities for real idea-sharing and collaboration. If we’re lucky, that process of community-building will help us develop the knowledge and networks to find our real tribe.

What does a 2017 Nielsen Norman Group award winning SharePoint intranet look like? We'll show you!

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Earlier this year, the Nielsen Norman Group announced its picks for the 10 Best Intranets of 2017. Goldcorp, a leading gold producer focused on responsible mining practices with safe, low-cost production throughout the America, received one of the coveted spots alongside other prestigious and global organizations. Habanero was proud to create this intranet for Goldcorp, which delivered on the needs of the growing organization and its employees working above and below ground throughout Canada and Latin America.

We put together a webinar to show you inside this award-winning SharePoint intranet with highlights and key learning from this project.

View our webinar: Upgrading to SharePoint 2013: A new foundation for great workplace experiences

The webinar shows screenshots from the intranet, a little history into the project and Habanero, and four highlights of the Goldcorp intranet:

Merging multiple local intranets – creating a new global navigation that would work for everyone.
Designing for the new digital workplace – having personalized pages and features as well as light, easy-to-use integration into other existing digital applications and tools.
Engaging workers from anywhere – creating a new responsive design that allows employees to use all the great new features from any device.
Fixing permissions – simplifying and clarifying permissions within the organization allowed us to create a consistent workflow for requesting and distributing permissions that is trustworthy and secure.

Winning this award showcases Goldcorp’s commitment to create rewarding employee experiences, foster a sense of belonging within the organization, and support employees in their jobs.

Talk to us today about creating great employee experiences inside your organization!

HR and the Modern Workplace: Using Design Thinking to Create Successful Digital Transformation

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Effectively completing a digital transformation can be challenging and risky. HR is in a unique position to help optimize this change, given its connection to employees and, often, ownership of corporate culture. Leveraging design thinking techniques can empower HR leaders to lift digital transformation projects from technology-focused initiatives to ones where the employee experience is at the centre of the change.

“72% of HR professionals feel digital HR is important or very important yet only 9% feel ready for it.”

Global Human Capital Trends 2016, Deloitte

I recently hosted a webinar to cover exactly these topics. In it I share how HR can be instrumental during a transition into a modern digital workplace, and more specifically:

the common tenets of the digital workplace
how HR can apply design thinking skills to the challenge of digital transformation
an example of where design thinking, HR, and the digital workplace intersect: onboarding

View the 45-minute webinar.

Here are the downloadable templates mentioned during the webinar.

Project canvas (PDF)
Use a project canvas to help organize all your project principles before you begin in earnest.
Research plan (Visio)
Research plans are great for laying out the details of how you’re going to collect all the data you will need for your initiative.
Experience map (.PNG)
Experience maps can do a number of things, like communicate research findings, address pain points, uncover opportunities, build empathy and challenge assumptions.
Visual SWOT (PDF)
Consider using a visual SWOT as a way to generate ideas quicker, make it more fun (and creative) for the team.
Blueprint (PDF)
Service Blueprints can be very helpful in showing all the necessary action required to bring one element of an experience to life. It uses a stage metaphor to organize all of its information.

Leveraging Aspose for PDF to Excel migration

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Do you have data living in PDF forms that you'd like to analyze and report on?

We solved this problem for a client by leveraging the Aspose.Pdf and Aspose.Cells libraries to pull the data out of PDF and into Excel. Using the Aspose libraries to do the heavy lifting makes this a fairly trivial task. The data that we needed to import into Excel was contained within PDF forms with each form comprised of named fields. The resulting Excel file was created to have one row per PDF form, and one column per field. For this to work, it is important that all PDF fields are named meaningfully and that only similar PDF forms are imported.

Step one - Licensing

First we headed over to the Aspose website and download the trial version of Aspose.Cells and Aspose.Pdf.

Note: the trial version of Aspose.Pdf restricts you to reading only the first four fields from a PDF form whilst the trial version of Aspose.Cells restricts you to 100 files and also inserts an additional worksheet with a trial message. In order to prevent these limitations you'll need to either purchase a license, or request a 30-day temporary license here.

We went for the temporary license option in order to test extracting more than four PDF fields at a time. To register this license at runtime we completed the following.

var cellsLicense = new Aspose.Cells.License();
cellsLicense.SetLicense("Aspose.Cells.lic");

var pdfLicense = new Aspose.Pdf.License();
pdfLicense.SetLicense("Aspose.Pdf.lic");

Step two - Workbook

Next, we decide whether to create a new Excel workbook or append to an existing one. In this example, we appended to the same file if it exists.

Workbook workbook;
var outputFilePath = "Outfile.xls"

if (File.Exists(outputFilePath))
{
	workbook = new Workbook(outputFilePath);
}
else
{
	workbook = new Workbook();
}

Step three - Worksheet

Then we get to create our data worksheet if it doesn't already exist. We've chosen to store all our programmatically imported data in a worksheet named "Data". This way, users are free to create additional worksheets, to manipulate, and report on the data as required.

var worksheetName = "Data";
var worksheet = workbook.Worksheets[worksheetName];
if (worksheet == null)
{
	worksheet = workbook.Worksheets.Add(worksheetName);
}

Next we added a header column to store the field names. We also stored the PDF filename in the first column so we know which file each row comes from.

var headerRow = worksheet.Cells.Rows[0];
headerRow[0].Value = "File name";

Step four - Import data

From here, we are able to add rows to the worksheet quite easily by looping through the PDF fields and filling the appropriate cell. In this example, we first check if a column already exists for a given named field and if it doesn't we add a new column.

var directory = new DirectoryInfo("C:\PDFFiles");
var pdfFiles = directory.EnumerateFiles("*.pdf", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

foreach (var pdfFile in pdfFiles)
{
	// get the first empty row
	var dataRow = worksheet.Cells.Rows[worksheet.Cells.MaxDataRow + 1];
	// Add the PDF filename to the first column
	dataRow[0].Value = pdfFile.FullName;

	Document pdfDocument = new Document(pdfFile.OpenRead());

	var fields = pdfDocument.Form.Fields;

	// Loop through each of the PDF form fields 
	foreach (var field in fields)
	{
		var fieldName = field.PartialName;
		var fieldValue = field.Value;

		if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(fieldName))
		{
			// Try to find a column header that matches the field name
			var headerCell = headerRow.Cast<Aspose.Cells.Cell>()
			.Where(c => c.StringValueWithoutFormat.Equals(fieldName, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
			.FirstOrDefault();

			if (headerCell == null)
			{
				// No existing column with the field name so let's create one
				headerCell = headerRow[headerRow.LastDataCell.Column + 1];
				headerCell.Value = fieldName;
			}

			var dataCell = dataRow[headerCell.Column];
			dataCell.Value = fieldValue;
		}
	}
}

workbook.Save(outputFilePath);

And there we have it. By leveraging the Aspose libraries we can build out powerful tools quite easily.

Habanero innovation initiative – Chatbot, your workplace assistant

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

At Habanero, we are always experimenting with new ideas to push the boundaries of design and technologies to improve employee experience. We want to offer insights and strategies to help our clients make informed decisions and ultimately create better workplaces.

In this blog series, I would like to share the story of our on-going innovation initiative on chatbots. In this first post, I will give an overview of the problem space, the benefits of an AI chatbot, and what the research covers.

The reboot of the chatbot

2016 marks the reboot of the chatbot since its inception many decades ago. As consumer behaviors shift and artificial intelligence technologies progress, the opportunity to innovate in this space is more appealing than ever before. Major tech companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have been contributing to this momentum by coming up with their own Conversational User Interface (CUI) platforms. Numerous well-funded startups and businesses are creating their own frameworks and chatbots.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term chatbot, it is “a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you can interact with via a chat interface. The service could be any number of things, ranging from function to fun, and it could live in any major chat product”.

While chatbots are generating a mix of hype and promises in the consumer space, I believe that there is tremendous potential for chatbots to make a positive impact in the enterprise and increase job satisfaction.

The same old enterprise problem

Minus a few lucky people, I’m pretty certain that we have all experienced the frustrations and inefficiencies of dealing with housekeeping tasks such as finding information or filing expenses at work. The problem isn’t new, and until now the solution has always involved a myriad of business systems and third-party tools. The onus is on the employees to dig up information and go through complicated steps to accomplish tasks.

The time and effort that we spend on low-priority tasks could be better spent on more important work.

According to a report from McKinsey Global Institute, the average employee spends an estimated 20 percent of his/her work week looking for internal information or looking for colleagues who can help with specific tasks.

With our limited cognitive load, we can only do so much each day. The time and effort that we spend on low-priority tasks could be better spent on more important work. Little nuisances snowball into bigger inconveniences, thus negatively affecting our job satisfaction and keeping people from thriving at work.

The vision of the enterprise chatbot

There are different types of bots out there depending on the business objectives and development approach. For the purpose of the study, we are referring to the type of chatbot that was built with artificial intelligence, namely machine learning and natural language processing.

An enterprise chatbot integrates all relevant business systems and is the place where all tasks begin.

The vision of the enterprise chatbot is to be the origin of an operation by integrating all the relevant business systems into it, thus allowing users to access information and services directly in a chatbot-enabled messaging app. The bot will serve as a critical factor in enabling organizations and employees to be more efficient and productive by stripping down the user interface and simplifying the steps to complete a task. The AI engine is critical as it would allow the organization to instill the bot with enterprise specific knowledge and for the bot to learn and grow through interacting with users.

How organizations and employees benefit from utilizing chatbots

Driven by the desire to increase productivity and get to the results faster and more efficiently, below are some examples on where a chatbot can improve the existing scenarios.

Human resources

The chatbot can answer questions about an organization such as HR benefits, internal processes and policies. The conversational format and system integration with user profile can return information faster than navigating through the system or looking through a list of search results. The small size of the chat window will push authors to create short, to the point content.

Marketing and sales

It’s not uncommon for a company to have bits and pieces of their customer information scattered across different business apps. The chatbot can present a holistic view of a customer profile by gathering the relevant data across the integrated sources. This approach provides an easy way to learn, share, and edit information about a customer with your colleagues in the chat app. It also saves time and cuts down on disruptions from switching and logging into multiple programs.

Mobile

Chatbots reduce the inconvenience of switching between apps. This is a benefit that will be even greater in mobile devices. If implemented properly, the chatbot would become the go-to place for mobile workers to access relevant services on the device.

The range of enterprise use cases is extensive. The chatbot is not meant to be the end-all solution to business systems, rather it is an extension of them that streamlines processes, and improves data sharing and findability across the organization.

Why now?

In 2015, the combined number of users of the top four messaging apps exceeded the equivalent of the top four social media apps. Today chat apps are more than just text and GIF exchanges between people. Businesses are conducting transactions and interacting with customers in this channel to boost engagement and increase conversions. Progress made in neural networks, machine learning, and natural language processing has enabled people to realize ideas that were once thought as blue sky. The context and technologies seem to be in place but what about the user experience?

State of chatbots

Despite all the excitement going on, we are still in the early stage of the reboot. The present landscape of chatbots is like a double-edged sword. There are plenty of bot building frameworks out there that require minimal technical development to allow people to create their own chatbot. This democratization of technology has helped propel the momentum of chatbots into the mainstream. Unfortunately, as a result of this, the world is filled with many underperforming examples and very few stellar chatbots. Truth to be told, mistakes have to be made so we can take the lessons we learn and get better.

A chatbot experience needs to be tailored to the organization and its most valuable assets: their people.

In the enterprise space, the chatbot experience needs to be tailored to the needs of the organization and its most valuable assets: their people. It takes good planning and strategizing to set up a chatbot for success and scaling; and not end up as another business application that employees loathe.

The experiment

To better understand how chatbots can be positioned within the enterprise and define what makes up the ideal user experience, we conducted user research to validate our assumptions.

Initial research questions:

Are people receptive to using the chatbot when looking up employee benefits information?
What tasks can be best accomplished by the chatbot rather than using the existing internal systems?
What’s the ideal user experience when interacting with the chat bot?
- What qualities make up a good assistant?
- How should it behave?

In the next post, we will look at the methodology that was used to collect data and the principle qualities and personality traits of a great assistant bot.

Is your file plan technology ready?

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0700

We consider a file plan that is optimized for an electronic records management context to be a technology-ready file plan. These file plans are smaller and simpler, making them – and you – more agile.

Whether you’re transitioning from physical records to electronic records, or you’re developing a green-field electronic records management system, the development of a technology-ready file plan is an essential component that will save you and your users headaches down the line.

In order to explain how file plans can be optimized for technology, we need to reflect on some basics. A file plan is an essential piece of any physical or electronic records management environment. It connects records to categories, and categories to disposition schedules. File plans were originally introduced to support the physical management of records. In that world, there are storage rooms, cabinets and shelving, all mapped and organized to store paper.

In this original context, these file plans delivered three outcomes:

Organize categories and records into a comprehensible structure;
Associate categories with retention schedules (to facilitate disposition);
Allow people to find records (aka search).

The last outcome, delivered somewhat as a result of the first outcome, is worth calling out explicitly. Developing a file plan that permits people to find physical records makes sense. However, in an electronic context, search is delivered a search engine (rather than the file plan structure). Search applications with their refiners and advanced search options are much more capable at locating content. Its like finding a phone number using the phone book instead of Google.

Initially, this may seem like a trivial distinction, but much of the granularity of categories – maybe up to eighty percent – found in a file plan is there to help people find records. Records with identical disposition schedules are often categorized separately to provide a distinction for purposes of finding content, but when using electronic document managements, search and effective use of metadata for filtering is much more useful and flexible than records categories. In effect, this approach adds another level to your file plan. The nature of a hierarchy is that each additional layer is broader or bigger than the proceeding layer.

This matters because the bigger the volume of file plans, (by definition) the more categories they have. In an electronic sense, additional categories mean more content rules, more workflows, more disposition schedules (simply because you can), and more complexity. People argue that, in that electronic context, additional rules, disposition schedules or complexity have no impact, but in reality they create unneeded overhead. Overhead in the initial implementation project, overhead in operation and overhead post go-live sustainment.

This overhead means less agility. Less agility to respond to your users’ changing needs, and less agility to respond to changes in legislation or regulations.

Depending on how much exposure your end-users have to your file plan, reducing its size and complexity will be appreciated by them, too. (We advocate increasing user adoption by reducing or eliminating your users’ exposure to the file plan.)

What employees say about great digital workplaces

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0700

What is a digital workplace?

There is a growing amount of discussion around what a digital workplace is, which you can quickly discover yourself through a Google search.

However, a great digital workplace isn't about just extending your intranet, allowing people to do things faster, or simply signing up for more of the latest technologies that are becoming easier for you and your employees to access.

A great digital workplace is about:

Extending and complementing the physical workplace
Helping people do their best work
Being part of an overall great employee experience

There are so many new and useful tools available – what’s the problem?

We certainly see many success stories related to various tools in organizations. However, in general, options and capabilities to support digital workplaces are evolving faster than organizations and employees can keep up.

This creates a situation where citizens of digital workplaces—employees—have little in the way of strategy or vision to guide them. The result is haphazard, unguided growth and a Wild West feeling in a lot of the digital workplaces we see.

Great digital workplaces resemble great cities

I like to think of digital workplaces as similar to cities. Urban planning plays an important role in the quality of life people have in a city. If you think of the places you either love to visit or live in, it’s likely a certain degree of intentional design plays a role in that. Therefore, similar to cities, organizations need to apply some intentional design to their digital workplaces.

The future of digital workplaces

There’s a lot of power and value in sharing information with employees and giving them opportunities to share with each other. It’s not crazy to say that most successes and achievements in the workplace are the result of people collaborating and working together. So, the right collection and use of the many digital tools available can make your employees and workplace more successful.

Just what will a well-built digital workplace do for employees? Read on to hear what employees will say.

“I understand how and when I should use the different tools available to me.”

Many—if not most—of our clients are struggling with what we have been calling the “what tool, when” problem.

We usually see:

Tools that could support important business and employee goals being under-used
Rampant, unguided overuse of other tools that don’t contribute to broader digital workplace goals (e.g. email and file shares)
Ad hoc use of a range of other tools, many of which are unsanctioned by IT (e.g. Dropbox, Google Docs, Trello, or even memory sticks)

Above is just a small sample of typical tools available to employees. It’s hard for people to keep up and even more challenging for organizations to guide their use to create a digital workplace that supports the goals of the organization.

The main problems with “what tool, when?” are:

Locating information resembles a challenging scavenger hunt or obstacle course, but a lot less fun
Keeping tabs on all of your organizational data. In how many locations is sensitive data being stored? When employees leave the company, are they cutting off access to important information? Can you perform eDiscovery across all the locations of your data?
Missed opportunities for employees and the business to do things better

You can start addressing these issues by:

Identifying the most important needs of your employees in sharing, storing, and accessing information
Matching those needs with the tools that will best support people
Creating and communicating high-level, simple guidelines in using tools

“My digital workplace helps me have an organized mind.”

While there are bestsellers like “The life changing magic of tidying up: the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing” about the merits of getting our physical spaces in order, we are lagging behind on keeping our digital workplaces even relatively decluttered and organized.

I also find this quote from Dave Allen, a productivity expert and advocate for capturing and organizing ideas, very inspiring: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – Dave Allen

Wouldn’t it be amazing if your digital workplace held much of the information employees need so that their minds could be freed up to have and act on ideas, rather than to be burdened with hunting and remembering them?

You can start addressing this issue by:

Supporting tools that help your employee be more organized
Creating and designing spaces to hold important information for employees

There are many tools and ways of helping your employees have organized minds. One tool we’ve been using more of at Habanero is Office 365’s Planner tool, which helps you keep track of tasks with other people. Everyone gets notifications when they’ve started, completed, or added a task and you can see all the things assigned to you in one view.

Another way is to create and design a space that helps employees pulls together most of the information they need. For just one example, see the following screenshot from the Goldcorp employee portal and read this case study.

“I don't need to piece together my own digital workplace to get things done because our IT group is proactive in supporting us.”

It’s become easy for employees to get access to tools that will help them do their jobs on their own. Sometimes this happens because IT doesn’t support a tool that does something they need and sometimes the technical leaders in an organization just don’t know about a certain tool. As a result, users are frequently bypassing IT and adopting solutions on their own. To read more about this, check out our Insights post about shadow IT in the digital workplace.

The problem with this model is that it resembles an “every employee for him or herself” reaction in relation to sharing and managing information. It’s a bit like everyone driving all over a city without any roads to guide them. That means decisions about tools aren’t made in a holistic manner and leads to the Wild West digital workplace scenario we are seeing more and more. It also means employees often spend time piecing together their own digital workplace instead of using tools their colleagues are using.

You can start addressing this issue by:

Positioning your IT group as a strategic business partner
Understanding the needs of the business and employees, and anticipating what tools they are going to need and benefit from
Developing a roadmap to continually evolve your digital workplace

“I see what inspires me and makes me proud to be part of this organization everyday.”

We see a lot of opportunity for organizations to use technology to more deliberately showcase what is important to employees, what motivates them, and what makes them proud to be part of their organization. This could be charitable giving and community involvement, the expertise of their colleagues, the innovation that is happening in the organization, or the difference that products and services of the company are making for people.

You can start showcasing what inspires employees by:

Understanding the core values and sources of pride and motivation of your employees
Creating a place where this information can be shared—this can be as simple as news stories, employee-submitted photos, or allowing sharing through enterprise social tools

ATB Financial included a community initiatives part of their portal to showcase the great work they do across Alberta. This is one area that helps to tell strong stories within the organization and show employees how they're a part of something bigger than themselves, which is key to driving engagement and other metrics within a workplace.

“My organization is transparent.”

I’ve certainly seen a link between healthy workplaces and the degree to which decisions and activities take place in an open and transparent way.

You might have also noticed that most countries that have high levels of transparency, like Denmark, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands, are places that people generally like visiting and living in. It does indicate that transparency contributes to a healthy environment that allows people to function well. If you’re interested in this topic there are different lists on this front, but you can check out a fairly recent one from U.S. News.

Some of the ways you can use digital tools to help increase transparency are:

Using a social network (like Yammer, Slack, etc) to allow people from around the organization to share information
Providing alternatives to sharing information in email (this could also be using a social network or other places in your digital workplace)
Having a video channel where important company meetings are recorded for people who can’t attend them

Above is an image posted on our internal video channel, where we post videos of our company meetings so all employees can catch up on company meetings that support transparency at Habanero.

“It’s easy for me to share my knowledge and skills.”

Related to being transparent, a good digital workplace allows employee to share their knowledge and skills.

For example, at a global mining company a safety engineer had come from a trip to several mines in South America where he had taken photos of innovative ways people were supporting the organization’s core value of safety. However, aside from emailing colleagues he knew might be interested—only to have the email likely get buried in inboxes - he had no options. Similarly, I hear of teachers sharing things with a handful of colleagues via email, or even post it notes in the staff room. This is effective if information is only relevant to several people but not having a digital workplace often means missed opportunities to share knowledge more widely.

At Habanero, one way we support employees sharing their knowledge and skills—whether it’s about Office 365, employee portals, measurement and analytics, experience design, etc.—is a social enterprise tool. That way, anyone interested in a topic can participate, not just the people who got included in the “To” field of an email.

Above is an example of a space we have online where people can share updates about Office 365. It’s just one of many areas where people can share knowledge and information at Habanero.

Some of the ways you can help employees share their knowledge and skills are:

Creating sites or online spaces to share information related to core topics
Using a social network (like Yammer or Slack) to allow people from around the organization to share information

“Our digital workplace helps me build on the ideas of others.”

I love how the evolution of our Habanero digital workplace from primarily email and file shares to an intranet, Yammer, team sites, and other tools, gives me opportunities to go shopping for ideas. I rarely start work from scratch as I can almost always build on the ideas and work of my colleagues. I also don't need to reinvent things already figured out by my colleagues.

I rarely start work from scratch as I can almost always build on the ideas and work of my colleagues

Instead, I start most of my projects and activities with an “idea shopping trip” through our project team sites, knowledge sharing area on our intranet, and various discussions on Yammer. This helps me combine ideas from across our organization to create things that are newer and better versions of what I would do working on my own. And because our digital workplace lets us build on the ideas of others, we’ve both accelerated our intranet design process and made our intranets better.

I’d also be remiss if I didn't mention the possibility of using ideation tools specifically intended to gather and bring ideas to life. We've worked with organizations on the design of ideation platforms and with the proper support and clarity in business goals for these tools, they have potential to be a valuable part of your digital workplace.

You can use digital workplace tools to increase innovation by:

Creating digital spaces where employees can share their work, resources, and ideas
Using an ideation platform

The Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario's intranet includes a knowledge library where people can go to learn and share information related to the organization’s purpose—regulating dentistry across the province.

“I’m not tethered to my desk – I can work where I want to.”

Who finds it convenient to work from your desk, all day, every day? Who never never has things come up that make working somewhere else from time to time more convenient than coming to the office? I've certainly appreciated the evolution of our digital workplace at Habanero that has made it easier and easier to work remotely and have a more flexible schedule. Even as I write this, my older boy is under the weather and at home resting up and I've been able to stay home and have access to all the information and people I need. This kind of flexibility allows people to be productive wherever they want to and accommodate the important things in their life outside of work, whether it’s their kids needing to stay home from school, a person coming to repair something at their house, or a special occasion.

We don’t yet see the ability to work anywhere being a key factor on employee engagement surveys, but I suspect there will come a day where being able to work wherever you want becomes an important factor in being a great workplace.

You can use digital workplace tools to help employees be able to work where they want by:

Ensuring core information is available online
Providing collaboration tools for people to interact online

“I feel connected to my colleagues in different offices.”

The great thing about enabling your employees to work remotely is that you get the added bonus of supporting colleagues working together in different locations.

I love how as our digital workplace at Habanero has evolved with Yammer, Skype, and HD video in all our meeting rooms and collaboration spaces, I’m sometimes not even sure if I’ve not actually met a colleague in person yet. This really shortens and supports team work among all our different offices.

Above is a photo Angela in our Calgary office uploaded to our internal Yammer social network. It’s just one of many ways we see and interact with our colleagues in different offices at Habanero.

You can use digital workplace tools employees be connected to each other by:

Using tools and behaviours that help people see each other, such as photos on social networks and creating a norm of turning video on during meetings
Providing collaboration tools for people to interact online
Supporting an enterprise social network

“I feel informed and up-to-date with all the context I need to do my job.”

Employees feeling informed and up-to-date with the business context they need to do their jobs largely has to do with communication in an organization.

A digital workplace can play an important role in supporting this with providing clear information about the organization’s goals, performance, strategies and priorities.

Other things noted earlier – such as being transparent and supporting employees in sharing their knowledge, skills and what they are doing – also supports your employees feeling informed and up-to-date.

You can use digital workplace tools employees feel informed and up-to-date by:

Making information about your organization’s goals, strategies and priorities available in a clear, user-friendly format that is easy for them to see
Ensure that employees can share information with each other

What’s going on in your organization?

If you are interested in speaking with us about creating a great digital workplace experience for your organization, please contact us.

Five reasons you need an ECM roadmap

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0700

A roadmap’s value is both in its creation (working through the program, developing a vision, outing common themes, even ensuring that the work is ordered in the correct sequence), as well as its execution. It also helps you be sure that all the critical pieces have been considered and people have been engaged. Governance? Check. Change management? Check. Migration planning? Check. User experience design? Check. And so on.

The most obvious reason for developing a roadmap is that it helps you plan, prioritize and organize your program of work, but outside of that, there are several other notable side-effects when you develop a kick-ass roadmap.

1. Address the cause, not the symptoms

A disciplined approach to building the roadmap will help figure out the right level from which to look at the problems and opportunities. This is critical to help an organization from being myopically focused on a few specific problems. Stepping back affords the opportunity to see the larger system at play.

When this is coupled with human-centred research techniques, we really start to see the full system view unfold. It starts to expose broader cause-and-affect relationships that might have been invisible if you were too focused on specific problems. The ultimate benefit is that the process exposes the root causes of problems allowing organizations to address them effectively rather than getting caught in the endless cycle of treating symptoms.

At the heart of our ability to help our clients step back in this very important way is discipline. It's sort of an organization’s version of the discipline that the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment discovered. It's human nature to see a problem and start to solve that problem before our brains have had half a chance to really understand the problem. Just like pounding back the marshmallow right in front of us, coming up with a solution right away is a sweet little dopamine rush. The problem is, of course, we have no idea what problem we really need to solve.

This “see a problem, solve a problem” impulsive behavior is a reinforcing cycle in organizations. It's like a game of whack-a-mole where the faster you solve a problem, the faster another one pops up. It feels like progress, but it's not.

2. Break-down a complex initiative (provide better visibility)

A great roadmap deconstructs your complex, multi-phased, and multi-stakeholder project into a plan that is consumable for all parties. A roadmap’s visual nature allows interested parties to glean just the right level of information for their own purposes.

Seeking the fine details behind each component? That’s fine, it’s all there. Need an executive summary as a reminder? Totally okay, just read the guiding principles or the title for each phase.

The roadmap breaks the ECM program’s complexity into distinct and tangible pieces. This tangibility helps your stakeholders anticipate what’s coming as well as witness success. Identifying successes along the way is critical in order to keep the momentum and excitement throughout a long ECM program.

3. Change management (you can’t start early enough)

A roadmap’s accessibility also means that it’s a great change management tool. If it’s not accessible, then it’s likely not a good roadmap. When we develop roadmaps, we target different audiences and aim to explicitly describe the value of the initiative to those audiences: Value to Compliance, Value to the Business (in addition to compliance), and Value to the Employee.

Check out our roadmap template below; it’s designed to be visually appealing so that it can be printed out (they are often three feet high by six feet long) and pinned to a wall.

4. Alignment (because we need all stakeholders to engage for success)

ECM projects are unique in their breadth and depth within an organization. ECM success requires that all parties that have information assets within an organization participate. This participation comes through understanding, alignment, and trust in the process.

An extension to the idea of change management is alignment. We think of alignment as change management from an organizational perspective, rather than from an individual perspective. In this context, the process of building a roadmap is an even more powerful tool.

Your stakeholders will engage more readily in a roadmap that they helped to develop. They are also your ambassadors within the organization. (There’s also the not-insignificant fact that great collaboration will also produce a much higher quality outcome!)

The process to develop the roadmap is critical; not just to the success of the roadmap, but to the engagement of your constituents. There are several phases to roadmap development including research, vision setting, developing the big ideas, and then, finally fleshing out the details.

Collaboratively developing the roadmap—at least the vision setting and the development of the big ideas—is a prime opportunity to engage your stakeholders. This can be as simple as a workshop to capture themes on sticky notes, or more involved exercises (we often use the workshop techniques described in Game Storming).

5. Establish good rhythms (and practice makes perfect…)

Finally, establishing the mechanism of a roadmap early on in the project cycle introduces a framework for on-going planning. This framework should allow you to continually review progress and then (re-)evaluate solution features, priorities and outcomes.

Like most things, roadmaps and road-mapping takes practice; you’ll need to persevere. Initially, your timelines might be out of whack, or maybe the you don’t get the communication uplift from your roadmap because the language isn’t quite right.

Want to chat? Contact Rick Martin or leave a comment today!

Rethinking ECM

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0700

We’re really excited to see OpenText following Habanero’s lead and rethinking ECM. Through their new features in ContentSuite 16, OpenText is fostering collaboration and increasing productivity. Like OpenText, we recognize the value of focusing on the end-users’ jobs. By supporting the end users in achieving their agenda – instead of the ECM or RM agenda – we drive adoption and, ultimately, compliance. The OpenText ECM team talks about getting out of the way of their users; we agree. Paradoxically by focusing on the end users’ jobs we able to get out of their way and allow them to work.

Our experience in working with our clients’ end users, shows that a good plan is more important than ever because working with additional stakeholders increase complexity. Of course, we believe that the upside of delivering additional value, improved adoption and better compliance readily justifies that additional complexity. Developing a plan that garners the attention and buy-in of all stakeholders requires careful engagement and planning.

Check out our Insights about developing roadmaps. When you’re ready, download our ECM roadmap template and get started on your roadmap today!

10 signs you have a design thinking mindset

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0700

What do you think about design thinking?

If you asked 100 people these statements, how many do you think would answer "true" to at least one of them?

Design thinking is a cloudy, nebulous concept.
Design thinking is an annoying, somewhat meaningless buzzword.
Design thinking probably means something to designers, but it's not relevant to other people.

I’ve seen enough blank stares and experienced enough silences when this term is dropped to feel confident I could go out to any sidewalk near me and easily find someone to agree with at least one or all of those statements.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a way of describing the deliberate use of activities that give you the best chance of having a design that:

Makes a difference – it’s not just about designing something, it’s about designing something that matters and has an impact
Is viable – the design can be embraced by people because it fits into their lives and environments

I’m going to bet you’ve had the experience of being part of something that seems like a great idea, only to have it get shelved. This is probably especially true if you’re in a design role.

I’m also going to bet you have bits of knowledge that could help improve the things around you—whether it’s your kids’ school, communication in your office, a sales process, or the customer service at your favourite store.

That’s where design thinking comes into play. Design thinking is about tapping into the collective knowledge and pool of ideas of the people connected to an experience or issue and bringing the ones that are viable alive in a deliberate and disciplined way.

A bit of background

One of my first encounters with design thinking concepts was when I worked for international research organizations in the Philippines and Indonesia in my first jobs after university.

While I worked for relatively large international organizations, many of my friends worked for smaller, local organizations. So, I’d hear about how although large international development organizations often had big, healthy budgets to spend on projects, they sometimes missed the mark in making meaningful differences to people because they didn’t have a deep enough understanding of the people the projects were supposed to benefit.

Then I’d hear about how local organizations were often creating small, yet more meaningful outcomes with smaller budgets because they took more time to understand the people and problems, and were working alongside the beneficiaries to develop and evolve solutions.

Sound familiar? To me, this example captures a big part of the spirit of design thinking.

At Habanero, we use a design thinking mindset to design employee experiences, whether it’s digital workplaces, bringing values and culture to life, onboarding, or performance management. If you are interested in a bit of a deep dive into using design thinking for performance management, check out our video series.

So what can you use design thinking for?

I share the information above to show that design thinking concepts have been around for a long time and can be applied to everything from a piece of furniture to employee experiences to international development.

Put another way, design thinking is a mindset you can apply to anything you are designing that involves people, including organizations, systems, products, or services.

Anyone can have a design thinking mindset. If you've read this far, I bet you do too.

10 signs you have a design thinking mindset

1. You know the value of taking time to pause and define the ideal experience

If you have a design thinking mindset, you know the value of deliberately shaping experiences, whether it's a birthday party, a classroom, an office, or a consumer experience.

You know that skipping the time to think about people’s experiences is—at best—a missed opportunity for a service, event, or product to be all it can be. At worst, you know you risk continuing to solve the wrong problem because no one has stopped to question if the way something has always been done still makes sense.

A friend of mine recently told me about creating a light, happy moment for kids at the funeral of her 93 year-old mother when they released dozens of balloons into the sky at the burial. She got the idea through discussions with her sisters during her mother’s last weeks about how they could avoid a somber situation for the kids.

That’s a perfect example of being able to use a design thinking concept of wondering about the people who will be affected by an experience and then deliberately shaping it for their benefit.

2. You know the value of understanding the perspective of the people you’re designing for (also known as empathy)

You know that if a tailor is going to design something to fit a person’s body they need someone’s height, waist, arm measurements, and more.

Similarly, you know that if you’re going to design a new performance management system, new ways of communicating, or any other process that depends on the behaviours of people, you have to understand and consider the needs, feelings, thoughts and perspectives of the people the system or process is going to effect.

At Habanero, one of our go-to exercises early on in an engagement is empathy mapping. This helps us learn more about the people who will be part of whatever change we're driving in an organization. Below is an example of an empathy map we have of a newer employee at Habanero we use to iterate on performance management for new hires.

There is also good context for this empathy map in our other Insights post about solving enterprise problems. We also have an empathy map template you can use to get started.

3. You appreciate the value and challenge in getting the science into social science

Getting reliable, meaningful, and relevant data about groups of human beings is important if you’re designing products, services, or experiences.

If you have a design thinking mindset, you probably appreciate the pursuit of reliable and relevant qualitative and quantitative data. You’d also appreciate the value and challenge in using methodologies like interviews, surveys, observation and ethnographic research, workshops and other ways of navigating the messy uniqueness of people to get to something truthful, relevant, and useful to guide your design.

Some of our clients get concerned about spending too much time doing research. It’s important to note that just because we are using the word “research” does not mean we are trying to get into peer-reviewed journals.

A good practitioner knows that some research is better than none, can choose the most valuable activities to conduct research on, and balances the amount of research done with scale of the problem being addressed.

4. You appreciate the sentiment in Einstein's quote

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” - Albert Einstein

While you’d probably leave more than five minutes to think about solutions, you know getting crystal clear on what you're working to solve or change allows you to not be too narrow or broad in your focus.

Taking the somewhat random example of furniture design, saying you want to design a chair is too narrow a focus and would caused missed design opportunities. You want to focus on what the true nature of the problem is, which is likely allowing people to rest or work in a comfortable position.

Similarly, if you’re looking to design or redesign things like performance management or communications, deeply understanding what the area is supposed to solve not only dramatically shortens the amount of time it takes you to identify solutions, it improves the quality of the solution.

5. You understand that while your role is important, it's not about you

Design thinking is really not about someone’s chance to be a superstar designer. It’s more about the chance to be a superstar facilitator, listener, or observer and ask good questions.

If you have a design thinking mindset, you know that while you likely have expertise to contribute, it’s less about your own ideas and more about eliciting and facilitating ideas from insightful and informed people closest to the problem. A big part of your role is creating a collaboration-friendly space for others to share and refine their ideas.

6. You also have a scout’s mindset

This is a concept I've only heard very recently through this TED Talk about why you think you're right, even if you're wrong.

A scout’s mindset is about being curious. And if you have a scout’s mindset, you feel intrigued instead of defensive when you come across something that contradicts what you think or expected. You also are less likely to associate changing your mind with weakness, because you know a new perspective is also a sign of being willing to test your assumptions and adapt to new information.

This kind of mindset is important to design thinking because it allows for new, innovative ideas to happen.

7. You know that while it's fun to design change, it’s not always easy to be on the receiving end of that change

If you follow activities related to design thinking, such as service design, you probably know that co-creation is important.

Why is co-creation so important? It’s partly because it supports facilitating and eliciting ideas from different people, but also because people are more likely to get on board with change if they have a say on what the change should do or how it will happen.

Many or most people will only half-heartedly follow an initiative if they aren’t truly convinced about the change taking place. Co-creation isn’t a silver bullet for successfully managing change, but it is a powerful way to help influence it.

8. You know the power of shared understanding

If you have a design thinking mindset, you know the challenges in using language to communicate complex ideas and problems to many people in a consistent way. You know pictures, models, and stories can often be much more powerful in creating a shared understanding that enables everyone to collaborate on problems together.

Below is a visual diagram illustrating our performance management at Habanero that includes information from empathy maps and illustrates the different components of the overall process. We placed copies of these on our walls so everyone could get an in-depth understanding of our process.

9. You know you need to surface the most promising ideas and then test them

There are so many ideas out there. Everyone has them. If you want to drown in ideas, that can be easily arranged. The challenge is in finding ideas that actually address what’s important and are viable.

Once you understand the people you're designing for, have a deep understanding of the problem, and there is a shared understanding of the people connected to the problem, it’s time to identify the ideas that are most promising.

From there, the best way to validate those promising ideas is to test them. If you're designing a piece of furniture, you get people to test a prototype. If you're changing performance management or improving your digital workplace, run pilots or release components that can test your ideas before over-investing in them.

10. You know the value of feedback loops

Finally, if you have a design thinking mindset, you know the best way to evolve and improve something is to continue to test and evolve things in the wild. “The wild” is the environment where the people you’re designing for are living and working.

If you’re new to being in a role that supports the design of something new, this is a good time to review sign number five about your role being important, but it not being about you. Good designers want to see their creations fail in testing so they can catch the things they weren’t clever enough to predict.

You could use feedback surveys, ongoing observation and monitoring, analytics; whatever makes the most sense in creating a way to learn and evolve what you are designing.

Using experience design to solve enterprise problems

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0700

At Habanero, we are super passionate about working with organizations to solve the right problems.

We've been applying our over 20 years of people-centred research to deeply understand how to make workplaces better. Using the principles of experience design, we’re working with our clients to solve complex workplace challenges, from large-scale areas like employee onboarding, culture, vision and values, and performance management to more modest scenarios like a company-wide event.

Experience design gives us a powerful, collaborative toolkit that can be scaled up or down to suit the need. We embed design thinking methods to develop highly impactful outcomes, like alignment around a vision and roadmap, culture change, communications strategy, people development, process strategy and, of course, technology evolution and innovation.

My colleague Steven Fitzgerald and I realized the best way to share the value of experience design is to tell a story in the context of one of our immersive, co-creation spaces.

In the following videos, we’re showing how experience design is helping us reinvent performance management at Habanero. Performance management is perfect for an experience design engagement because it’s a complex, ever-changing part of an organization—meaning that a traditional cause and effect, process-driven problem solving approach isn’t always the best bet. The work we were able to do really enforced how important it is to address the right problems, as opposed to tackling everything in one big bite.

Part one: Building empathy through experience design

Part two: Personas and empathy mapping

Part three: Mapping a complex experience

Ultimately, experience design is all about creating an important transformation of some description in your organization. This toolkit ensures that we see the holistic picture of an organization and its challenges, connect the dots, and create the most meaningful change possible.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you and your organization tackle some of your biggest challenges, let’s connect!

Metrics: Separating the signal from the noise

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0700

Every project manager that I have ever worked with has one piece of information they always want to know – “where are we?”

This is a very simple question that requires a very complicated answer. The mistake a lot of development teams make is to try and give the most positive spin on the situation, because each member of the team is thinking only of the piece they are responsible for, rather than measuring the progress of the project as a whole. And because IT tends to be full of raging workaholics who will never admit they are overloaded and in need of help, no one can be objective enough to assess the situation.

However, even if we go with the old adage, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” you have to determine the key performance indicators, find a reliable source for that information, and then figure out how to incorporate the findings into a decision making process that enables course corrections throughout the project to address risks and problems.

Another important thing is to get everyone on the team to understand what the numbers mean, what actions need to be taken to address them, and who is accountable for those actions. That last part, the communications piece, is critical.

On a recent engagement, I was producing graphs and metrics to show in a condensed format how well the team was proceeding toward the goals of the sprint and project as a whole. I thought these were an incredibly clear and concise way of showing exactly where a project was at any given moment, and I couldn’t understand why my beautiful graphs and charts weren’t being understood by the intended audience.

The reason for that is simple: The audience didn’t speak metrics and I hadn’t clearly explained the metrics I created.

Creating a metrics dashboard

My information was rolled up into a dashboard that looked something like this:

This would tell me everything I needed to know very quickly, but for anyone else it said nothing at all—except that green meant good. I would be running around saying something that probably sounded like “It’s 17! Why are you not all reacting to the 17-ness of the situation that we are in? And this here? It’s BLUE! Blue is bad, are you blind?” and see only uncomprehending stares.

It was a pretty frustrating experience for both sides!

To avoid confusion in the projects that I work with from going forward, I thought I’d give a high level overview of what that dashboard tells me about this project, so that maybe next time I won’t feel like Sherlock Holmes yelling “Vatican cameos” without someone to interpret what that means.

In my above dashboard example, sections A, B, and C can be used to measure how well the development process is going. Section D shows each team member their current workload. Sections E, F, and G can be used to assess how the QA process for the project is going.

Section A: Remaining work compared against the team’s available capacity

Here, it looks like the team is falling behind on the work that was planned for this sprint.

Are they really? Or are people not keeping their tasks up to date? Is this an accurate assessment of where we are, or is the source of truth not reflecting reality?

As this is sprint four, we can compare the amount of work completed previously to see if we are chronically over or underestimating the workload and feed that back into our sprint planning process.

To find out what is really going on, you have to read the other two development-related charts.

Section B: The rate the team is completing the work

Ideally, the team will knock tasks off at a steady pace throughout the sprint, so I added the ideal trend line to illustrate that more effectively. It looks like the team started out at the ideal pace, then plateaued for a little while, then, for some reason, more work was added.

What happened there? Was more work found? Was scope added in the middle of a sprint, against agile best practices?

We’d have to look at the work backlog to get a bit more insight into what is happening here. Which brings us to section C, which I realize I should have changed the name to “release burndown.”

Section C: Release burndown

I removed the sprint filter because it was our last development sprint before being feature-complete, so if you will forgive the retcon:

For some reason, Mark has more work on him than the other developers. Why is that? Is Mark not updating his tasks, and this is inaccurate? And what is up with those 88 hours of work not assigned to anybody?

This chart is configured so that you can click through and see what tasks remain, giving you the information you need when you talk to Mark to see if he could use some help, and insight into what those unassigned tasks really represent.

If this was filtered to show only the current sprint’s backlog, it could be compared to section A. If Mark just hasn’t updated TFS, then no actions need to be taken except to clean those up.

If, however, his work needs to be redistributed, then should it go to one of the other developers? Thankfully this chart also shows the capacity the other developers have available so we can decide who should take on additional work.

Section D: Work that is assigned to the currently logged-in user

This part is pretty straightforward. I have no active tasks assigned to me that I have not already completed, but I have seven bugs waiting for my attention. Each of these is clickable so I can see bugs and tasks in more detail.

Sections E, F, and G

These should really be read all together, so this may get a little complicated.

Section E seems straightforward, but is a little more complicated than it appears. This is a measure of the number of reported bugs that no one has looked into yet.

But, is 17 bugs good or bad? How are they distributed? Evenly throughout the team, or does one person have 12? How serious are the bugs, and do they need to be prioritized? And if this number was low, does that mean that the sprint features are getting stabilized, or does it mean that no one is testing it yet?

This brings us to section F, which indicates how many requirements don’t have test coverage yet. This project used the scrum process template so requirements are referred to as product backlog items, or PBIs. Ideally, all PBIs will be associated with at least one test case, so that we can ensure that all features get tested and nothing falls through the cracks.

Even if the untested requirements number is low, and the bug count is also low, then that is still not enough to say how well the project is going without the last chart G which shows the test results.

Scenario One: E is low and F is high, G may or may not have test results

This means that the test results don’t tell us as much as we would like to know. Section G is just going to give us results for the test cases that we have written and the PBIs that we have been testing. But what about the PBIs that aren’t covered? What state are they in? Why is no one looking at those?

Scenario Two: E is low and F is low, but G shows that most test cases have not been run or are blocked

This makes the argument that the bug count is artificially low, we are in a position to test the features, but the tests haven’t been run yet and we should look into what is happening that prevents this from happening.

Scenario Three: E is low and F is low, G shows a lot of failures

The most likely explanation for this scenario is that the testers are behind in verifying the bug fixes that have been checked in, and regression testing the test cases that have failed.

Why are the testers falling behind? Do they not have access to test the bug fixes, and a new build should be deployed to the QA environment? Are the testers even aware of what has been fixed and is waiting for their attention? Or are the failures not being raised as bugs?

Scenario Four: E is low and F is low, and G shows mostly passes

This is when we can have some confidence in the stability of the features. As features pass testing, we can measure the progress of the project as a whole. Passes can be safely ignored until final regression testing is ready to start, and the team can focus on what failures are the most important to fix first.

Conclusion

Projects are huge, complicated beasts with many moving parts, and it can be extremely difficult to keep track of what needs attention and what is just noise or administrative backlog. A good metrics dashboard can help sift through that information and surface what areas are most in need of attention, preferably while the problems are still small and manageable hot spots and before they become fires that need to be put out.

Communicators and digital workplaces: An IABC World Conference recap

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700

I’ve just returned from the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in New Orleans. Communicators have such a complex and evolving role. The conference did a nice job balancing the current perspective on the trends, shifts, and demands of both internal and external communications.

With the recent launch of our Go Intranet Accelerator, we felt the conference would be a great place to connect with organizational leaders who are trying to communicate within the new world of work, but also doing more with less. A colleague and I also had the chance to present on the trends Habanero is noticing in the intranet space.

Through conversations at our booth and at our presentation we noticed some of these common themes:

Dissatisfaction with the status quo

So many communicators were unhappy with the current state of their intranet. Common comments included too little investment, problems with SharePoint usability or the usability of their intranet in general, lack of insight about what was working and what wasn’t, troubles reaching field workers, and lots of challenges with low adoption. It was encouraging to see much of the conference topics focus on internal communications and a range of digital workplace topics—covering everything from social to chatbots to the future of the digital workplace. There is hope!

SharePoint is the most common intranet platform

When we presented to a room of about 60 people, we asked how many of the intranets in the room were currently running on SharePoint. Nearly 90 per cent of participants raised their hand. This was echoed again at our booth conversations where SharePoint was the dominant current solution.

While it’s encouraging that nine out of 10 Nielsen Norman Intranet Design Awards went to SharePoint-based intranets, the majority of the people I talked to seem to not like SharePoint. Usability, lack of IT support, poor planning, and too many customizations were cited as some of the most common challenges. Igloo Software, Interact Intranet, and a series of other intranet-like technologies were presented and showcased at the conference as SharePoint alternatives, so it will be interesting to see how the next few years pan out for SharePoint-based intranets.

Communicators and IT don’t see eye to eye

Lastly, communicators and IT departments don’t seem to see eye to eye. The common conversations here included: lack of a holistic strategy (including lack of integration with team sites/collaboration areas and corporate news), complaints about how IT did not engage the communication department when rolling out intranet platforms, and surprisingly little evidence showing communicators and IT were working together on the future of their digital workplaces. Personally, I think this collaboration is critical to both the future of IT and communications, so I hope to see this area improve as more and more organizations adopt a digital agenda.

While many of the conversations were disheartening, there seemed to be a surprising level of optimism about the future. People were excited to talk about the latest and greatest, and while there were a few companies that lamented they “will never go to the cloud,” “will never be mobile,” or “will never spend money on communications” the majority of people I talked to had a sense that change was on the horizon. It helps when organizations such as the IABC can create a forum for the positive, what’s working stories in the community.

Improving performance management through experience design

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700

I am fortunate to work for a company recognized as one of the best places to work in Canada. There are many really cool and compelling reasons for this, including getting to work with some amazing people, an awesome culture, and flexible work hours. One standout reason is how we are continuously looking for ways to move from good to great, and from great to awesome! We believe in creating exceptional workplace experiences.

After completing a project that uncovered ways to improve our onboarding process we realized we had to look beyond how someone starts a career with Habanero to the journey of learning, training, and feedback. Up until recently, we’ve called this process performance management.

We knew through employee surveys and anecdotal feedback that some parts of the performance management were working really well, while others just felt crummy. We wanted to understand the big picture to know that we were investing our time in solving the right problems.

So, we embarked on a short, time-boxed initiative to understand as much as we can about the current experience of performance management at Habanero.

Two weeks, two people, one mission

Our mission was to use experience design methodologies to uncover opportunities for change in how our employees experience Habanero through their career.

The ExD pop-up space is born

My colleague, Melanie Gabanna, and I were particularly sensitive to a magician act (disappearing for two weeks and coming up with a magical outcome). We saw this as an opportunity to start building the change momentum throughout using what we called 'kitchen collisions.’ Both of us are located in different offices, so we decided for the two week initiative we would set up a video camera connecting the two spaces in Calgary and Vancouver.

Vancouver office ExD pop-up space with a video channel into the Calgary office ExD pop-up space.

This was an opportunity to expose our findings throughout the process and gain further insight and feedback along the way. Setting up our spaces near the kitchen enabled us to do a bit more guerilla research, grabbing people for a quick informal conversation while they made coffee or ate lunch.

Higher altitude view and capturing insights

To better understand the process, we needed to gain insight from a variety of people who experience it every day. We knew we couldn't speak to everyone, so we combined 12 in-person interviews with an online survey to pull out initial insights.

We used big stickies (pink stickies) at the top of a wall to highlight what we were calling the opportunity spaces. Along the left hand side, we created a scale of good experiences and not-so-good ones (green stickies).

We added insights from our interviews and survey responses according to where it fit along the process, how that experience felt, and from who's perspective (the performance managers vs other employees).

Initially this was just one journey map, but midway through we realized there were experiences unique to performance managers that deserved attention separate from an employee's experience. So, we split that out, pulling the blue stickies (insights from performance managers) into their own journey.

Creating a journey map

Journey maps often follow a specific sequence of activities. We quickly realized that much of the performance management journey didn't have a specific order to it. The onboarding and offboarding processes did, but what happened in the middle – check-ins, reviews, feedbacks sessions – didn't happen sequentially. By artificially putting it on a linear continuum, we were worried it would present “false cause and effect” connections. Mapping out a relationship linearly also felt weird and inauthentic.

Touchpoints across the experience are contained in the top portion of the graph. Details about each touchpoint are indicated under the activities and thinking sections.

This lead us to three big phases:

Getting to know each other (from initial interview through your first 90 days)
Working together (our regular check-ins and rhythms, including our yearly review)
Transitions and parting ways (career transitions and exit interviews, etc.)

The visual layout facilitated some deeper insight into what worked and what didn't as well as surface key cause and effect relationships. Adding that to what we learned in our interviews and conversations gave us a really complete picture of what was successful and what needed attention and smoothing out.

Digging into the details: Understanding the different journeys using empathy mapping

Different people have different experiences and needs. We had identified 3 key persona groups:

New employee
Intermediate to senior employee
Performance manager

Using our initial research, we built out empathy maps for each of our persona groups to understand how each of them is thinking, feeling, hearing, seeing, and doing.

What we discovered as we chatted with folks coming in and out of our space was that we were missing one persona—a new hire, senior in their career versus our existing persona for a new hire who is junior in their career. These two people have very different needs, even though they are both new to Habanero. We also noted that we needed to understand the journey of someone who wants to become a performance manager.

Combining insight from journey map and personas together starts to build a picture of unique needs at different parts in the process.

Journey map layered with persona insights.

Highlights and pain points

Workshops used to gather additional feedback and prioritize highlights and pain points.

Through a series of workshops across our offices, we used dot voting to collect prioritization feedback. This helped validate what we had heard, as well as provided additional insight and feedback.

For example, we heard a lot about salary discussions at the end of the year. But we also learned how some of the other aspects of performance management impact the salary discussion—such as our skills matrix, feedback, and something we call accountability agreements (basically a description of what you’re accountable for in our organization).

Focusing solely on the salary discussion misses a whole part of the process that has a huge effect on that discussion. Being able to see all aspects of the process in one diagram made it easier to have discussion and make connections and linkages between activities.

Inspired by Adaptive Path’s Exploratrium experience design work we used visuals to indicate the highlights (green stars) and painpoints (orange downward arrows).

Outcomes

At the end of two weeks we had clarity around the process of performance management, we could make decisions from a point of knowledge and understanding about relationships and connections.

We have insight into priorities
We have a plan for our next steps (priority list)
We have buy in for next steps

Some key things that contributed to success:

Autonomy and the ability to stretch and take risks as a team
Access to our employees, people giving their time
A space to work in that has high visibility

Next steps

We will be making incremental changes to our organization instead of a big overhaul, smoothing out the experience one area at a time to see how that impacts other areas while continuously reprioritizing. Design principles developed during the project will help guide the changes we make to focus on a shared vision for the future experience.

Your last SharePoint upgrade ever?

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700

You’ve probably heard the Greek myth of Sisyphus. He was condemned for eternity to have to roll a large stone up a hill, only to watch it roll down again.

Creating intranets over the last 15 years has felt pretty similar. In most organizations the typical intranet lifecycle looks something like this:

Feel familiar?

This lifecycle occurs for a few reasons:

As intranet projects are expensive and involve technology many organizations capitalize their investment over a number of years. The team that is left to support the intranet is often underfunded and doesn’t have the capability to enhance the portal in a meaningful way. Your business changes all the time, but other than adding new content, your intranet likely does not.

This lifecycle also occurs because of the way many SharePoint intranets are built. In the Future of SharePoint webinar Microsoft promoted the fact that nine out of ten of the winners of Nielsen Norman’s 10 Best Intranets of 2016 (we created one) are built on SharePoint.

What Microsoft neglected to mention is that these intranets are heavily customized to create an award-winning experience. Due to this deep customization, many organizations don’t upgrade from version to version, but rather create a new intranet and migrate content into the new environment. When we attempted SharePoint upgrades in the past, they were often more time consuming than a new build and migration.

Why did we do this level of customization? Because the out-of-the-box SharePoint intranet experience was poor and the developer frameworks weren’t robust enough to customize the platform the right way. If we didn’t spend the time and effort customizing SharePoint the new intranet would skip the love your intranet step and jump right to hate your intranet.

The cloud to the rescue

The cloud has shifted how organizations fund technology projects. As opposed to large capital expenditures, the majority of cloud-related spend is seen as operational. Cloud vendors provide a service you turn on, turn off, scale up, and scale down.

As Microsoft’s cloud offerings began to mature, organizations began to engage us to create intranets in Office 365. As SharePoint Online doesn’t allow you to dig into the guts of the platform and deeply customize it, we had to create a new responsible development approach. This enabled us to create the exceptional intranet experiences Habanero is known for, while respecting the restrictions placed on developers in the cloud.

Another challenge with Office 365 is the number of updates to the platform. Over the last year Microsoft has made hundreds of enhancements. Each one of these can break your intranet, but leveraging these same responsible development techniques dramatically mitigates this risk. In fact, we’ve become downright comfortable managing our Office 365 intranets through Microsoft’s enhancement releases.

SharePoint 2016 Forever

It’s not all bad though! The continuous enhancement challenge is also a massive benefit. As SharePoint is always being updated you are always running the latest version.

When Microsoft created SharePoint 2016 they stated that it was built on the same foundation as SharePoint Online. They also announced that SharePoint 2016 will receive feature packs at regular intervals to ensure it is kept in sync with SharePoint Online (with the caveat that you must have Software Assurance). Sounds a lot like the cloud. If SharePoint 2016 is constantly receiving enhancements and updates, your need for a disruptive upgrade might just go away if you play your cards right.

Perhaps they should have called SharePoint 2016 something different. SharePoint Forever? SharePoint Next? SharePoint X?

Let’s Go

The idea that you will never have to do a disruptive SharePoint upgrade again is great in theory, but is this reality?

We put this to the test at Habanero!

When we were developing our Go Intranet Accelerator we built it for SharePoint Online first. Our plan had us adding SharePoint 2016 on-premises support at the end of our development phase, as SharePoint was still being refined. We wrapped up the development of Go on SharePoint Online and decided to give it a whirl and deploy it to SharePoint 2016. The result: with a few small tweaks it worked great! No significant refactoring or development required :)

The cloud is coming to you (whether you like it or not)

Even if you have no desire to use SharePoint Online, SharePoint on-premises customers will benefit from Microsoft’s cloud focus. If you are using SharePoint 2016 you employees will benefit from the continuous updates and feature packs that will be made available. In addition, using responsible development techniques and platforms like Go that are built for the cloud mean you will always be up-to-date!

It’s an exciting time for organizations who use SharePoint. And who knows, your upgrade to SharePoint 2016 might just be your last.

Additional resources

Download our 22-page white paper on developing your intranet in Office 365.
Create the world’s best SharePoint intranet experiences with the Go Intranet Accelerator.

Drive records compliance through exceptional user experiences

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700

Did you know that it’s possible to design a door so badly that you need instructions? It’s true; Habanero has done it. Check out the picture of Calgary office entrance. It looks great – clean, professional, and hopefully welcoming.

Upon closer inspection, we have a problem. As you can see, we have a vertical door handle on the outside of the door. Any door handle instinctively suggests that you pull! to open the door, but then we also have a sign that says push..

In processing these competing cues, instinct wins over intellect. You walk up to the door, yank on the handle and then the door doesn’t budge. You’ve strained your arm, you’ve strained your shoulder and you’ve slopped some of that finely-balanced-on-your-notebook cup of coffee on your notebook and the floor. Only then do you stop to consider the push sign and have another go. We’ve managed to create a terrible experience for anyone entering our office!

If it’s possible to design a door so badly that you’re confusing your users, do you think it’s possible to design a records management solution in such a way that you’re confusing your users?

There’s really one simple lesson here: consideration of the experience of the user is paramount. It’s surprising that we designed an office, a door and an entrance way to that office without REALLY considering the experience of the end-user. Each component individually made sense, but together, we built an experience that is sub-par.

What can we learn from this and apply to enterprise content management?

We have identified three ideas that will support you in developing great experiences for your users. The rest of this article describes these ideas, all of which draw a little bit on the example above.

Enduring empathy for your users
Leverage other projects
Seek out a win-win scenario

We consider all involved parties to be the user, that is, the end-user who’s creating content, accessing or declaring records, the records manager user who’s working auditing, reporting on and making lifecycle decisions for records, and even the organizational leaders who want visibility into and reports on compliance.

Enduring empathy for your users

As motherhood and apple pie as this sounds, this best describes the approach to delivering exceptional experiences to your end users. There are a collection of tools and techniques that you can use to identify and map the current-day experiences of your users. The key here is, as per our office door example, you need to consider the experience holistically; granular examination of the environment doesn’t work.

Once you understand those experiences, you can start to discover the high-points and the low-points, the areas of tension and the underlying reasons for those points of tension. This thinking is actually known as experience design. You can read more about experience design in Kurtis Beard’s excellent insight about employee onboarding.

In considering the experience of your users, we would urge that you consider the experience of yourself and your records management team in operating and/or supporting your completed records management solution. Will it, holistically speaking, be an exceptional experience for you? Will you be required to cajole, chase or even reprimand end users? If so, we would suggest that that will not be an exceptional experience for you or your team.

These perspectives reinforce the original point; develop an experience that is exceptional for your users and supports their job.

Leverage other projects

My brilliant colleague Natalie Veldhoen expressed that one ideal scenario for records managers would be where they are simply “collecting records” that have been previously uploaded by the end users. With some technical know-how, like Collabware’s automated declaration capabilities, it’s possible to do just that. The automated declaration is based on the location and/or the type of the content uploaded.

The challenge here lies in where we find the content in the first place. In most enterprise organizations, there’s no shortage of initiatives that are trying to control the tidal wave of content. Often we work with our clients in connecting these types of solutions to a robust records management solution that “collects” the records behind the scenes. These initiatives might be anything from a CRM project to a business process workflow project, a collaboration project or even an external website project.

One great example is a solution we developed that is focused on policies and procedures. The solution allows the policies to be created, edited, approved and then published to all of the employees in a way that is simple to navigate.

The solution is oriented around the experience of the end users in order to ensure that they can find the policies or procedures that they need in order to perform their work safely and correctly. This solution is not a records management solution per se, but because it contains the version of all of the policies and procedures, there’s a great opportunity to capture (and subsequently control access and versions) the policies and procedures as records.

In this way, the records management team is able to leverage a solution focused on delivering a great experience to its users and collect records in the background.

Seek out a win-win scenario

It’s easy to believe that addressing the experience of our end users’ impacts our ability to deliver on our records management agenda. Put another way, we could believe that applying our scarce resources of budget, time or energy to our end users reduces the budget, time or energy we can apply to our own agenda.

Don’t succumb to this false dichotomy; the two outcomes are far from mutually exclusive. Presenting a great experience to users will drive much better records management outcomes. Improved records management outcomes will improve the experience of the users because, at a minimum, they will be able to locate what they seek.

Like

In wrapping up this insight post, there’s one scenario that is very useful to consider.

The scenario is one where the success of this particular business relies (at least in part) on its users’ tagging the content that they upload. This business has no sway over its users’ actions; no comebacks or performance bonuses. Its model requires users to upload and tag content in their own time, with no training, no support, and no recognition for doing the uploading or tagging. And yet, this is exactly what many of the users do readily every single week.

Which business is this? Facebook.

Daily, millions of Facebook’s one billion users choose to upload and tag their photos. They tag their friends and their location, and they add-in a few words about the photo. These are the exact actions that we seek from the users of our records management solutions. What accounts for the success Facebook has versus the challenge we as record managers face in requesting the same of our users?

Motivation.

Whether you applaud or mock the motivation that is driving users to upload, tag and share their photos, it’s hard to argue that whatever is motivating the users, it’s very effective. Fortunately, we can consider this further without discourse around WHAT might be the motivating factor here!

We could dismiss this level of motivation as an unfeasible option for the users of our records management solutions; after all, how could we conceivably get our users to be motivated to tag their content in OUR records management solution? We likely can’t. That’s not how this type of motivation works.

But, by aligning that solution towards or around the work that your users are trying to perform then you’re getting closer to their motivation. If we’re able to support them in accomplishing their goals, their work and their tasks, then we’ve got a fighting chance.

Interested in learning more about driving compliance through better user experiences?
Download our ECM roadmap template

Resources for communicators

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700

For many of the projects that we work on, people in a communications role (internal and external) are major stakeholders or program sponsors. Whether it’s an employee portal, an enterprise website, or community extranet, communicators help shape the vision for these employee and customer initiatives. With the evolution of organizations into the murky world of the digital workplace, we feel there’s a great opportunity for communicators to lead into this new future.

We’ve been collaborating with IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) chapters across Canada, and spoke at the 2016 IABC World Conference to validate and share this approach. You can view a recording of our webinar on this topic in case you weren’t able to attend the conference in New Orleans!

To help support this journey of transforming organizations into modern digital workplaces, we've curated this list of resources for communicators, which includes some of our most relevant Insights posts, as well as a few tools and templates. If you'd like to learn more about how to apply these inside your organization, just reach out to me!

Resources for communicators

Intranet trends for internal communicators

The intranet space is changing dramatically and this top 10 list helps to summarize some of the key trends and opportunities that may be cropping up at your organization.

Creating great workplace experiences

In our experience, too many organizations jump straight to a solution before considering a more holistic approach to the workplace experience. This reference guide helps to explain why you can only create great workplace experiences by solving the right problems.

Setting a compelling vision

This tried and true process walks you through how to create a vision that puts your audiences at the centre of the process and aligns your team around a shared vision and experience.

Using a roadmap to bring your portal to life

What's the right plan for your initiative over the next six, 12, or 18 months? Learn how to align your team around the right decisions to create an iterative plan that moves your organization closer to its goals.

Using co-creation tools to find opportunity

We use many of the methods in the Gamestorming toolkit when working with employees, stakeholders and other audiences in our research and visioning process. Empathy mapping is probably one of the single most powerful tools you can bring to your team to help them "walk a mile" in the shoes of your audiences.

Forming a team for your initiative

Structuring a team for success when embarking on a project helps to avoid a lot of problems down the line. Learn what roles to consider for your team, and recruit the right people from the start!

Here are some of our tools, templates and toolkits to help you and your organization get started:

Roadmap (Excel)

Roadmap (InDesign)

Journey mapping workshop toolkit (.ZIP)

Empathy maps (PDF)

Feature idea cards (PDF)

Responding to shadow IT in the digital workplace

Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 -0700

I would define the digital workplace as the collection of technology that enables people to contribute, share, and access information as part of doing their jobs. The digital workplace has existed in some form for a long time. In the past, it was as centered around the desktop experience for information workers. Capabilities were limited when you weren’t physically sitting at your desk in the office and field workers had very little, if any, interaction with the digital workplace.

The impact of cloud services

Fast forward to today and we see a very different environment. There has been a proliferation of cloud services, enabling companies to develop products and sell them directly to consumers and business users. Sophisticated capabilities that at one time could only be provisioned by a company’s IT department are now readily available, often purchased with a credit card with a per-user per-month billing model.

A small fraction of cloud based tools available in the digital workplace

The rise of shadow IT

Much of the demand for cloud use in the enterprise is driven by the consumer experience. We have become accustomed to the digital experiences that have developed in our personal lives. We’re constantly connected through our smartphones; with a few taps and swipes we can retrieve up-to-date news and information on any topic, purchase everything from food to flight tickets, and start a video conference with friends on the other side of the world.

With this type of digital experience in our personal lives, employees have increasingly high expectations of the digital tools they use at work. This has lead to the rise of shadow IT which Gartner defines as “IT devices, software and services outside the ownership or control of IT organizations.” In many cases, cloud services are being purchased and consumed directly by business units.

IT is often not aware of how prevalent third-party services are in their organization. One customer we worked with recently had an audit done that looked at their network traffic. It found there were over 200 cloud applications in use among their more than 5,000 employees. IT was not aware of the majority of these applications.

So why are employees procuring cloud services on their own?

The most common reason is to get up and running more quickly than IT has traditionally been able to do. Sometimes there is a specific capability the person or group needs that is not currently offered by their enterprise systems. Sometimes it’s to circumvent restrictions such as file size limits or sharing files with external parties.

So what’s the downside of shadow IT?

Unfortunately, while procuring their own solutions might fill an immediate need for someone or their team, it often works against organization-wide objectives for collaboration, productivity, and innovation. Everyone is working with their own tools within their own silos, leading to a fractured or fragmented experience for employees.

Additionally, without a plan and due diligence to select and manage technology applications and services, these users could be putting the organization at significant risk.

As an example, consider the control of your organization’s data:

Do you now have customer or other sensitive data stored in the cloud?
Is that data stored in Canada or elsewhere? and does that present a risk?
Do you still own your data? What are the service provider’s polices and terms of use?
Is your data encrypted? How safe is it?
Who else has access to the data? If the employee who uploaded it leaves your company, can anyone else access it? What level of access do staff of the service provider have?
Can you perform eDiscovery across your repositories in the event of legal action?

The CIO usually has responsibility for information security and technology risk for the organization, even in scenarios where a particular application hasn’t been explicitly sanctioned by IT.

How should IT react?

Unfortunately, a common reaction to shadow IT is to lock things down—blocking cloud services and preventing employees from accessing them at work. Another strategy is to institute policies, that no one typically reads, in an attempt to shift the blame off of IT if things go wrong.

Creative commons (without censorship): Simon Wardley

Not surprisingly, this approach ultimately doesn’t work. Employees find ways to get around these constraints. It only serves to reduce employee satisfaction. Eventually, IT becomes less relevant in the organization.

IT must stop attempting to hold users back and instead embrace cloud services, effectively becoming a strategic partner to the business.

First and foremost, IT must transform from playing the role of a utility function to being a strategic enabler of business objectives. IT should directly influence revenue growth, cost reduction (in other areas of the business), minimize risks, and provide an engaging experience for employees. This is not to say that the utility functions of IT aren’t important. They are critical. But it’s time to start pushing these, where appropriate, to cloud providers like Microsoft and have your organization’s IT resources focus on the highest value tasks that directly impact business outcomes.

Infrastructure

Except in very specific cases where doing so provides a distinct competitive advantage, running large data centres will quickly become a thing of the past. Cloud providers are making investments on a scale not feasible by most organizations.

As an example, Microsoft has invested over $15 billion to-date in its global data centre infrastructure for Azure. Microsoft has more than 100 data centres and has just opened its first two Azure data centres in Canada.

Instead of allocating resources to managing servers and performing administrative tasks, IT leaders must look for ways to leverage cloud services and re-orient their resources to business enablement activities.

Application development

Application development within the enterprise must also change significantly. Enterprise platforms such as SharePoint or ERP systems are no longer on three to five-year upgrade cycles. Instead, vendors are rolling out incremental changes on a continuous basis. IT departments must reorient themselves to this new world and plan and manage projects and resources differently.

At Habanero, we’ve adopted an approach we refer to as Responsible Development in response to this. Customizations are considered only where absolutely needed to create an exceptional user experience that facilitates adoption or serves a specific business need. When customizations are deemed necessary, we take a cloud-first approach to development, even in cases where the solution will be deployed on-premises initially.

Security

Security of proprietary information, customer data, and other organizational data must remain a top priority for IT leaders; however, the approach must change from one of defaulting to locking everything down to one of embracing user needs and helping them to manage the risks. Capabilities should be implemented, such as mobile device management (MDM), that minimize roadblocks for users while at the same time mitigating risks to the organization.

Empowering users

The rise of shadow IT is being driven by employees who are looking to adopt technology to help them in their jobs. IT leaders should embrace this trend, encourage these users, and guide them in their use of technology. Once business stakeholders and other employees see that IT can help them meet their objectives, they will be more open to collaborating and involving IT leaders in strategic decisions affecting the future of the organization.

Records management: Focus on end-users' jobs

Wed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 -0700

You know the feeling. A bit of panic sets in. You have just received notice of a legal hold, or maybe been asked to collect documents and access records for an audit, or there is a FOIP request that has come your way.

Managing information for an organization is the core responsibility of the information or records manager but everyone creates, modifies and uses the information that needs to be managed. As a records manager have little to no control of how people work and yet your success is predicated on users properly managing their content. You need to make content management easy for your users. It needs to be as seamless as possible.

Having a successful information management program requires you work with all users of content in your organization, understand what they do, and implement strategies that support them in the work they do. The only way you can be successful in managing enterprise content is to ensure employees understand and use the systems and processes that information management requires. Herein lies the ultimate challenge.

Get to know what your end users do and what is important to them

To truly get a good understanding of what your end users jobs are like you need to step out of your work space and go talk with them, watch them work, and ask questions. You will gain so much more insight from this than only doing a content audit.

Determine how they access and interact with information.

Are they using laptops on the corporate network or using a tablet at a remote site?
Do they have to access content through VPN or other portal solution and how does this affect their experience?
Do they complete forms or use templates, and if so what does the download and upload process look like?
Is there content access based on business cycles, such as weekly reporting or monthly maintenance activities?
Are there any barriers which prevent people from interacting with the content and what workarounds do they use?

Ask employees about other information systems they routinely use. These may be transactional systems such as an accounting database, client management system, cloud solution for document exchange, or software-as-a-service site for tracking and reporting. If information is duplicated across these systems, there is no quicker win than removing duplicated manual effort by looking for a technological solution that can pass information from one system to another.

In addition to knowing what your end users’ jobs’ looks like, find out what is important to them and their team. Ask about departmental or organizational priorities and find a way to help the team address these priorities. Determine what poses the greatest risk to that department’s success and find out what they are getting measured to do. If you can help the team be successful and get them working in a way that supports information collecting and reporting, you will both win.

Understand your users’ content and how they interact with it

Enterprise content management is about content. It’s about how content is created, updated, shared, accessed, and eventually disposed—but the scope of content in organizations can be broad and fraught with complications. You can look at traditional types of content such as documents, spreadsheets, and presentations but more often you will see this content mixed with, audio, video, images, 3D renderings, drawings, and executable files. Content maybe stored on an internal server, in a remote hosted site, on computer desktops, on removable storage, and a whole combination of other options. Finally, you need to analyze in what ways content is being used and by whom—who is creating it, revising it, reviewing it, approving it or using it for reference.

Your win will come if you can make interactions with content smoother and easier for end users and at the same time collect the records you need. Any change in process or system presents challenges to overcome, but all you need is one or two team members to say is, “Wow, this new system is so much easier to use than <blank>!” Your upfront time and effort in planning and designing the system with the end user in mind will far outweigh the effort needed to unsuccessfully push a cumbersome solution through an organization.

Make your goal to support end users’ jobs

We need to shift our mind set about the way we approach enterprise content management in organizations. One of the important goals is records compliance and although we need to continue to educate and repeat how important records are in an organization, it is not a way to win.

Instead, try these tactics to gain users’ support:

Design and build systems for end users which focus on supporting their jobs and collect the records in the background.
Reduce friction and enhance the user experience for end users and they will be likely to correctly use the system that collects and maintains records.
Help users streamline processes, making them more effective and efficient (anything you do to make them more successful in the eyes of the organization will help win them over)
Remember your document management tasks will never be a priority for end users, so for you to be successful you need to sneak in records management while still driving the outcomes they need to achieve.

Is your process obvious or chaotic? Choose the right approach to solve enterprise problems

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0700

As someone who often works with business processes, process maps are common. Process maps are well used because they define processes in a way that is predictable, transparent, clear, and repeatable. They use a common framework—a start condition, an end condition, a series of steps in the middle, and some decisions—which enhances the map’s value as a communication tool. Well-mapped processes are convenient because they can be measured, benchmarked, and tracked.

The real world doesn’t always follow formalized decision pathways though, and this can create tensions between process designers and the individual that need to follow the processes. Employees often report processes can ignore the nuance in their work, remove the individuality they bring to their roles, and miss out on important edge cases.

In fact, many problems in the world fall outside the step-by-step solutions that flowcharting techniques lend themselves to.

In my role at Habanero, I commonly employ a framework called Cynefin to help understand the nature of a problem and identify where a process may be able to support it.

What is the Cynefin framework?

Cynefin describes four classes of systems (plus a disorder state). Each one is a different way to see a problem.

Obvious: The workings of this system is obvious to a reasonable person observing it. There is a best way solve a problem in a simple system that can be repeated each time.

For example: Opening a web browser on a PC

Complicated: The workings of a complicated problem require either expert knowledge or analysis to understand. Many valid solutions to a problem can exists in these types of systems.

For example: Repairing a computer that isn’t turning on.

Complex: The workings of a complex system can never be fully known. There are always agents in a complex system that act out of your control to some degree. Trying to perform the exact same steps in a complex system often doesn’t work because the agents can act differently each time. Your actions one time can change the agents’ future behaviours. The solution to a complex problem can only fully be understood in retrospect.

For example: Getting more people to use your intranet

Chaotic: In a chaotic system, the workings are completely unknowable. There are no patterns here, only turbulence. A chaotic system has no order, and must be given some to move towards a solution.

For example: Responding to a massive hacking attack

Using this framework to solve enterprise problems

I have found in my work that many requests for process automation come from problems in the “obvious” problem space. Obvious systems are the natural candidate for process automation because there is a right way of approaching the problem that can be followed each time.

Obvious problems are the easiest to manage, but it's important to avoid calling a complex problem an obvious one.

When we encounter complicated, complex, or chaotic problems, it becomes more challenging to create a process that will work for everyone. In the case of complex and chaotic systems, there can never be a fully documented process that addresses all the issues that can come up. Trying to create a process that manages problems completely in these spaces is often a mistake.

The opportunity I have found when presented with complicated, complex, or chaotic systems, is to ask two questions:

Is there a part of this system that would benefit by being given a repeatable process to follow?
Is there a management or coordination role that should exist in this system that could benefit from being given a defined process?

Often what I’ve heard in response, is that a defined process can play a supporting role in all types of systems. Asking the two questions listed above, and identifying which system type your problems falls into, can help identify where to start.

Problems of all sorts benefit from adding process, but the right process for a particular situation really unlocks the value. In obvious systems, this might mean a process is automated from end to end. In a chaotic situation like a fire in a city, processes like 9-1-1 and dispatch allow response vehicles to make it to the scene quickly by coordinating resources and prioritizing the most important calls. By understanding the nature of the system you’re working with, and engaging with the problem appropriately, it’s possible to deliver meaningful value in all areas of your business.

What is quality assurance?

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0700

Quality assurance is often one of the least understood aspects of the software development process. People can wrap their minds around the concepts of writing code, designing the interface, talking to end users to find out what they need, and managing the project, but then there’s this group of people in charge of judging the quality of what is produced.

“Quality” is a bit of a nebulous concept that is hard to define on its own, let alone trying to convey the differences between the various roles.

The difference between a QA tester, QA analyst, and QA architect is the degree to which you understand the solution you’re testing, the problem the solution is attempting to solve, the code and the platform the code sits on, the factors that affect the project that may not be spelled out but should be taken into account, and the individual needs of the end users that will be using the application.

Quality assurance tester

At the most basic level of QA, someone tests an application to see what it does given different inputs. At this level of understanding, you can find obvious errors, display issues, and things like the application having different behaviour based on if you access it via Internet Explorer vs. Chrome vs. Safari on an iPhone.

What this level of understanding will not be able to tell you is:

Does the solution do what it’s supposed to do? If you don’t know what it’s supposed to do, you can’t answer this question.
Does it have any undesirable behaviors? Again, if you don’t know what the solution is supposed to do, you are equally clueless about what it should never do.
How bad are the bugs that are there? Something that would be a huge problem in one project will be an acceptable limitation in another one.

To use an example from a project I worked on a few years ago, the application had a web part on the home page that said what time it was in the current user’s location, with a drop-down menu that allowed the user to see what time it was in other locations. A QA tester could get that application to the point where there are no obvious problems, but that’s as far as they can go.

In other words, a tester can tell you what they think is wrong with it, but if they don’t know that you wanted it in purple text and need it to support Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language characters, then they won’t recognize the fact that it doesn’t do either of those things as problems.

The quality of the solution depends on whether or not what it does addresses the problem it should be designed to solve. At this level of understanding, all you can do is tell stakeholders what the code does, and leave it up to the people who understand the concept better to figure out what to do with that information.

Quality assurance analyst

There are two approaches to being a QA analyst, which for the purpose of this article, I will refer to as top down and bottom up. We’ll start with top down.

At this level, you understand both the requirements and the solution. You have at least some basic context for the business problem that it’s attempting to solve, so you can offer opinions on how well the solution satisfies those requirements.

In my example above of the application that shows the time in different locations, the company it was designed for had offices all over the world, and people working in the Vancouver office may have to collaborate with someone working in the Santiago, Chile, office. Employees needed a way to see what time during business hours it was in that office. Someone who has this level of understanding of the functionality required will be able to tell you how closely the solution gets to fixing the problem it was designed to solve.

A QA analyst that takes a bottom up approach would have an understanding of the underlying code and platforms that are used. This will uncover problems that are much different from the QA analyst that is approaching it from the other perspective. In the “What Time Is It?” example, this person will know how the system will return that information if the source of truth is a SharePoint list vs. a third party application.

The greater the understanding this person has for the functions and limitations of the code that is being used to solve the problem, and the platform that the code sits on, the more precise their testing will be.

This is what elevates the level of testing from hacking and slashing blindly, to carving methodically, to a surgical strike that attacks the system at its most vulnerable points. This is the person that can tell you the Web Part breaks for time zones like Newfoundland (3.5 hours off of UTC) because the source of truth is passing in a decimal value and the Web Part is expecting a whole number.

Ideally, a QA analyst would combine both the top down view of looking at the solution from the point of view of the end user and the bottom up view of looking at it from the point of view of the code and platform.

A QA analyst that can see the whole problem and whole solution in this way will have a much more informed opinion on the quality of the system.

Quality assurance architect

As the understanding of the external factors that affect the project grows, you start to move into the realm of the QA architect. What things are not spelled out in the requirements, but will affect the team’s ability to solve the problem?

For the time Web Part, the QA architect will be raising concerns such as what impact daylight savings time will have on the solution. Since not all locations observe DST, and those that do might not necessarily observe it at the same time, what affect does that have on how we address this problem?

If we are using a SharePoint list to hold the names of the locations with offsets from UTC, that list will have to be updated at least once a year to add the start and end date for each location, and is that an acceptable limitation?

Conversely, if we are pulling that information from an external source, what impact will that have on the system performance if that call happens from the client side vs. the server side? If the call is client side, are there limits to the number of calls that can be made each day? Because 600 employees using the intranet every day with this Web Part on the home page would be thousands and thousands of calls. But if the call is server side, how often is that call being made and how is it being cached? And will this be a one-off solution, or should it be built so that it can be used on multiple projects?

QA architect will also structure the QA process for the project based on the customer requirements as far as deliverables and burdens of proof are concerned. A project for a customer that is ISO 13485 compliant will require much more exhaustive levels of documentation of what was tested, how, and by whom than a customer that just wants a thumbs up/thumbs down assessment of the solution.

A QA architect is basically someone who has reached this level of understanding of not only the requirements, solution, and platform, but also the things that need to be accounted for in the project plan as far as tools, training, and resourcing is concerned, before we can estimate how long it will take to deliver the project, and how much it will cost to do so.

So, does your project need a QA tester, a QA analyst, or a QA architect? I would need to know more about the problem that you’re trying to solve to be able to tell you that.

Habanero’s idea lab: Facilitating roundtable discussions

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0700

This post is co-authored with my colleague, Ellisa Calder. She recently helped me facilitate a roundtable on organizational change and workplace experiences. The “a-ha” insights here are thanks to many chats with her over coffee and tea in our Vancouver office kitchen.

Over the past year, we have hosted a number of roundtables at Habanero where we curate conversations with like-minded people across industries to explore concepts and ideas that influence our business. While the concept of this type of discussion is not unique, we hadn’t realized the impact or depth of this tool until recently. And boy, are we happy that we did!

A beautiful symbiosis has emerged between us and the participants at each roundtable event, regardless of the subject we explore or the participants who attend. It’s truly a mutual benefit for everyone:

Roundtable participants get to:

Grow their network of like-minded colleagues

We explicitly invite individuals from diverse organizations that are pursuing similar goals or are faced with similar challenges. Our roundtable conversations are as rich as they are because of the people in the room. Sometimes they already know each other, but just as often, our participants are meeting for the first time. It’s not uncommon during breaks in the session to find folks either reconnecting or making plans to stay in touch after the event.

Share perspectives on a similar issue

Roger Martin, the director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management and the Ontario premier’s chair in productivity and competitiveness, sums up the power of co-inquiry perfectly: "How many times do you get a blinding insight out of your own head? You get to blinding insight when you listen to somebody and take that little snippet of logic or data or whatever, merge it with something that is in your head and — whammo — out comes a new interesting thought."

It’s extremely rewarding for participants to hear how peers are tackling familiar challenges (successfully or not!) in an authentic, safe and vulnerable space. This authenticity leads to deep connection that lasts beyond the time in the room.

Put learning and insights into immediate action

Through sharing each others’ perspectives and experiences, as well as our opinions or hypotheses, participants leave the roundtables with a list of ideas, tools and techniques, and suggestions they can apply immediately to their organization. After our last roundtable on organizational change, one participant said he’d “learned a lot yesterday and implemented some of it in meetings today – people are already sick of me asking what elevation we are considering a challenge or opportunity from!”

See what working with Habanero is like

We invite participants to our offices and facilitate the roundtables in the same way in which we work with organizations and project teams. We use collaboration and design thinking techniques to ultimately create something more valuable than the sum of its parts. The roundtables are like a Habanero amuse-bouche!

In this environment, we enter as individuals, but leave the roundtable feeling more like a team. We end with feeling inspired about what's working at some organizations and what could be possible at our own and everyone leaves with a new network to connect with for future conversations.

As facilitators, we get to:

Validate our ideas in a safe space

What better testing ground for our beliefs and hypotheses than with current clients and peers in a setting that naturally lends itself to discussion and debate? During the research, exploration and delivery of projects, we often start to see patterns and develop insights. We may discuss these concepts with clients in one-on-one settings, but the roundtable discussion format lets us to dive deep into an idea, share experiences, accelerate our thinking, and see how these sound to potential clients.

Discuss different ways we can work with clients to improve their business

Once an idea feels fully validated and if it’s aligned with our overall strategy, we incorporate it into our offerings. This is a delicate process though; ideas and hypotheses don't always correspond one-to-one with an offering. We need to validate with the market that what we are proposing to sell actually has value to an organization.

Extend our facilitator skills

As consultants and design thinkers, we facilitate a lot of workshops. Most of our facilitation takes place within the context of a project and within one organization. These multi-organization roundtables provide us with a unique opportunity to facilitate groups of stakeholders that come from diverse backgrounds or companies, each with their own perspectives.

Build empathy and understand our participants’ organizational realities

The solutions we develop are as good as they are because we co-create with our clients. Empathy is instrumental in our project process, ensuring that what we design and develop makes sense within the complex organizations in which it will live. Roundtables provide us with a similar opportunity to incorporate empathy-oriented insights into our ideas and beliefs and subsequently become better consultants.

We’ve held roundtables on topics like employee lifecycle and onboarding, safety, technology topics, and organizational change, among others. If you’d like to participate in future roundtables, please get in touch.

A primer on content types and column scopes in SharePoint 2013

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0700

Some context

I often work with a records management add-on for SharePoint, Collabware CLM. Collabware CLM, with proper and extensive configuration, enables seamless, transparent, and automatic handling of records in SharePoint while users work normally in a SharePoint portal or team site.

In order to carry out this user-friendly records management, CLM depends on content types and SharePoint columns (metadata) to classify content. Trying to come up with the perfect information architecture that balances users’ and CLM’s requirements involves being creative with columns and content types. In order to achieve more flexibility in dealing with a large number of columns and content types that are created in many Collabware CLM implementation projects, I try to use a mix of local and global columns.

In this post, I will share some of my learnings around the list, site, and content type hub level instances of columns and content types.

Please note this post is not about introducing columns and content types. It is only about documenting some behavior as it relates to the scoped copies of columns and content types. If you want to learn more about content types, columns, and metadata in SharePoint, you can easily find information on MSDN, TechNet, and other online sources.

How are content types (and columns) published from the content type hub?

Content types, when published at the content type hub level are dependent on a set of “content type subscriber” timer jobs that exist for each web application in the farm that subscribes to the content type hub. This job, that is scheduled by default to run every hour, creates copies of all content types that exist in the hub in each of the site collections in the subscriber web application.

Any columns created in the content type hub and attached to a published content type will also be pushed along with the content type.

A bit about the scope of content types (and columns)

Any content type you create in content type hub will be available to all site collections in subscriber web apps. We can call them global content types as they are scoped at the farm level in most cases.
When the content type subscriber timer job runs and completes, it creates copies of content types in content type hub in each site collection. These copies of global content types exist at the site collection level. If you create any content types at the site collection level (instead of the content type hub), those content types will be scoped at the site collection level and will only be available to the lists and libraries in that site collection. They will not be available to any other site collections in the web application or to the rest of the farm.
If you create a new content type in a subsite, it will be available to all lists and libraries—and any sub-subsites—but not to any other subsites or site collections. This content type will be scoped at the subsite level.
You cannot create a content type at a list or library level. However, you can add any of the content types scoped at global, site collection, or site/subsite level to a list or library that exists in the same scope. When you do add the content type to the list or library, a local copy of the content type is created at the list or library level. This copy of the content type is scoped at the list/library level.

Note: All of the above information about scopes and copies applies similarly to columns as well.

What do all these copies mean?

All these different scopes and copies can provide a lot of flexibility when you are trying to configure content types. They can also result in a lot of confusion and lost metadata and columns if you are not careful.

Essentially, SharePoint will let you edit copies of content types and columns at all of the scopes except the subsite level. You can create columns and content types at the subsite level but you cannot edit subsite scoped copies of higher level columns and content types.

Let’s work through an example to make this (slightly) easier to understand:

You create a content type in the content type hub called "Finance Document" and (create and) add a choice column called "Document Type" to it
You publish the content type
A timer job, “content type subscriber,” will run and create a copy of the "Finance Document" content type at the site collection level. Let’s call this Copy 1 of Finance Document content type.
You add the content type to a document library.
A copy of content type “Finance Document” will be created at the library level (in truth it is a child of Finance Document with the same name and columns but mixing copies and child content types can be quite confusing so for the sake of simplicity let us pretend that it is a copy and not a child). Let’s call this Copy 2 of Finance Document.

So now, you have three total instances of the Finance Document content type:

Original Finance Document Content Type
Copy 1 of Finance Document Content Type
Copy 2 of Finance Document Content Type

Why bother with copies of the content types and columns?

While this will probably have limited application for most of the farms but when you run into a scenario that could benefit from scoped copies, it will likely have to do with being able to customize the copies (of columns and/or content types) at a lower level without impacting the copies at higher or similar level.

Taking the above example of Finance Document, it could mean that I can edit the Copy 2 of Finance Document (scoped at the library level) and add a column called "Finance Document Status" to that copy only. It will not be added to Copy 1 or the original content type.

Some observations

Based on my experience in working with content type hub, content types, columns, and their copies, I have some observations here in no particular order that may save you some headache or research time. These should be especially helpful if you ever find yourself in need of editing narrowly scoped copies of columns or content types:

There is no timer job that publishes columns that you create in content type hub. Only columns that are attached to a content type that is then published will make it to the subscriber site collections. You can create a dummy content type, if needed, to serve as a transport for columns that you want to publish globally.
The web interface will not let you create columns or content types that have the same display name. Names for columns and content types are a finite resource at each scope and should be used carefully. Try to avoid creating a choice column called "Document Status" with values "Draft, Final" at content type hub level when configuring a site for IT because document status for finance may require values of "approved, signed, superseded" and for communications may require "published, unpublished.” One way to address these differences can be to add a suffix to the column (HR Document Status, Finance Document Status, Communication Document Status). Another can be to create the document column at the site collection level for the department instead of the global level.
Columns and content types are identified by the system by their internal names or GUIDs and not by display name. So if you were to change the Display name of a column's copy at the site collection level (say from "Finance Document Status" to "Document Status") that name will stay changed even if the global content type is republished at the hub level with additional columns. The only time the name change will revert is if you make changes to the global copy of the same column (change name, choice values, default value, required status etc.) and then publish the content type. For example, if you change the name of column to "Fin Document Status" and then republish the content type, then the name of column in the site collection copy of the column will change to "Fin Document Status" from "Document Status."
If additional values are added to a local copy of a choice column, these values will survive republishing of the global content type as long as the global column is not altered before any of the republishes. If the global column is altered, it will get published and will remove the additional values added to the local copy of the choice column. However, the values assigned to documents/items will continue to stick around until the properties of the document/item are edited, at which stage the user will be required to select a correct value that exists in available choices.
Changes to term store values used in a managed metadata column do not constitute changes to the column. Therefore, adding new terms to a term set will not trigger update of the column if the content type is republished.Changing the term set that is used by the column will be a changed to the column property and will trigger an update when the content type is published.
If a locally scoped original column (i.e. column created at site collection) is added to a content type (or library) and a column with same name is created at global level and added to the global copy of the content type, then the content type (or library) using the local column will have two columns with same name (but different field IDs). This will confuse the users and allow them to add both columns to the views and retain their values separately.
There is no subsite level copy of columns or content types. You can create new columns or content types scoped at subsite level and they will be available for use in all of the list/libraries/sites in the subsite.
If you simply add a column to a list/library instead of adding it to the list/library level copy of the content type, then that column does not appear in the edit and display forms for the items in the library. You have to resort to the quick edit (data sheet) view to be able to fill in or update values for the column.

Here are some links from MSDN on this topic if you just can’t get enough of this content type goodness:

Introduction to content types (MSDN)

Site and list content types (MSDN)

Content type scope (MSDN)

Updating content types (MSDN)

Updating child content types (MSDN)

Employee onboarding: Three things experience design taught us

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0700

Onboarding has long been a passion for us at Habanero as it deeply resonates with our vision of helping people and organizations thrive. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we recently decided to apply experience design methodology to our own onboarding experience.

What do we mean by experience design?

Instead of creating yet another definition of experience design, I’ll share one from Emile H.L. Aarts and Stefano Marzano that I find particularly helpful:

“Experience design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions.”

At Habanero, we wanted to shift the altitude at which we view and evaluate our onboarding experience. In other words, if we were looking at onboarding experience from a 100-foot perspective, we would want to escalate the perspective to a 10,000-foot view. By doing so, we could effectively see all of the potential channels, relationships, and impacts on onboarding at Habanero—whether it’s the hierarchy of our organization, the role of our employee portal, or even the layout of our offices.

What’s our process?

To follow through with the experience design approach, we landed on three core work streams:

Understand our own onboarding story

The first step was to assess and understand the current state of onboarding at Habanero. Although we, the project team, could each draw from our own experience, we extended our interview scope to include folks across the organization including new Habanero employees, IT, finance, staffing, office administration, performance managers, and employee experience stakeholders. From these sessions, we were able to develop a shared understanding of successes and areas requiring improvement.

We also held a session with members of the leadership team to identify the business drivers for improving onboarding: increasing productivity, gaining role clarity, developing acceptance of culture, and building self-efficacy.

Capture today’s experience

The next step we took was to use experience design tools and techniques to understand what the journey and experiences were like for new employees and managers.

We started with an empathy mapping technique with each of our audiences to understand how each of them is thinking, feeling, hearing, seeing, and doing throughout the onboarding experience.

This portion of an empathy map captures what an audience is hearing. You can follow this same process for thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing as well—all critical points when mapping and improving an experience.

From there, we collaborated with representatives from each audience to create experience maps that identified all of the moments in the process that added up to the collective onboarding experience. We were then able to reveal critical moments, along with the factors that shaped these instances, which highlighted where things go well for new employees and where the experience falls short.

Above is an example of an experience map, including the areas for improvement and what’s working well.

Create the future experience

Armed with our organization’s onboarding story and opportunities we identified, we crafted a vision, a set of guiding design principles and a roadmap for evolving the onboarding system.

For example, one of our guiding principles was to emphasize people first to ensure that we wouldn’t lose sight of the emotional experience of everyone involved.

This principle is evident in subtle ways throughout the onboarding solution we developed, such as including photos of everyone involved in the process so that the new employee can put a face to a name and know who to reach out to for support.

The experience map and roadmap have since become the playbook for our future onboarding work with all the people, process, and technology dimensions of the onboarding system.

What did we learn?

Don’t start with technology, but expect to get there eventually

For an organization that prides itself on innovative technology solutions, this may come as a surprise, but we were confident going into this that building a technical solution alone wasn’t going to resolve all of the pain points with our onboarding process. Experience design helps us consider all of the possible channels that onboarding encompasses (both online and offline) and supports the rationale for any technical solution we may eventually implement.

Early in the process we realized that a few of Habanero’s business drivers could be complemented by technology, but social and cultural considerations would play an equally instrumental role.

One of our business drivers is to ensure new employees have increased clarity in their role. To this end, we assessed a number of experiences in the hiring process related to this driver. What we discovered was that by simply moving the job title from after the employee was hired to before the offer letter was signed, we were able to improve the onboarding experience for all parties involved because we started with role clarity rather than seemingly addressing it as an afterthought.

Don’t overlook what’s working well

While it was tempting to immediately hone in on the pain points, we also wanted to be mindful of the areas of the process that were currently working well. The experience mapping process we followed ensured that it was just as easy for us to profile the high points as it was to analyze the low points for opportunities.

This was also a great reminder to recognize the people who were already doing great work and creating positive experiences for new employees. There were a number of good experiences we wanted to make great in addition to resolving pain points and frustration.

One example was evolving our digital resource library for new employees. We have a number of recommended readings that are relevant for all new employees, but we realized that providing role-specific resources was being left up to the new employee’s performance manager. In some cases, the new employee and the manager shared similar expertise and interest spaces, but in other cases where each had different roles at Habanero, the manager would have to do more digging. One centralized resource library with role-specific recommendations was proposed to take something that was working well and make it better for everyone involved.

Be consistent where it matters

Consistency was a hot topic throughout the research process. On one hand, there’s a desire to ensure that every new employee has a similar experience. On the other, each new employee is different and each of our offices has its own variation of the broader Habanero culture.

Ultimately, by putting experience design into practice internally at Habanero, we were able to reveal insights and opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have uncovered.

Why you should upgrade your SharePoint intranet

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0700

With the recent release of SharePoint 2016, there’s a lot of chatter about whether it makes sense to upgrade to this latest version of the platform, to SharePoint Online, or whether to upgrade at all.

If you have SharePoint in your organization as a collaboration tool for projects, teams, and groups or as an enterprise-wide platform for employee communication, engagement, and enterprise social, making the decision to upgrade is one that can be influenced by a number of factors.

We’ve had quite a bit of experience working through the upgrade process with our enterprise clients and have navigated the various considerations for organizations to invest in a newer version of SharePoint and what benefits they can expect in the short and long-term (see my colleague Chris Radcliffe's recent post on lessons learned from a SharePoint upgrade).

Here are some of the top reasons we hear from our clients who may be considering upgrading, whether to SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint Online.

Your current intranet has poor adoption

There are likely a number of factors that contribute to poor adoption of your intranet, but you may not be sure exactly what they are. Is it content? Features? Governance? An upgrade is a perfect opportunity to explore the reason behind the challenges your organization faces with adoption.

Rather than merely upgrade the technology and inherit the same problems onto a newer version of the platform, an upgrade is the time to seek out improvements that could be of highest value for your business.

Consulting with end users, field workers, and business owners can provide your organization with the opportunity to align the stakeholders around a vision for the portal and implement that vision during the upgrade (see my colleague Meghan Armstrong's posts on creating a design vision and developing a roadmap for your portal). These pre-implementation activities are great ways to improve adoption of a new or upgraded intranet, and help to restore trust in your solution.

Takeaway: A roadmap that addresses user needs and aligns with business objectives can a be a key driver of increased user adoption during an upgrade initiative.

Your organization wants to increase online collaboration and social connection

Enterprise software has come a long way in the past few years. Many of the social features that we see in our personal lives have the potential to help us connect and collaborate with our colleagues professionally. There's a whole new generation of workers who expect an organization's collaborative experience to be similar to how they connect outside the firewall.

If your organization hasn’t introduced social and collaborative tools to the workforce officially, you can bet that employees are using unsanctioned software and online tools to fill the gaps until you do. Not only is it risky and non-compliant to house enterprise data outside approved repositories, it diffuses the benefit of social connection and collaboration by spreading knowledge across disparate channels.

Our work with clients consistently shows employees at all levels inside enterprises crave basic social tools that help them to discover colleagues, work collaboratively on projects, and comment and respond to content. If you are using an older version of SharePoint—such as SharePoint 2007 or 2010—those features don't exist at all, let alone more advanced social scenarios like sharing kudos, best practices, and experience. Tools integrated into the Office 365 suite such as Yammer, Delve, and OneDrive can quickly open up sanctioned social collaboration and be deployed as part of an upgrade.

Takeaway: An upgrade provides organizations with the opportunity to introduce modern systems of communication and collaboration and provide official channels for thriving internal networks.

You want to offer self-serve and targeted tools to employees

One of the key business drivers for an intranet is providing employees with access to the tools they need to do their jobs. The latest versions of SharePoint (either online or on-premises), provide the opportunity to easily create content targeting that tailors resources for employees by role, geographic location, or other parameters that work for your organization.

Combining metadata with information such as Active Directory roles provides employees with easy access to features like toolkits that provide access to policies, procedures, checklists, and resources most relevant to their jobs.

Takeaway: Taking the time during an upgrade to map your content and functionality by role or location can result in more efficient, effective employees.

Your platform is no longer supported

If you are using a SharePoint platform that is no longer supported by Microsoft, not only are you likely falling behind the latest features and functionality that could positively contribute to improved collaboration and productivity in your organization, you could also be putting your organization at risk.

Once a platform is no longer supported, serious issues like security updates and patches stop being released, exposing potential flaws or vulnerabilities as technologies change. You may also find that its difficult to find staff or partners who can and will support the platform, putting the maintenance and evolution of mission-critical tools at risk.

Takeaway: Upgrading to the latest version of SharePoint will ensure your organization is protected by the latest security updates.

You are faced with cuts to your IT budget

Upgrading older versions of SharePoint to the cloud can often be justified by IT cost savings in the areas of licensing optimization, physical infrastructure, and support resources. In an upgrade to Office 365 or Azure, significant IT costs can be either removed from the equation or significantly reduced.

An additional benefit is often cited in the realm of scalability, where the cloud-based subscription model allows organizations to scale up or down quickly when needed and only pay for the users they have.

Takeaway: Organizations can realize significant IT savings when upgrading by taking advantage of licensing and IAAS options.

Your organization needs a better mobile experience

If you are on an older version of SharePoint, it's unlikely that your employee portal has a great mobile experience. Or frankly, any mobile experience at all. The investment in mobile experiences inside enterprise organizations lags behind adoption in the consumer world, but is starting to catch up.

There are great scenarios for investing in the mobile experience, especially for those employees who work without regular access to a desktop experience. Investing in targeted apps or fully responsive mobile portals allows for instant delivery of essential communications, access to key safety information or procedures in context while in the field, or product information for retail workers on any supported mobile device.

Takeaway: An upgrade is an excellent opportunity to understand the mobile scenarios that you need to support to help your employees do their jobs.

Any or all of these factors may be on your mind as you consider a SharePoint upgrade for your organization. It's important to understand which ones are most important to you and your stakeholders and how that might influence your upgrade strategy and decisions.

We can help you with your upgrade strategy by sharing our experience with other organizations like yours and making the best recommendations just for you.

Want a faster way to build an intranet in SharePoint and Office 365?

Learn how companies are creating the world’s best SharePoint and Office 365 intranets with Habanero’s Go Intranet Accelerator.

Intranet upgrade lessons learned: Moving to SharePoint 2013

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0700

Are you upgrading your intranet to SharePoint 2013 or investigating SharePoint 2016?

Lots of companies struggle shifting to a newer version of SharePoint and for good reason.

We’ve recently completed a pretty complicated migration to SharePoint 2013 for Goldcorp, a Canadian mining company with 18,000 employees and mining operations in Canada, Mexico, Central and South America.

I thought I'd pull together some of the migration lessons learned to pay it forward for anyone about to go through a similar experience! You can find out more about the new intranet in our upcoming webinar or see some screenshots in the Goldcorp intranet case study on our website.

And now for the SharePoint migration lessons learned:

Clarifying the scope and name of the initiative is a good first step

It may sound silly, but many organizations misrepresent what an intranet redevelopment is all about. Traditional terminology is to “upgrade to a newer version”, although in SharePoint parlance that actually implies the method and refers to an in-place upgrade. For SharePoint you cannot upgrade across multiple versions, say from 2007 to SP2013. When moving from SP2010 to SP2013, you can no longer perform the in-place upgrade. You have two options: Database-Attach or Migration using third party tools or custom scripts. My first suggestion is to make sure whatever you call the initiative, that you have a name that resonates with the business and make sure the technical folks understand that the name may not imply the approach.

Migration tools are not a silver bullet

Despite how advanced many of the top migration tools are, we found that there isn’t a one size fits all approach. Moving site collections are very different from moving workflows or pages with rich managed meta-data. Choose your tool and approach wisely based on the scope of what you are needing to move.

Redesigning the intranet is a double-edged sword

Many companies want to redesign and improve their intranet when they tackle an upgrade to a new version. Others are adamant about keeping to a like-for-like upgrade where the structure and experience doesn’t change. The unfortunate reality is that while it is really valuable to redesign and improve an intranet’s experience, the more you change the structure the more risk and change management is required. On the flip side, if you improve nothing then the business naturally will feel the initiative offered no incremental value. I think a healthy balance of both perspectives is wise.

Build a solid content inventory or audit

I can’t stress this enough. A complete content audit will save you a lot of money and pain when it comes time to migrate. The audit can help tell you what exists in terms of the current structure and creating a content map will make the connection between the current and future structure. You can run a script or pre-migration assessment to map out what exists and investigate the “Site Contents” to see what content lurks within each of the sites. Once you have a solid map in place you can build a migration approach and start testing out the approach. This isn't sexy work, but you will be the hero if you do it right and everyone will be thankful of your efforts in the long run.

Big bang or iterative?

While it can sometimes feel more satisfying and complete to migrate all the content in one big bang, it amplifies the risk and change required by end users. An alternate approach is to consider a more gradual migration roll-out. This may require end users to get used to the idea of a new solution being in beta or a work-in-progress experience, but it may reduce and control the potential for negative impact occurring to specific scoped areas.

Clean-up what you can, but don’t try to boil the ocean

Old site permissions and inactive sites can really complicate a migration process. Everyone agrees an upgrade is a great excuse to clean-up, but what can be really tricky is finding an owner of a piece of content or a site. Many sites become inactive, and aren’t properly retired which can bloat the migration effort and complicate the user experience. Striking a balance is key prior to launch. If you wait too long to make the clean-up perfect, you might be waiting forever and never get to the new solution.

QA the moved content

Sounds obvious, but once you’ve run some initial tests of your content migration approach, it is important to run quality assurance tests and user acceptance tests of the new migrated content. To the migration team, it may look like everything moved across properly. But with a more rigorous testing approach or with owners of the content, you may find that lists are missing, web parts didn’t make it or perhaps the left navigation didn’t make it across properly.

If you have any lessons learned from a SharePoint 2013 upgrade or are curious to learn more, leave a comment below!

Want a better way to build an intranet in SharePoint or Office 365?

Learn how companies are creating the world’s best SharePoint and Office 365 intranets with Habanero’s Go Intranet Accelerator.

Things to know before beginning a multilingual SharePoint project

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0700

Background context

We wrapped up a large SharePoint 2013 implementation project last year that involved managed metadata, search, and a multilingual user interface feature. Each of these features work fine on their own, but when you put them together, the out-of-the-box behaviour is not what one would expect. It is most likely the integration of these features is only 80 per cent done. This post will talk about the less-then-desired behaviours and the solutions we have to address them.

Requirements for this multilingual SharePoint intranet engagement:

The new solution delivers team sites that support multiple languages. The previous solution had a separate team site per language. The client would like to consolidate language sites into a single site.
The solution should allow users to apply multilingual metadata (term set) to content and should be able to find the content by the metadata in any of the supported languages.
The solution should present a refiner in the user’s preferred language for the multilingual metadata.
The solution should present content written in the user’s preferred language.

Challenges

First, the Microsoft answer to the multilingual requirement is to use Variation, which we can’t use. We need to deliver a single team site that contains multilingual content. The good news is that you can have a multilingual site title, list title, web part title, and list column display within a single team site. However, the SharePoint search engine indexes content in the default language of the SharePoint Server installation.

This causes the following behaviours:

If you have a site with site title “team site” in English and “sitio de equipo” in Spanish and if the default language is English, you will get no search result for keyword “sitio de equipo.”
If you have a document tagged with a multilingual term “department” in English and “departamento” in Spanish and if the default language is English, search won’t return the document for keyword “departamento.”
If the multilingual termset is used in the refinement panel Web Part, the refiner only shows the English label of the term even though the term may have multilingual labels defined.
The content search Web Part only shows the English label even if you use a multilingual termset for your metadata.

Although these behaviors are documented as by-design on TechNet, they are hardly acceptable in any standard. Besides, the first three requirements are not being met by the SharePoint multilingual user interface feature.

This is not to criticize SharePoint; remember SharePoint is designed to solve 80 per cent of business problems. Our problem just happened to fall into the 20 per cent scenario that SharePoint was not designed to handle. Luckily, this is when a custom solution comes to the rescue.

These problems are so deep and critical to the organization that it should be easy to justify a custom solution because if you don’t address these search issues, it is guaranteed Spanish users will become frustrated that SharePoint search doesn’t work. We know from experience that what will follow is people will not trust the system, stop putting documents in SharePoint, and refuse to use it all together.

Solution

A well-defined problem is halfway to being solved. The solution about to be mentioned sounds subtle and trivial, however, a scalable implementation of the solution is not a easy task.

To make search find content by keyword in the non-default language, one solution is to use a synonym for “departamento” and “department” such that search will find content tagged with “department” when Spanish users search for “departamento.” This sounds basic, but remember these pieces of content are dynamic, end-user generated content.

To do this:

Create a pair of synonyms to expand search for every taxonomy term label from non-default language to the default language.
Create a pair of synonyms to expand search for multilingual list title.
Create a pair of synonyms to expand search for multilingual site title.
To make the refinement multilingual, you would create a custom multilingual filter display template and programmatically fetch the correct language label for each refiner. A good client-side caching strategy should be considered.

Two things to consider:

There is a out-of-the-box API for registering multilingual text: $registerResourceDictionary. You may not want to use it because it expects you register all the multilingual values first and then use Srch.U.loadResource() to fetch the value back later. These APIs are great for a static resource like the title of the refiner but not the refiner values. The same technique can be used to make the content search Web Part support multiple languages.
To roll up language-specific content respecting a user’s language preference, it should be quite easy because SharePoint automatically detects the language as it indexes the content. However, our project had a unique requirement where certain documents are not translated into the other language and need to be presented to all users regardless of their language preference. We needed a way to change the alter the detected language by SharePoint somehow. If you like to know how we override the detected language, let us know by writing a comment below.

Personalizing experiences in SharePoint: What you need to know before you start

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Throughout many years in SharePoint university, we are told time and time again about this awesome feature called user profiles and how it can be enhanced to provide rich, personalized experiences for employees in our clients’ organizations. But, is it worth the trouble? Let me tell you a little story about adding custom user profile properties to your tenant.

In the interest of those who skipped class, I’m going to define a few concepts before moving onto the story.

What is a user profile in SharePoint?

In SharePoint, a user profile is a collection of properties that uniquely describe a single user. As a SharePoint Online admin, you can create new properties to track information generally not available out-of-the-box.

For example, certain organizations are spread out across multiple geographical regions. This could impact the way internal communicators broadcast different types of communications. A news piece is one type of communication that regional differences may affect. Most geographically-dispersed organizations understand users in the different regions generally have a preference for consuming content specific to their region, rather than stumbling upon bunches of content from different places.

The backstory to personalizing a SharePoint user experience

Let’s pretend you are SharePoint specialist for a Canadian organization distributed across four regions: Western Canada, Central Canada, Atlantic Canada and Northern Canada.

The head of communications gets in touch with you and says:

“Hey, I noticed you have some spare time this week so I was wondering if you could implement some kind of tool in our intranet for publishing news content that can be targeted to a particular region. Also, while you are there, could we add a refiner to our people search so we can filter users based on region?”

You roll-up your sleeves and tell him/her:

“Absolutely, I can make that work for you!”

Yet you think and think and come up with the conclusion that you need to create a custom user profile property to store this kind of information for each user. With this data in place you would be able target news content to a particular region and add a new refiner to your people search, you think.

Bumps along the way to creating a personalized experience

User profiles have definitely helped organizations become more social and enhanced the overall user experience through things like profile pages, people searching, expertise search and more. But, we are living in a different world now and the tools organizations have access to are evolving pretty fast. Let’s try to understand what has changed.

Not all active directory attributes make it to SharePoint Online

You set-up DirSync on your client's infrastructure to bring your information from Active Directory up to the cloud and the first thing you notice is you are missing a bunch of properties. Why?

DirSync synchronizes your Active Directory (AD) information up into Azure Active Directory (AAD). After that, there is a replication that goes from AAD into the SharePoint/Office 365 service; this only brings a subset of the overall AD properties into SharePoint and it can't be customized!

You will need to build a custom solution to fill-in this gap. Dust off the best PowerShell book in your collection and create a job that will update user profile properties based on Azure Active Directory (or an external line of business application, whatever the case may be).

Full crawls on user profiles are in danger of extinction

Next, you jump into your SharePoint admin center and create a custom user profile property to track region information and you figure something is not right. So you try a few things:

You use an out-of-the-box refinable string and map it to your custom crawled property. You wait, wait... and wait some more; no results
You create a custom managed property and map it to your custom crawled property. You wait, wait... and wait some more; no results
Out of desperation, you edit an existing managed property to remove the existing mapping and add a new one to your custom crawled property. You wait, wait... and wait some more; no results!

Yes, you have now reached the point where you need to get in touch with Microsoft support and here is, if you are lucky, what you are going to find out:

First of all, there are no full-crawls (that run on user profiles) scheduled in SharePoint Online. Ironically, whenever you create custom user profile properties, a full crawl is required.
You probably need to open a ticket with Microsoft support every time you add a new property so they can manually force a full crawl on your tenant. This could take a couple of escalations so be patient and be nice to the people you talk to through-out this process.

Now here is where it gets interesting, before you call and speak with Microsoft about a full crawl, you will need to do the following:

Create a custom managed property and map it to your custom crawled property
Select a RefinableString of your liking and map it to your custom crawled property
Ensure your crawled property mappings are set to both managed properties: the one you created in step one and the RefinableString you chose in step two

With this in place, you can now proceed to open a ticket with Microsoft and kindly ask them to manually execute a full crawl in your environment so your custom user profile properties are indexed properly, which will finally give you the ability to search and refine by such properties.

What we have learned

All-in-all it seems like an okay process for some but believe me, this can be quite painful during development when you have tight timelines. It can be very time consuming and frustrating moving through the different phases to get regional profiles and personalization working.

Is it worth the trouble? Whenever planning on personalizing experiences in SharePoint, take some extra time to think this through and put some questions back on your stakeholders’ plate to really understand the requirements. In the cloud world, things are evolving so fast you never know when you could come across a toolset that can deliver the value you are looking for with a lower effort than the alternatives.

The bottom line is that personalized experiences have great potential to benefit users in a lot of organizations, but executing this SharePoint feature can come with a cost that your stakeholders need to consider before moving forward.

Creating a custom field validator in Sitecore

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0800

In a perfect world, users and content authors would be relied upon to enter valid content—content that matches the requires for a certain field, such as author name, title, or body content.

Unfortunately, this scenario is rarely the case which is why using validators can ensure that content authors are entering valid content, thus preventing any issues with site functionality, and layout or information architecture.Sitecore comes with a set of out-of-the-box validation rules for common scenarios such as required fields, max length restrictions, email addresses and more. However, there will be cases where the out-of-the-box validation rules don’t meet your needs. This is where creating custom validation rules will come in. Fortunately, this is a relatively straightforward process.

Creating the custom validator

We’re going to use a validator that we created to validate that a general link field includes a value in the link description field (to use as the text for our link) as an example.

First, create the custom validator, which extends StandardValidator from the Sitecore namespace.

[Serializable]
namespace Habanero.Project.Validators
{
	// This validator ensures that the description attribute of a link is specified
	public class LinkTextValidator : StandardValidator
	{
		public override string Name
		{
			get { return "Link text validator"; }
		}

		public LinkTextValidator() {}

		public LinkTextValidator(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) : base(info, context) { }

		protected override ValidatorResult Evaluate()
		{
			Field field = this.GetField();
			if (field == null)
				return ValidatorResult.Valid;

			string str1 = this.ControlValidationValue;
			if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(str1) || string.Compare(str1, "", StringComparison.InvariantCulture) == 0)
				return ValidatorResult.Valid;

			XmlValue xmlValue = new XmlValue(str1, "link");
			string attribute = xmlValue.GetAttribute("text");
			if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(xmlValue.GetAttribute("text")))
				return ValidatorResult.Valid;

			this.Text = this.GetText("Description is missing in the link field \"{0}\".", field.DisplayName);
			// return the failed result value defined in the parameters for this validator; if no Result parameter
			// is defined, the default value FatalError will be used
			return this.GetFailedResult(ValidatorResult.CriticalError);
		}

		protected override ValidatorResult GetMaxValidatorResult()
		{
			return this.GetFailedResult(ValidatorResult.Error);
		}
	}
}

To ensure that our custom validator works with the validator button, we need to add the serializable attribute to the class as well as define the constructors. Otherwise, the validator button would throw an exception. We also override the Name property and the Evaluate method. This is where we add our custom validation code.

As you can see, we first perform some basic null checking to ensure that the field, and ControlValidationValue are not null or empty. If either of those values are empty, we return a Valid result so that the field isn’t validated any further (we only want to validate the text property if the link field has a value). We then check the value of the “text” attribute, and if this value is null, or empty, we define custom error text, and return a “CriticalError” validator result so that the author knows that there is an error, but is still able to save (more on this below).

Creating the validation rule in Sitecore

Now that we’ve created our custom validator, we need to add the validation rule item in Sitecore. Field validators are located in /sitecore/system/Settings/Validation Rules/Field Rules/.

Notice that we point the type to our custom-created class and that we’re assigning the “Result” parameter the value of “FatalError.” All validators have a parameter titled “Result” which determines what the default result of the validator will be. Values for this parameter are:

Valid
Suggestion
Warning
Error
CriticalError (Author is warned, but is still allowed to save)
FatalError (Author is prevented from saving the item)

By passing in a value to the “Result” parameter here, we can override the default value we set in code (CriticalError). You might wonder why we’re doing this, so let me explain.

You may want to apply different validation behaviour depending on how validation is triggered. In our case, we wanted validation to fatally fail and not complete the workflow, but we still wanted the author to be able to save their work and not lose progress. To accomplish this, we created two validation rule items, both pointing to the same validation class, but each passing in a different “Result” parameter (CriticalError and FatalError).

Applying the validation rule to your field

Now that we’ve created a couple rules, we want to apply them to our field requiring validation.

To do so, select the according field on the template you want to validate, and expand the “Validation Rules” section. You’ll notice there are four places to add validation; Quick Action Bar (which runs validation in the bar left of the content tree), Validate Button (which runs validation after clicking the Validation button in the review tab), Validator Bar (which runs when you save the item, and in the bar to the right of the content editor), and Workflow (which runs on the workflow action). This allows us to apply different rules depending on how validation is triggered (in our case, allow the author to save but not publish in a case where the link text is null or empty).

Conclusion

By following these steps, not only have we created a custom field validator for Sitecore, but we’ve showed how to control the validation behaviour depending on how it is triggered, thus allowing us to apply validation without impeding an author’s progress.

Using a roadmap to bring your portal to life

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0800

A roadmap can't be built without first completing the necessary research, including:

Speaking with the leadership team to uncover what keeps them up at night, what they see as the company’s greatest hurdles, and where they want to see the company in the next six, 12, and 24 months.
Stepping back for a holistic view of the experience someone goes through when engaging with the company (if it’s an intranet, this is the experience of an employee engaging with the portal itself).
Setting a compelling vision for the solution
And some sketching along the way!

Once you have these pieces, you are ready to complete a roadmap. Find a big empty wall and a handful of colourful sticky-notes. Along the left side of the wall from top to bottom list out:

value to the customer (or employee)
the value to the business
design principles
viable alternatives
conditions and requirements for success

These elements will provide the guidance and validation the team and organization need to successfully launch and evolve an intranet or website.

Elements of a roadmap

Big ideas

Begin by listing out the big ideas across the top of the wall, starting with the most important on the far left. The big ideas are feature concepts, such as organize, prioritize, and compartmentalize key internal communications.

Value to...

Below the big ideas, list out all of the benefits to the different user groups (for example, employees, customers, and the business). Make sure to write these in first person. For example, "I know what is going on this week, next week, and beyond. I feel involved and informed.”

Principles

Indicate all of the design principles that are supported by this big idea. For example, one of our employee portal clients set principles that included ideas like “one organization,” “globally-recognized workplace,” and “connecting people to people.”

That same organization created these icons that provide a quick visual reminder of the principles throughout the roadmap:

Viable alternatives

We also include a section called viable alternatives. This section is meant to ask if there a viable alternative to building something custom to address a certain functionality or feature. For example, if an organization wants to have event registration features on its intranet, based on the requirements does a service like Eventbrite meet the requirements or is it absolutely necessary to commit to custom development?

Conditions for success

Conditions for success can include a variety of subcategories depending on the portal and circumstances. Some subcategories include content strategy, governance strategy, training strategy, and portal management activities and resources. A condition for success could be that a new full-time role needs to be created to support the big idea, or that another project has to be completed, such as cleaning up customer or employee databases to support personalization features.

For example, "This feature requires that a full time role be created and a resource hired to manage and write this information."

Prioritization

We love this cupcake analogy by Brandon Schauer at Adaptive Path. It’s a great way of prioritizing the big ideas into compelling releases starting with the minimal viable product.

Many companies start with the dry cake, add the tasty filling later, and maybe some icing and sprinkles the next year. Rather, it is better to think about creating something really desirable - the cupcake. This helps stakeholders think about creating the long wow that will increase adoption, create enthusiasm, and ultimately allow the portal design to be nimble and respond to changing circumstances.

Make it big and visual

We print our roadmaps so that they can hang on a wall and everyone can see the whole thing at once. This allows a group of people to gather around the roadmap to discuss each point, add notes, or tape revisions overtop. In doing this, roadmaps don't get lost in a computer file and opened only periodically. Using colour also groups content together so that the large format is easy to navigate.

These roadmaps should be living documents. Printing them captures a point in time. When we present roadmaps as part of the process, we add sticky notes, edit sections, or completely cross areas off. This instantly makes these documents less precious and invites others to do the same. We have even pulled out a pair of scissors to cut out a large section and reprioritize it by moving it down the wall.

We have created roadmaps in both Excel and InDesign. Excel may not be as visually compelling, but it is effective and allows a greater number of people to update the roadmap digitally.

Roadmaps are a fantastic tool for project visioning through to design, implementation, and portal evolution. It gives the team and stakeholders confidence that functionality will be built and value will be continually delivered to the organization. By tying the big ideas to user goals, stakeholder outcomes, and all the things that need to be in place to make each element successful, a roadmap is an amazing tool to help a team maintain a strong and compelling portal vision.

You can download an Excel version of our roadmap template here!

Setting a compelling design vision

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0800

After you’ve collected loads of data, information from key stakeholders, and end-user observations, how do you set a compelling direction that will help the team stay focused and moving toward the same goal?

Insights to principles

It’s not always easy to involve outside groups in the nebulous, grey fuzzy space that surrounds the period just after the research stage of a project, but it’s worth it.

We often begin by going through all of our interview notes and listening lab observations to pull out key themes and quotes onto different coloured sticky notes. Each stakeholder is represented by a different colour.

This provides a great opportunity to involve our client teams in our messy problem solving space to help us analyze raw findings from the research phase and come up with themes that can guide the design of the solution. Clients have said this takes a bit of the mystery away from how we arrived at recommendations, creates a unified goal, and furthers a shared understanding of the evidence and rationale.

In working directly with clients to process and formulate the research information, we create stronger ownership of the recommendations and design direction. Everyone becomes an advocate within their organization for the vision.

Create design principles

Next, these themes are transformed into guiding principles to create the design direction. This is what helps the team move from discovery to implementation. These are overarching guiding principles that align with the strategic business objectives; the sort of things a portal has to do above all else.

The secret is to make these principles visual, memorable, and sticky so they’re not easily forgotten. You want everyone on the team, including client stakeholders, to know them inside and out.

For example, these are a few guiding principles that came out of a recent employee portal engagement:

One organization
Globally-recognized best workplace
The right information at the right time
Never too remote
Connecting people to people

More tools that help to inform and create a compelling and memorable design vision

Empathy maps

Instead of creating polished user personas, empathy maps lightweight, more collaborative way to dig into a person’s motives, feelings and experiences. Using the template found in the book “Game Storming: A toolkit for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers,” we create empathy maps based on listening lab info, research and the input of our key stakeholders. These aren’t as polished and refined as a traditional persona. Instead, they are more of a working document that helps the design team better understand everything a person is experiencing, feeling, and thinking to enable everyone to consider how a design may impact each person’s experience.

Service blueprints

As organizations grow, they tend to have more and more siloes. As a whole, the organization offers a single service but each area independently contributes only part of that offering. Over time these areas or departments lose sight of the holistic experience as their focus is really about a single task or function.

To overcome this, we recommend gathering representatives from each area of the business to build a holistic picture of the service the company offers and wishes to see reflected in the solution. This service design blueprint exposes all of the front and backstage actors as well as the systems that the organization needs to complete the action. Service blueprints are another effective way to surface opportunities, gaps and or redundancies that span departments.

Experience maps

We also take a look at each user personas experience, mapping it from start to finish—the highs and lows and the various touchpoints they have with a particular actor to complete a task. This really helps us understand how and why different people are experiencing a service, system, or process and where the pitfalls and opportunities are.

All of these tools can prove extremely insightful for organizations as they think about the people using their portal, their experience, and the people and systems who deliver it.

A strong vision sets your team on the path for success

Setting a compelling design vision that is rooted in research and is aspirational drives a design that the whole team can work collaboratively towards. To keep this vision top of mind, tie the design principles into any project roadmaps and remind the team at every opportunity what you are ultimately trying to achieve.

Research and discovery activities for a website or intranet

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Charting a design vision for a website or intranet isn’t easy. With multiple stakeholders and constraints surrounding the teams developing the solution, the design direction can become muddled.

So, to meet the challenge of coming up with a vision that satisfies the organization and provides value to everyone, we recommend beginning with a research and discovery phase before developing the solution. This portion of the project ensures a design direction is founded in evidence and measurement and meets end-user needs.

A research phase also captures and delivers what stakeholders want to see in an intranet or website initiative. This helps to inform future design decisions, priorities and opportunities.

Research activities for designing a website or intranet

Leadership team interviews

Interviewing senior leaders and stakeholders is where teams can match the solution with organizational goals. These interviews enable teams to have a clear understanding of a company’s goals beyond reading the published mission statement. To be successful, this portion of the engagement requires direct communication with leaders to find out where they see the company going, what means they have to achieve this vision, and how a website or intranet can support this strategy.

Interviews are also critical to generating buy-in across the organization and empowering the portal design team to make decisions based on the information the leadership team provides.

Listening labs

Listening labs are a chance to ask users about their goals and tasks as well as to observe them in their day-to-day contexts. This is a rare chance for designers to be an observer of a current solution, and it’s often the only chance to understand what users actually do—not what they say they do.

To do this, we meet with end users one-on-one from across the organization, including those who are new to the company, employees in frontline roles, and people who are often away from a computer working in the field. We ask them to walk us through a typical day, including where and how they use the existing employee or customer portal. We also ask about the things they have posted up around their workstations. Schedules, calendars, and acronym lists highlight opportunities for surfacing content that is referenced frequently or difficult to remember.

Content inventory

In the design and discovery phase of a project before we have the results of a full content audit. We start with a cursory content inventory. This is our chance to get an overview of the type of content currently on a portal or communicated outside a portal via e-mail, newsletters, advertisements, and more.

Content inventories includes breaking down the existing structure of content and identifying at a high level which areas may be relevant, redundant, or need to be created. This really is a chance to immerse ourselves in the current content and look for initial opportunities or areas that need further investigation.

Measurement

A successful research phase enables and empowers the team to make evidence-based decisions and aligns the vision and direction across all stakeholders. Digging into the details, numbers, analytics, surveys, and feedback all contribute to building an understanding of current performance, pain-points, user issues, and how we can measure information in a portal. The key is to analyze anything you can get your hands on.

Once you have this information, turn these insights into a compelling design vision and ultimately a roadmap to bring your portal to life

Increasing records management compliance

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Organizations struggle with compliance because routine tasks like declaring records are not what users want to do, and records management in general is often not a part of peoples’ jobs.

If we focus on solutions that are oriented to the end-users’ jobs, we can eliminate both of these challenges and free records managers to concentrate on higher value work, instead of corralling end-users to declare and dispose of records. The end result is an organization that has a handle on compliance and a records management solution with high adoption.

In this video, we cover four strategies for boosting records management compliance in your organization, including:

How to focus on the end-users’ jobs
Reducing barriers to accessing and using records management solutions
How to create invisible compliance
Ways to measure and evolve your ECM program

What do you think?

What do you think about the content in this video? Let me know! Leave a comment on this post or send me an email.

People-powered portals: Roles and teams for your intranet or website

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Powering a portal takes more than technology. Discussions about platforms, design, and features may appear to be the priority, but the portal team is also key to the success of your portal.

Without the right people to chart a course and drive outcomes, a website or intranet will not be successful

Early on, consider the size of the team, roles, and resources that can be put towards a portal. Good design decisions are built on understandings of the people you have available, how their roles may shift, and the new roles that need to be created. A clear division of work between team members ensures every portal meets the day-to-day needs of users as well as evolves over time.

Two key streams of work need to be in place for website or intranet teams:

day-to-day management (triaging feature requests, trouble shooting issues, and generating new content)
vision and evolution (strategic and thoughtful evolution of a portal based on the organizational goals, and portal vision).

The following are the roles and teams that need to be a part of every intranet or website. People can hold multiple roles, but the point is that each of these accountability areas should reside with someone.

The people and roles

Portal owner

Owns the success and vision of the portal

Maintains and helps develop the vision, including the design principles and outcomes
An advocate for the team within the rest of the organization
Holds and helps manage the budget for the portal

Portal manager

Connects between day-to-day decisions and the portal’s vision and strategy

Accountable for turning the portal roadmap into a reality
Overall owner of the portal, accountable for day-to-day management
Owns and maintain the information architecture
Oversees the release management process to manage feature requests and match requirements to delivery capacity
Create and support a community of portal champions

Content manager

Maintains an editorial calendar and considers the voice, tone, and personality of content

Plans when content will be created, refreshed, and retired
Works with content contributors to provide support and direction
Oversees the content review cycle and may approve content before it is published
There may be content managers for different areas of a portal, if so these managers need to meet regularly to stay aligned
Part of the content steering committee

Content contributor

Writes content and actively looks for areas to improve the information within the portal

Produces content
Works with content manager to refine and create content that maps to the goals of the portal and end-users

Support contact

On speed-dial because they always fix the problem

Troubleshoots issues and provides supports to users
Provides information to the portal manager on potential improvements based on help requests and feedback

Portal champions

The backbone of a solution, especially when it comes to employee portals and encouraging adoption

Portal super-users, change agents, and advocates
Provides guidance to end-users around how and why the organization is using the portal
Part of the portal manager champion community

Portal committees and teams

While the roles on a website or intranet team are important, there should also be a few groups of people to guide the solution and make sure everything stays focused on organizational goals.

Here are a few key committees and teams that we’ve seen organizations have success with as a website or intranet goes from vision, to build, to launch.

Portal steering committee

A mix of organizational stakeholders, each one invested in the success of the solution

Provides guidance to the portal manager around the ongoing evolution of the portal
Prioritization and scoping for releases
Owns the vision, mission, goals, and objectives of the portal
Evolves the portal roadmap
Meets monthly

Content steering committee

Oversees the content team

Establish and own content priorities and initiatives
Owns the development and maintenance of the content calendar
Contributes to decision-making related to information architecture changes
Meets weekly

Technical release team

Implement and manage the technical side of releases

Responsible for implementing new functionality base on the roadmap
Will grow and shrink based on the release schedule and features within each release
May include a portal manager, business analysts, designers, developers, quality assurance, and project managers

Portal champion community

Crucial to a successful rollout and ongoing user adoption efforts

Community of portal champions working to build portal knowledge and experience within the organization and leverage the portal technology effectively
Meets monthly to share successes, opportunities as well as prepare for any coming changes

Bringing it all together

The makeup of a team within an organization will vary based on the size of the organization, the organizational structure, the people, and the goals of the website or intranet. Moving away from a list of roles and responsibilities to focus more on the people involved, who they are, what are their skillsets and what new roles need to be created is foundational.

Powering your portal with these people early in a re-design project enables better decision-making based on the team's individual skills, passions, and capacity to support the features and functionality being developed.

Designing a new onboarding experience

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0800

The challenge and objectives

In the summer of 2013, an international law firm approached Habanero with a project to create a workflow to facilitate the onboarding of lawyers, students, and internal staff. The client looked at several workflow products and eventually settled on using Nintex Workflow and Forms on SharePoint 2013. Once we knew which technology we were going to use, we interviewed key stakeholders on what we were trying to achieve through creating an onboarding workflow.

We came up with the following desired outcomes that we would keep top of mind throughout the project:

Increase visibility and transparency into the onboarding process
Less follow-ups, rekeying information, and errors
Keep the onboarding process smooth from the new hires perspective
Streamline the process so that every hire has a great, consistent onboarding experience.

This project was actually a bit scary for our team. There was nothing wrong with the current onboarding process. As far as a new hire was concerned, everything was hunky-dory. But the new hire couldn't see all the hustling going on in background that made it a seamless hiring and onboarding experience. The last thing we wanted was to apply technology to a people problem and introduce gaps for the people doing the work.

Mapping the onboarding process

We tackled the daunting task of mapping out the onboarding process for the law firm as our next step. This was more intimidating than it sounds!

Much of the process was inside people heads. They just knew what they were supposed to do when a new hire joined the firm. What about when people were sick? Or if they retired? In many cases the process wasn’t documented. There was also the issue of people emailing each other back and forth, checking in on each other to see how the process was coming along.

Another problem was all the rekeying of information. Most of the forms were paper-based and as I'm sure you can imagine, there are a ton of forms to fill out when a new lawyer is hired. Between lawyers, students, and staff, this particular law firm was hiring up to 180 people each year–and every one of the new additions were hired and onboarded with care and attention.

A digital workflow was needed. But how do you go about applying technology to a people problem without losing focus on the new hires?

We set up a workshop to get all 25 stakeholders across 10 departments in a boardroom together. That's how many people were needed to hire one person–up to 25 people. We played a game where everyone had to put green sticky notes on the wall to show what was working with the current process and red stickies to show what was not. The idea was to get the group to see each other's pain points and successes. It was amazing how many times we heard things like, "I didn't know you were doing that. I do that too!"

Through mapping it out, we actually discovered more than a few places where people were duplicating tasks. At the end of the workshop, I shamelessly promoted all the merits of creating digital workflows and forms. I can get pretty passionate about business processes and I thought I might have come across a bit strong for a traditional law firm. I was pleasantly surprised when I called an end to the two-hour workshop and groups of people remained huddled together around the table excitedly discussing how to make the process better. We were off to a good start!

Designing the onboarding experience

As we were going through this process, our designers went to work coming up with a look and feel for the forms, always focusing on the experience. The client was very good at working with us to create a workflow that makes sense for every department and guides employees through tasks with the information they need to complete their responsibilities—all with minimal training on how to use the solution. The goal was to consider how each person and department would interact with the solution and then design a workflow that facilitates a great experience for everyone involved in the process.

We also wanted to make sure that the forms were intuitive to use and easy on the eyes. It's simple to say, "well, it's just a form, who cares how it looks?" But it definitely makes a difference in terms of applying shading, icons to make fields obvious, spacing, and branding.

We wanted to create a solution that people want to use, not just have to use; to take some pain and frustration out of their day and maybe even add some enjoyment.

We were a bit limited to what could be done in Nintex Forms versus custom code, but the product does a good job of making it easy to apply JavaScript on the forms, so we were able to do quite a bit in terms of branding and look-and-feel.

Building the onboarding workflow

Once we had the process hashed out, we began building out the solution. We knew the workflow was going to be huge and long running, so we took quite a bit of care to ensure we could fire off the workflow at any stage. Nintex doesn't support this out-of-the-box.

We created a parent workflow that kicked off departmental workflows as needed. It also made it easier for us to make changes down the road when tasks needed to be added or removed. Business processes change all the time and we wanted an in-flight onboarding process to follow the new departmental workflows if changes had to be made.

Success!

We launched the new and improved business process in August of 2015, meeting all four objectives. None of this would have been possible without the amazing support of the client. Throughout the process, every stakeholder was open to suggestions and forthcoming with what their jobs entailed. Key to this success was one woman in particular who made it her mission to guide everyone through the challenging change management phase.

Six months after launch, we made adjustments to the workflow from gathered feedback and just recently I helped out with a few minor changes. Many new hires have gone through the new system since launch and it's definitely a made a difference in the daily lives of those 25 stakeholders.

Three ways to increase records management user adoption

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0800

As described in our recent post Focus on the users’ jobs, we believe records management solutions should be oriented toward supporting the jobs people do every day. Solutions that are successful in this regard will gain traction and achieve rapid adoption within an enterprise.

Through this approach, the aims of records management will be more readily and completely attained as a result of this user engagement. Increasingly, there is little debate that focusing on the end-users’ jobs is the right way to set up an ECM program. The question is how to actually go about it.

Orientation toward helping the users perform their jobs can happen in a multitude of ways. The three approaches described in this article—information structure, business process, and terminology—are tried and tested ways of improving traction with users.

Information structure

An easy starting point is to structure the information the way in which end-users consume, work with, or think about the information instead of using a file plan. Users don’t think in file plans. This necessitates engaging people and understanding how they think about and use the information, an exercise that is a helpful tool when figuring out how to drive adoption.

People typically base themselves around an artefact in the real world–an address, project, employee, customer, sales campaign, and so on. Orienting information in a similar way will inherently make sense to end-user and be more effective than structuring the information around a file plan.

Consider a collection of development permit applications submitted to a municipality. The users within the municipality (e.g. the planning department) would consider the applications from the perspective of the civic addresses associated with each permit application. Furthermore, the users would associate not just the development permit application with that address but also the subsequent correspondence, internal documents, and final approval or rejection for development. This is an example of orienting a records management solution around the job a person does.

By contrast, a file plan or other some records management-focused taxonomy might be set up around document type (permits, correspondence, letters of approval) or a retention period. This would not support the end-users in performing their jobs. This contrasting scenario also does not map to how the users think about and use the information.

Business process

Another orientation to consider is the business process. Users trying to accomplish a task interact with the records management solution to get things done. In a similar way to the information structure, a successful records management solution automates or streamlines pieces of the business process that the end-users are focused on completing.

An unsuccessful records management solution might be focused on the business process of declaring a record. Most users don’t care about declaring records! This business process orientation can have significant positive impacts on the overall productivity and engagement of the users in question.

One example of orienting ECM towards a business process is to support hiring a new employee. The hiring process might have multiple natural pieces to it–resume review, initial interview, technical interview, HR or fit interview, and then a final executive interview. An ECM solution supporting this process would show the progression of each candidate and have notifications as the person moves through the process. This is in contrast to simply having one folder or one document library where all the application forms, interview notes, and follow-up correspondence reside. To support the process flow, an ECM solution might require workflow as well as an information architecture that would also align with the process.

Terminology

Another simple but often overlooked approach is to ensure the use of the end-users’ own nomenclature when developing a solution. Records management or corporate terminology should be kept to a minimum. Instead, the use of words that are clear and in common with users’ own vocabularies and area of focus drives adoption. As with the other methods, this is an excellent opportunity to engage people and undertake usability testing to be sure that the final terminology makes sense to the end-users.

To be successful, you need to orient your solution toward the lowest common denominator for education levels, experience, backgrounds, and even spoken languages within most workplaces.

Instead of “document disposition” ECM solutions could refer to “permanent document deletion,” or instead of “retention period” a more easily understood term might be “how long should we keep this document?”

How far to go?

The depth to which a records management team executes each approach is readily adjustable depending on the information domain being considered. For example, when determining how to structure the information through the eyes of the end-user, there are multiple tools and processes that can be used including card sorting, content audits, end user interviews, and usability testing. Each tool will improve the final solution, increasing adoption, but comes with increasing effort for the records management team.

Removing custom workflow columns

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0800

When we create a new workflow at Habanero, a best practice we employ is to disable the SharePoint workflow status column. We do this for a couple of reasons:

We have found that the status column that SharePoint creates does not provide users with a lot of insight into a process.
When a workflow and its associated list is migrated from one site to another, duplicate status columns are created automatically.

Instead, we prefer to create our own status columns that have process-specific statuses. We do this to keep users aware of the workflow’s progress and avoid running into the same column duplication issues when a list is migrated.

As a general rule, if a column isn’t needed on a list, we don’t include it. Sometimes though, on a workflow that we or a client has created, the column has been provisioned unintentionally.

In order to prevent this column from being created in the first place, the option to must be deselected in the workflow settings. Otherwise if the workflow is run once, the column is generated.

The challenge with workflow status columns is that they cannot be removed using the SharePoint UI. There are a few ways to be able to remove the column outside of the UI. The one that I’ll discuss requires access to the server where the workflow resides, SharePoint Designer, and a tool called SharePoint Manager.

To remove the workflow status column:

Download and install SharePoint Manager 2013 available here on the server hosting SharePoint
Navigate to your list, expand fields, and find the workflow status column
Find the property “AllowDeletion” (This should be blank by default) and set it to True

Open the site in SharePoint Designer
Find the Lists and Libraries from Site Objects on the left hand navigation bar
Click edit list permissions

Click “show read-only columns”
Delete the column

Done!

Delivering records management: A new way to approach a common organizational challenge

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0700

The aim of records management is simple: keep what you need and discard what you don’t. When this aim is achieved, organizations are less exposed to risk. The question is, how can we achieve this simple goal?

Traditional records management solutions have tried to address this challenge through governance and mandating that users engage with the system to drive compliance. We believe that mandating usage is deeply flawed and expensive. Just consider the legions of struggling change management programs, the ink spilt over records management and adoption, or the numerous training sessions users have been subjected to during the course of enterprise content management initiatives.

Other records management solutions (or records managers) focus on user experience to engage users and streamline adoption. While improving the user experience can be helpful, this too is a flawed approach because ultimately it is still focused on delivering the records management agenda. End-users are often dismissive, or at best confused, when it comes to records management.

Don’t focus on the end-users, focus on their jobs

We believe that for records managers to achieve their goals, they need to orient themselves towards helping people do their jobs. In orienting towards the end-users’ jobs, records managers get solution adoption and they will then be able to deliver on the aims of their records management program.

This orientation could be as simple as structuring the file repository in a way that directly supports the end-user (as opposed to the records manager), delivering an automated workflow to expedite business processes, or even using an online form to capture, organize and disseminate business data.

In addition to supporting the end-users performing their jobs and delivering on the records management agenda, our experience has shown that there is a third benefit to this approach: the organization is less burdened with low-value work, is more efficient, and is more focused on delivering business outcomes that matter.

So, how can we help the users perform their jobs and deliver records management?

Practicalities matter. This is not theoretical physics. There are three things that must occur for this approach to be tenable.

You need to be able to actually support people in performing their jobs in a way that can also deliver your records management aim.
It takes more effort to drive this result than a standard approach to records management, so you need a project governance and funding mechanism that permits a more user-focused approach.
You have to prioritize your focus. At the outset, we say this is about risk, not absolutes, and priorities should consider the risk—within any given content domain—of keeping too much or discarding too much.

People’s jobs are complex and multi-faceted. When supporting these jobs, the temptation is to decompose them into processes and tasks and focus on optimizing that job from a process point of view. Unfortunately, this process optimization approach neglects the creativity that is required for most work in today’s world.

The alternative to the process optimization approach is to consider the user’s experience to understand the root of success or failure in a job and work from there to orient all the tools, technology, process refinement, and people development toward a newly designed ideal experience.

So, how does this help records management?

Once we gain a deep appreciation of the user’s challenges and experiences within their job context, we have a foundation for robust end-user adoption of the solution.

After users adopt the solution, we as the records management team have the ability to manage the content within that solution as we see fit. For example, we are then able to automate record declaration as well as continue to drive higher value within the business. This is a 180-degree turn from the reputation that records management’s reputation of reducing risk by adding friction and extra work into people’s days.

Records management can be a powerful, outcome-driven part of an organization that benefits end-users as opposed to infuriating them. In fact, under the auspices of records management, an organization can be transformed by focusing on the jobs people do.

Learn more about how focusing on end-users' jobs can drive compliance and other critical records management objectives:

Employee recognition in the digital workplace

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Recently, Microsoft announced its machine learning knowledge discovery platform, Office 365 Delve, will be expanded to include employee praise functionality. In a similar method to what’s already possible in enterprise social tools like Yammer, employees will soon be able to recognize fellow coworkers for a job well done, include a comment, and select from a collection of praise icons. This praise card is then immediately visible to all employees, who can ‘like’ or comment on the post.

This news prompted me to reflect on some lessons Habanero’s learned related to recognition systems:

Employee portals provide an excellent platform for recognition and building a culture of positive reinforcement; an effective portal or intranet can engage people from all corners of an organization much faster than offline approaches.
Simple recognition capabilities are often just as effective, if not more so, than complex systems that involve points, gamification, or reward incentives.
Peer-to-peer recognition has just as much impact as top down recognition.
Recognition capabilities can thrive regardless of perceived cultural readiness.

In the few months since The Junction—the Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario’s intranet— has launched, the organization has experienced a steady uptake in popularity of their employee kudos capability. The College uses SharePoint 2013’s social newsfeed capability as a simple but popular means to shine a light on employee contributions in the workplace. The employee Kudos Corner widget is featured prominently on The Junction’s homepage and is open for anyone to either add a new kudos or comment and like an existing post.

The College has observed through portal measurement and analytics that more than 50 per cent of employees have left a kudos or commented on an existing post. The popularity of this feature echoes what we’ve heard from to other clients as well.

It’s also important to note that this type of kudos feature is often a great way to encourage repeat traffic to your intranet, because it acts as a draw for users to eventually navigate to areas where they may consume other important content.

Having an employee recognition capability available and easily accessible on your intranet homepage is relatively simple to achieve given where technologies like Office 365 have progressed.

All too often, however, employee recognition systems are hidden away from an person’s daily work life. For example, sometimes users are required to navigate to a third-party web service with a separate username and password. We know that too many access hurdles equates to low adoption, so keep it is best to keep recognition features front and centre.

Trinkets and badges only provide short-term motivation

We’ve also seen many employee recognition schemes that involve a gamification, point systems, and reward based incentives. These type of solutions often over complicate the process and take away from the authenticity of the experience. The personal gratification and sense of connection one receives from both giving and receiving unsolicited recognition from a network of peers is what ultimately provides the real reward and tends to have a snowball effect across organizational cultures.

Traditionally, employee recognition flows through standard chains of command and rarely enjoy high visibility in the organization. If you happened to do a good job in a presentation, it might get mentioned to or recognized by a manager. Sometime later, typically in a performance review, that feedback might just trickle down as a pat on the back—well past the point where it could have had maximum effect and been visible to the rest of the organization.

Through effective use of social technology, however, we no longer need to rely on this haphazard process. Peers, regardless of seniority or geographic location, can instantly recognize colleagues with complete transparency to the rest of the organization, helping to create a culture of positive reinforcement.

“But we’re just not that type of organization…”

We hear concerns about cultural readiness all the time when talking with organizations about introducing this type of capability. While organizations might have different historical approaches to employee recognition and sit on a different ends of the spectrum when it comes to communication and transparency, we’ve seen this become a popular and transformative feature even in the most conservative of cultures.

We shouldn’t understate in all this that a solid strategy needs to be in place to support recognition capability and functionality within employee portals, as a kudos application itself won't change a culture. But that strategy can involve simple actions which have a big impact when it comes to a successful introduction. For example, many clients have actively enlisted members of their leadership team to make posts and reply to existing ones to help set the tone of encouragement and entice others. Other clients have added user interactions to help encourage use of the tool itself.

Sharing external recognition

Employee recognition doesn’t have to be limited to within the organization either. At Habanero, we quite often use it as a means to share client recognition that we might receive either in person or via email. By posting this feedback via our employee kudos feature, we raise the visibility beyond just the project team or email recipient list, further encouraging and inspiring a culture of exceptional client experience.

Want a better, faster way to build an intranet in Office 365?

Learn how companies are creating the world’s best SharePoint and Office 365 intranets with Habanero’s Go Intranet Accelerator.

Intranet trends for internal communicators

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

There have been some big shifts in the way internal communicators manage and leverage intranets to communicate with their organizations. While some of these changes are still occurring, the underlying premise is the same: internal communicators have never been more crucial to the success of intranet and digital workplace initiatives.

Let’s talk about what’s changing in the way organizations communicate internally and how the employee portals of the future present opportunities to streamline communication and collaboration.

1. Internal communicators have a broader accountability

For many communicators, the sandbox is growing. The internal target audience is growing. The channels are increasing. It’s not just about communicating to the office worker anymore–mobile and field workers are now in range. It’s also not just about managing homepage news either. Instead, internal communications teams help craft strategic communications for departments, executives, enterprise projects, change initiatives, and more.

The intranet continues be a primary channel for deploying these communications, but it is not the only one that matters anymore.

2. The role of the intranet manager is changing

For some organizations, the role of the intranet manager is being reframed as a digital workplace manager, although it remains unclear exactly where this person should sit in the org chart. Are they in PR/comms? Are they in IT? Are they in HR? I happen to feel they should live in communications, but I don’t think it really matters. What does matter is that they are a strong advocate for the employee experience and can bridge a vision across HR, IT, and communications, shaping a modern view of the digital communication and collaboration landscape.

3. The new, digitally fractured workplace presents new challenges

With the introduction of so many cloud-based tools and the evolution of Office 365’s NextGen Portals for communication and collaboration, we’ve entered into a world where capabilities massively overlap across technologies and vendors. For many organizations, more tools isn’t always a good thing.

Despite a recent Gartner news announcement saying, “Today's employees possess a greater degree of digital dexterity,” I think we still have a tough road ahead to help employees make sense of their digital options.

Businesses need internal communicators to work side-by-side in partnership with HR and IT to carefully craft a new information management strategy to bring clarity to employees and solve real business challenges. Communicators need to help establish the "what tool, when" playbook and make sure all this market innovation doesn’t stall or impede the success of internal collaboration.

4. Enterprise social is still finding its place

Enterprise social networks have gone through a traditional hype curve’s peak of inflated expectations and may now be rising out of the trough of disillusionment, although it’s not clear many companies are feeling enlightened yet.

If you haven’t adopted an enterprise social network or infused your intranet with some kind of social capability, then I’d imagine you are getting ready to make sense of it soon. Between Jam, Jive, Yammer, Slack, and other great tool sets, they all really support the same type of experience. Communications generally needs to decide if they want to be a driving sponsor of the employee community and use the network to their advantage. Or instead, they must choose how to leverage enterprise social within the context of their intranet communications.

For the past two years, Microsoft has given clear guidance that it’s better to invest in Yammer instead of investing in SharePoint’s social capabilities. Going forward, it seems pretty clear that they are moving to a more integrated experience with social plumbing into the entire Office and Office 365 fabric.

5. Employees want authentic communications in real-time

Perhaps this has always been the case, but more than ever it seems employees expect to have answers at their fingertips. They want the straight goods too, no beating around the bush. If a topic has made it to the proverbial water cooler, you should probably consider having a position on it soon in the next official internal communication.

The question communicators need to grapple with is which channel should they leverage to get involved in the conversation? It is important to note, some companies that are really on top of their internal social networks are on top of the conversation before things really ever get out of hand. Great communicators need to also be great listeners and decide the best channel to connect with their audience!

6. Intranets are mobile

This somewhat feels like old news, but surprisingly many companies have still not figured out how to build a responsive experience for their intranet. If you have SharePoint, it is important to know that the technology is no longer the barrier.

Instead, internal communications needs to help define what parts of their intranet should be converted for mobile. Is it everything? Chances are you will want key areas of your intranet experience to be responsive for smaller browsers or you’ll want to extend the intranet content into an app. You also need to rethink who the target audience is and what the most common use cases are for a mobile-friendly intranet.

Lots of companies we talk to want to target when employees are commuting and trying to get caught up with company news on the bus or train while getting to and from work. Retail environments look at the back-office break time to get employees oriented for their next shift. Construction, energy, and resources companies often consider field workers and think about different tools they need to be connected, engaged, and safe.

7. Video and live broadcasting have arrived

While the ability to internally host and stream video has been possible for a few years now, we are really starting to see companies take interest. It’s not hard to imagine why there has been a delayed shift to video within corporate employee portals. Internal communicators are often great writers but don’t always have a background in film. As well, up until more recently, there hasn’t been a very easy and affordable option for companies to adopt and embrace internal video. That has now changed.

This year, Microsoft released its initial attempt to take over the video domain with its Office 365 Video Portal. While it is still in its first generation of features and capabilities, I expect to see a lot more companies shifting their internal intranet communications to video in 2016. What’s more, Microsoft will soon release a new product or capability in Skype for Business that allows live broadcasting for events.

Skype Broadcasting will enable companies to host big internal events like town halls or strategy briefings with a secured internal audience. Video can be recorded live during the broadcast and the Event app console will integrate with Yammer and Bing Pulse for live social feedback and conversations. The role of the communicator will be both a manager and orchestrator of the event, as well as a live community manager of the social conversation. Videos recorded from the events will be available for download and long term storage in the Video Portal for future playback.

8. A shift from pages to portals

Intranets were once carefully structured collections of pages, documents and team sites organized with purpose and labeled to optimize findability. While information architecture still matters, it is clear that the CMS days of page based publishing systems are losing ground and content is being curated through a variety of new forms.

To add to that, the end user experience of viewing a PDF or Word document isn’t as jarring as it used to be and the value of supporting the authoring process and experience has become more critical.

Intranets are shifting to being more of a loosely connected set of apps and sites and page based communication may be isolated to news and some employee essential information. The future Microsoft promise would have us believe that NextGen Portals will start to emerge in the ecosystem in the latter half of 2015 and into 2016.

What does this mean for the user experience? How should the global navigation adapt?

We believe internal communications will need to rethink the global navigation strategy and design to make sure they are optimizing the overall experience within and outside the traditional intranet boundaries.

9. The homepage is dead

Intranet homepages are no longer relevant. Bold statement, I know. It is time for communicators to rethink the role, design, and best practices of their homepage. Looking back, intranet homepages were originally inspired by best practices from the external web. Today, the landscape has significantly changed and I’d argue it’s time to take a more innovative stance on the homepage. Some key questions to ask:

Are employees really starting their intranet experience on the homepage because they want to or because they are forced to?
How many people are reading our news stories? How many are engaging in the content?
Do people appreciate and feel more connected as a result of what we are producing?
Does the mish-mash of stuff on the homepage add to the communication experience or detract from it? Perhaps you should consider simplifying the homepage and refocusing it on being a news portal.
Do we still have a lot of page content in the intranet that people are navigating to, or have we shifted to more of an app or portal approach. A directory for those items might be more important.

Asking these questions may help you realize the homepage layout and navigation patterns from the past are no longer as relevant. We find people start their intranet experience from a variety of locations today. It could be the homepage, it could be through the Microsoft Office suite when re-opening a document, it could be from an email link to a team site or it could be by going directly into an intranet app or the enterprise social tool like Jive or Yammer. As well, as we add more cloud collaboration tools on top of the traditional intranet landscape and further complicate the digitally fractured workplace experience, we think it is time to rethink the homepage and try to make things easier for the employees.

10. Suggestions?

What would a top 10 list be without a number 10? Well, I only had nine but 10 sounded way catchier. Why don’t you add to the list with your suggestion about a top 10 intranet trend for internal communicators!

Bring ideas to life with high-fidelity prototyping

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

I’m a strong believer that ideas don’t live on paper alone. While low and medium fidelity prototypes such as sketches and mockups are great for brainstorming and presenting polished visuals, a high-fidelity prototype inherits the groundwork and transcends the design to the next level.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term high-fidelity prototype, it refers to an artifact that resembles a true representation of the user interface, and often high fidelity prototypes allow users to interact with it.

Benefits of high-fidelity prototyping

From a business perspective, prototypes create tremendous impact in building momentum and engaging the organization. Being able to interact with a working design provides a much better way to generate informed discussions between clients and the project team. Documentation is limited on its own. People are more compelled when they can touch and play with the ideas.

From a design and development standpoint, the process of creating a high-fidelity prototype enables the team to think critically about the interaction flows and technical considerations. Often times we hand off pixel-perfect mockups, hoping that it will all be realized perfectly in the implementation stage. What we sometimes fail to understand is that the design may get lost in translation and the medium we use to deliver specs may not work for every project.

From a usability perspective, high-fidelity prototypes give end-users a much more realistic idea of how the solution behaves and why they would use it. We are able to get richer data on where the design shines and where it still needs to be refined. The better we can help the audience bridge the gaps of how the product works, the closer we are able to creating something usable and delightful for users.

“Thinking through making is not a process, it’s a philosophy. If you see something, if you can touch it, if you can experience it, you’ll learn more about it.” – Warren Schramm

Is it for me?

It’s important to consider the objectives of the prototype as a guide to determine how refined it should be in terms of visual design, breadth and depth of functionality, richness of interactivity, and richness of data model (McCurdy et al. have a great article about these concepts).

For example, if the design deals with complex business logic that drives transaction flows or if it emphasized invoking emotions through novel interactions, animations, and/or videos, then you should definitely strive for a high-fidelity prototype. On the other hand, if you just have a static website with simple interactions, then you are probably better off with mockups and atomic components.

Keep in mind what level of fidelity and which dimensions are most appropriate for communicating the ideas and best minimizes the layers of abstractions. Depending on your needs, a low or medium fidelity prototype would work just as great.

Prototyping is a means to the end, but not an end in itself

For prototypes created in code, often times we can reuse more than 70 per cent of the source and significantly speed up solution development, which could bring significant savings over the course of a project. Prototypes can help to validate features and surface critical issues early on, thus minimizing unintended tasks and blocks during implementation.

A successful high-fidelity prototype is one that will bring different players on your team and in your organization closer to the problem that you are trying to solve. Not only do they improve communications, enhance feedback, and learning opportunities, high fidelity prototypes serve as a potential cost-saving investment down the road.

For more information on the concepts discussed in this Insights article, go here, here, and here.

Value beyond dollars: Richer employee experiences through process automation

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Typically, workflows are evaluated on how they save an organization money, save time, or increase consistency. This evaluation is valuable because it enables an IT group to make a financial case for adding process automation.

However, bringing in process changes can be challenging for employees, and the benefits listed above may not create sufficient motivation or excitement around the change. We have found that being selective in what we automate can create benefits beyond typical return-on-investment measures and ultimately free employees to take on more interesting and valuable roles in an organization.

One example of this comes from about a year ago, when an individual working for one of our clients approached us with a business problem and workflow solution in mind. Each week, she would contact representatives from thirty departments to find out who was going to be available that weekend. Most times, people would respond promptly. Sometimes she needed to follow up. Every Friday she would send an email out to everyone at the site that would contain a spreadsheet with the names and contact info for the people on call.

Usually when we start to build a workflow, we take some time to understand the reason this solution is desired so that we can help the business prioritize activities or identify opportunities for collaboration. In this case, we learned that she would spend about three hours each week collecting this information.

If we were looking at this through a strictly financial perspective, this project may not have been worth the cost. The opportunity for an additional three productive hours each week balanced against the cost of implementing a new workflow, form, page and lists may not have made financial sense.

However, through our discussions, we discovered that she was moving into a new role at the organization, one that would put her on a different schedule that would mean that she wouldn’t be available to collect and send this information every week.

In short, this workflow wasn’t just saving her three hours, it was enabling her to take a promotion.

The new workflow solution would:

Send an email to each department head requesting employee availability information
Automatically follow up if needed
Provide a centrally located list where anyone could view the information submitted
Generate an email containing this information that was sent out to the company every Friday
Escalate stale tasks so that administrators could follow up if necessary

When asked “What part of your job sucks your time away?” we have found that many people in administrative and management roles have aspects of their jobs that are repetitive, time-consuming, and straightforward. Reflecting on this through an individual development lens, we see that there is a potential value to workflows that address this, where the benefits can’t be measured through dollars alone.

Speaking with the users involved in a process gives insight into the roles that people value performing and also helps to assess if parts of a business process should be automated. We find that the aspects of roles people tend find the most interesting—judgement, analysis, coordination, communication—are the most challenging to implement and ultimately less of a fit for a workflow solution. Finding the balance of what to automate and what to leave as-is can ultimately increase consistency, save money, and create better employee experiences.

A retina image approach for Sitecore

Wed, 02 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

On a recent project, we needed to come up with an approach for supporting retina images. CSS can be used to handle displaying standard, or retina images based on pixel ratio and device, but this doesn’t solve the need to handle images that are served from Sitecore (specifically, Sitecore 7.2). We also wanted to avoid the user having to upload both a standard version of the image, and a retina version of the image, to keep the authoring experience as simple and seamless as possible.

To solve this problem, we used a combination of Sitecore’s image scaling functionality, the new srcset attribute, and respimage–a responsive images polyfill.

In order to ensure that the author only needed to upload one image, we set the expectation that they would only be uploading the retina version of the image. This allowed us to leverage Sitecore’s image scaling capabilities to scale the image in half, which would then give the standard version of the image.

First, we created a Sitecore extension method to return an image url at a given scale:

public static string GetImageUrl(this Item item, string fieldName, float scale)
{
	Assert.ArgumentNotNull(item, "item");
	Assert.ArgumentNotNull(fieldName, "fieldName");

	string imageUrl = string.Empty;
	ImageField image = item.Fields[fieldName];

	if (image != null && image.MediaItem != null)
	{
		MediaItem imageItem = new MediaItem(image.MediaItem);
		MediaUrlOptions imageOpts = new MediaUrlOptions { Scale = scale };
		imageUrl = Sitecore.StringUtil.EnsurePrefix('/', Sitecore.Resources.Media.MediaManager.GetMediaUrl(imageItem, imageOpts));
	}
	else
	{
		Log.Warn("Could not retrieve image item in GetImageUrl.", typeof(Sandbox.SitecoreExtensions));
	}

	return imageUrl;
}

As you can see, we’re passing in the Sitecore item, the name of the image field within that Sitecore item as a string, and the desired scale as a floating point number. The scale for the retina version of the image being 1.0, or 100 per cent, and the scale for our standard image being .5, or 50 per cent. After verifying that the image, and associated media item aren’t null, we create a new object of type MediaUrlOptions and set the Scale property to our desired scale. From there, we can call the Sitecore.Resources.Media.MediaManager.GetMediaUrl method, passing in the media item, and our MediaUrlOptions object, which will return our image url.

Now, let’s take a look at how we mark up our image using the srcset attribute, and our Sitecore extension method. The new srcset attribute enables you to specify a list of image sources to use based on the width of the browser and the pixel density of the device. In our solution, we are only using the pixel density to determine whether the standard image should be chosen, or whether the retina image should be chosen. On regular resolution displays, the 1x variant of srcset will be used, and on displays with 2 device pixels per CSS pixel, the 2x, or retina, variant of the srcset will be used. This puts the work of determining which image to use, on the browser.

We are passing the 50 per cent scaled image url into the src attribute to handle JavaScript disabled legacy browsers. We are again passing that 50 per cent scaled image url into the srcset attribute as the 1x variant, and our unscaled, retina image url in as the 2x variant using our GetImageUrl Sitecore extension method.

This nearly solves our problem, but because srcset isn’t supported in all browsers, we needed to use the respimage responsive image polyfill to expand support to a wider range of browsers and devices. The respimage script only needs to be added to your website, or bundled in your normal JS and will automatically run, and polyfill all images.

Conclusion

By leveraging Sitecore image scaling, the new srcset attribute, and the respimage responsive polyfill, we were able to implement a basic, and author friendly retina image approach for Sitecore. This approach could be expanded upon to utilize the srcset width description, and even the image sizes attribute if needed.

Notes

In Sitecore versions 7.5 and greater, a new security feature will prevent the GetImageUrl extension method from returning the same result. Sitecore now requires a generated hash value to be appended to the querystring. You will need to use Sitecore’s hashing utilities to append the hash value to the media URL using the Sitecore.Resources.Media.HashingUtils utility methods. I’ve provided an example of the updated extension method below.

public static string GetImageUrl(this Item item, string fieldName, float scale)
{
	Assert.ArgumentNotNull(item, "item");
	Assert.ArgumentNotNull(fieldName, "fieldName");

	string imageUrl = string.Empty;
	ImageField image = item.Fields[fieldName];

	if (image != null && image.MediaItem != null)
	{
		MediaItem imageItem = new MediaItem(image.MediaItem);
		MediaUrlOptions imageOpts = new MediaUrlOptions { Scale = scale };
		string mediaUrl = Sitecore.StringUtil.EnsurePrefix('/', Sitecore.Resources.Media.MediaManager.GetMediaUrl(imageItem, imageOpts));
		if (!string.IsNullOrWhitespace(mediaUrl)) {
			imageUrl = Sitecore.Resources.Media.HashingUtils.ProtectAssetUrl(mediaUrl);
		}
	}
	else
	{
		Log.Warn("Could not retrieve image item in GetImageUrl.", typeof(Sandbox.SitecoreExtensions));
	}

	return imageUrl;
}

Why we love working with Sitecore

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0700

The content management system that drives a website or customer portal has a huge impact on the overall experience. At Habanero, we’ve been building our expertise in Sitecore to complement our customer and member portals practice.

Sitecore enables us to create incredible digital experiences and support any aspect of the customer lifecycle. Its digital marketing suite, integration capabilities, and overall potential make it an exciting and compelling platform for organizations to consider when building a public website.

Our team is incredibly passionate about working with Sitecore! We wanted to share the perspectives and opinions our team has about the platform and how it can benefit organizations.

Why do you love working with Sitecore?

Mallory O'Connor

First of all, it’s an enterprise-level platform - it’s not an entry-level product. Instead, it’s aligned with the middle and upper segments of the market, which also happens to be Habanero’s sweet spot.

Second, it appeals to the marketing and communications side of a business, as opposed to being purely an IT play. This helps these teams within organizations get more value from both the content management system and the website as a whole. Sitecore helps to expose valuable information about user behaviour to inform design and business decisions.

Sitecore is also a .NET suite with good support and a great community. It integrates well with most line-of-business systems, and the ecosystem of third-party products around Sitecore make it even stronger. Coveo for Sitecore, for example, is a product that helps us create a compelling enterprise search experience for Sitecore.

Mike Jensen

Plus, if you’re picking a platform and want to be strategic, just look at the Gartner quadrant. Sitecore always ranks super high. If you have a need as part of your digital strategy for digital marketing, Sitecore is the big player in that space.

How is Sitecore different from other enterprise-level content management systems?

Andrew Wright

The personalization capabilities in Sitecore are incredible. I really like being able to craft a more personalized experience based on known behaviours or known attributes of a visitor to try and deliver a more customized and relevant experience. It’s not always appropriate, but when it is, it’s really nice to be able to do it.

The best part? This type of action is in the hands of content editors. IT and developers don’t need to be involved when content editors and authors want to do this, which is different than other systems. Sitecore really is a marketing tool, and marketing and communications should be involved in using and evaluating this kind of tool.

Mike Jensen

Other content management systems have a lot out-of-the-box components, whereas Sitecore focuses more on the core authoring experience. It’s intended for you to extend and customize. It’s always going to need to be customized and built on top of the basic framework that they give you. That’s what I like about it. It doesn’t get in the way of the best way to do things. You’re not weighing out-of-the-box with how much to customize.

Andrew Wright

The level of control and the constraints in Sitecore are also different, but in a good way. This is especially evident in the way the authoring experience works. You can set up the experience in a way that enables people to start writing and placing content in the right parts of the site quickly and confidently. Authors can focus on getting content where they need it, instead of getting bogged down in other considerations and layers that are common with other CMS platforms.

What other technical strengths does Sitecore have compared to other platforms?

Mike Jensen

As a development platform, it’s nice to be able to write in a CMS using ASP.NET MVC. It’s incredibly extensible; you name it, you can change it.

And because it’s an ASP.NET application, just like SharePoint, you can write anything custom to integrate with other systems. There are some products out that will have connectors to negate the need for customization, but you have the ability to build whatever you need.

Overall, it’s flexibility that Sitecore gives to developers. It provides just the right amount of framework to allow you to customize it the way you want to.

Ruben Chan

When you start with a Sitecore project and you have a space that you’re working in—say a portion of a site like the team directory—the first thing you do is define your data schema. It’s not working in Visual Studio. It’s going into the content editor in Sitecore and working on these data templates, figuring out which fields and functionality a content author needs.

From a developer’s point of view, this is fantastic because it forces you to have very structural content and the ability to separate content authoring and design which can otherwise cost you a lot of time. Instead, we can focus on developing and deploying higher value parts of a site, such as the digital marketing suite or integrating with existing systems.

What can the Sitecore digital marketing suite do for organizations?

Spencer Perry

Sitecore’s digital marketing capabilities can do a lot for clients. In fact, I think it’s what sets Sitecore apart. Personalization is one thing, but geotargeting also adds a lot of value. Without a developer, a content editor or author can calibrate a site to roll up geographically relevant content ahead of other items. Imagine if you were a company doing in business in Alberta and B.C. You could highlight the B.C. content for visitors coming from that province to ensure that the site’s most relevant messages are prioritized and delivered right in front of them.

The analytics built-in to Sitecore provide good insight into how the site is performing. You can still use Google Analytics or another tool, but Sitecore has enough data depth to guide decision-making and give feedback on strategies and activities.

Mallory O’Connor

Aside from the functionality within the digital marketing suite, it’s important to remember that Sitecore is platform. There are so many features and packages within Sitecore 8, for example, that it really makes sense to prioritize the components of the digital marketing suite before the first release. This way, teams invest in the most high-value areas first and gradually build up competencies with each aspect of Sitecore before moving onto the next feature set.

How easy is it to get started with authoring and managing a Sitecore website?

Mike Jensen

As we’re building out a solution, we’re able to put things into production a lot faster than other platforms. This speeds up the authoring process, even though the site is still in development. Content authors often appreciate the option to start working as soon as possible, too.

Spencer Perry

As an end-user, the visual nature of the authoring experience is fantastic. Everything is laid out in the content navigation tree, which makes it easy to see the entire site and find the right pages without much effort.

Plus, with the help of a developer or site owner, it’s easy to set up the right permissions to manage the authoring process. Content creators can write copy for a page, submit it for approval, and I can go in and check it before publishing it. All of these activities happen right in Sitecore, which saves having to manage draft and published content across multiple places.

Finally, what gets you most excited about Sitecore?

Ruben Chan

I’m always learning new stuff that fascinates me at Sitecore, like the rules engine. It’s super powerful! Overall, I love the flexibility and the organization. The developer and authoring experiences are so structured, which makes it easy to work with and manage every part of a website.

Mike Jensen

I like it because it’s intended for you to extend and customize. They give you a robust framework, and then you have the ability to go beyond that and determine the best customizations for your website and organization as a whole.

Mallory O’Connor

I’m excited because our team loves to work on these kinds of projects. It’s fun and challenging, but also easy to work with Sitecore. There’s so much we can do to improve digital customer experiences with this platform!

Microsoft Cloud is coming to Canada

Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0700

We’ve been building portals within Office 365 and SharePoint Online for the past several years and are noticing a dramatic increase in interest from our clients in building portals that leverage the Microsoft Cloud. The rationale for transitioning existing SharePoint solutions to the cloud is a compelling one, whether you want to benefit from the latest and greatest features, Microsoft’s subscription-based licensing models, or to avoid costly infrastructure overhead. There is also the lure of unique services and capabilities only available through the cloud; capabilities like Yammer, Delve and the Office Graph, Office 365 Video, and other NextGen portals. This has been further intensified by Microsoft’s unwavering determination to incent customers to move to the cloud with an unapologetic cloud-centric roadmap for its core product portfolio.

Yet, even with all the compelling arguments, one point of contention frequently blocked consideration of the cloud for many of our clients — the fact that the infrastructure and data would be located outside of Canada and thus be subject to foreign laws and regulations such as the USA PATRIOT Act. This was in violation of a number of Canadian organization’s privacy policies and/or privacy legislation that they must comply with.

Yesterday, Microsoft made a significant announcement, which will be a game changer when it comes to the appeal of the Microsoft Cloud in Canada. Microsoft will be opening two Canadian data centres that will offer Office 365 (including SharePoint Online), Azure, and Dynamics CRM services.

Some of the key points to note:

General availability of Azure is anticipated in early 2016, followed by Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online later in 2016.
The data centres are to be located in Ontario and Quebec.
Microsoft will address data residency considerations (you can specify that your data will only reside in Canada).

There are many questions to be answered such as: Can existing Office 365 tenants be transferred? Will the pricing model be on par? Will performance be as robust? Will features be released on the same schedule? We hope to find out these details and more in the coming months.

All of us at Habanero applaud this move and commitment by Microsoft to Canada, which frankly until now, we weren’t expecting despite the inherent demand. We believe this will be well received by organizations across Canada.

Will it fuel an even greater interest in Office 365 and Azure services amongst our Canadian clientele? We think so!

Comparing SharePoint search and Coveo for Sitecore

Wed, 27 May 2015 00:00:00 -0700

We recently completed a Sitecore 7.2 public website project. We made the decision to use Coveo as our search engine because of its easy integration with Sitecore and the search centre’s attractive, highly functional front-end experience.

Habanero has a ton of SharePoint search experience, especially using SharePoint 2013. Initially, we figured “search is search – how different can it be?” The concept of publishing content, parsing the content, storing the searched content in an index, and then returning that content in response to search queries is pretty much the same across any search product.

What we found out is that although a lot of things are identical, or very similar, between Coveo for Sitecore and SharePoint search, there are some key differences to be aware of.

Coveo is not just a search engine for Sitecore. It started life as a standalone product, with integration points with Sitecore and other applications. As a result, Coveo for Sitecore still comes with Coveo’s own feature-rich management interface, much of which does not apply or is disabled in the Coveo for Sitecore product.

What’s the same?

Automatically indexing published content in the content sources
Automatically recognizing custom content types/fields (SharePoint) and templates/fields (Sitecore) and mapping these to searchable properties in the index
Rich management interfaces for configuring the search indexes and the search experience
Rich end-user search experience, including ranking, sorting, refining, and customizable display of results
The ability to “promote” results in response to a particular query
Query capabilities based on the full-text of a piece of content, or based on specific fields in the content

What’s different?

How to manage the search experience

In SharePoint 2013, search is largely a matter of configuring out-of-the-box functionality. Everything is provided for you, with settings so that you can tweak things the way you want. In some cases, you may need to do some custom development–for example, the process of creating custom display templates to render search results the way you want generally requires a developer.

For example, defining content sources, defining crawl schedules, managing the search schema, resetting the index, defining result sources and result types, or configuring search Web Parts is a configuration exercise. SharePoint provides a user interface for doing all these things or you can configure it using the .NET APIs or PowerShell.

In Coveo for Sitecore, out-of-the-box functionality is limited to the infrastructure side. Sitecore and Coveo work together to create an index for each Sitecore database, and Sitecore custom templates and fields are automatically pushed over to Coveo. For any other customization, you generally need to write .NET code to make it happen.

For example, to create a calculated field in the Coveo index, you need to write a .NET class and insert it into the Sitecore processing pipeline. For the end-user experience, Coveo for Sitecore provides a sample search centre results page with many configuration options. However, if you want to brand the page or modify functionality on any of the Web Parts, the way to do that is to take a copy of the Coveo for Sitecore Web Part and modify it as you wish. This will require a developer.

Where to manage the search experience

In SharePoint, most of the search management is done in Central Administration, in the Search service application. Here, you can define content sources, manage the search schema, set search rules, reset the index, and start crawls.

In Coveo for Sitecore, most of the search management is done in Sitecore. Indexing is performed automatically when content is saved or published in Sitecore. Initiating a full indexing operation is done in Sitecore. Defining refinable properties (called “facets” in Coveo) is done partially in the Sitecore pipeline and partially in the Sitecore content tree.

A few things are still done on the Coveo management side. Resetting the search index (actually, “deleting” the indexes) is done in the Coveo admin tool. As well, setting up promoted results (called “top results” in Coveo) is done in the Coveo admin tool, and needs to be done in every index.

One area in which Coveo excels is the ability to directly examine the index. Using the Coveo admin tool, you can browse all content in the index, both full-text content as well as individual fields, which is a great help in troubleshooting.

Crawling content

SharePoint 2013 uses a “crawl” paradigm to discover new, changed, and deleted content. Each content source has a crawl schedule, which can perform a full, incremental, or continuous crawl. SharePoint content is published, and then there is a delay before the crawler will discover the changes and update the search index. Continuous and incremental crawls examine the SharePoint logs to determine what has changed since the last crawl, and then indexes only that content. Full crawls examine the entire content source, can be slow depending on the size of the content, and are usually performed relatively infrequently (eg. weekly).

Coveo for Sitecore takes a different, “push,” approach. Every time a piece of content is saved in Sitecore, the modified content is pushed to Coveo for Sitecore, which parses the content and updates the search index. As a result, modified content is typically available in the Coveo index much faster–usually within seconds as opposed to minutes. This is in part driven by Sitecore’s search model–Coveo for Sitecore has to follow this pattern, just as Sitecore Lucene and Solr search providers do as well.

For this reason, the equivalent of SharePoint’s full crawl in Sitecore-Coveo is really a full push --pushing every piece of content from the master database to the web database, which will pass each item to Coveo for Sitecore. In Sitecore, this is called reindexing and is available from the Sitecore control panel.

Faceted search

Faceted search refers to the experience of displaying a list of facets (which SharePoint calls refiners) on the search results page. These usually take the form of a list of categories with checkboxes. Checking the box filters the search results to just the ones that match the tag.

SharePoint 2013’s refiners are always “and” refiners, which means if you select more than one value for a specific refiner, the search results show only those results that are tagged with all the selected values.

Coveo for Sitecore’s facets are, by default, “or” refiners. This means that if you select more than one value for a specific refiner, the search results show the set of results that are tagged with at least one of the selected values. You can configure the facets to be “and” refiners instead.

Promoted results and top results

SharePoint 2013 has a single search index for all published content. To create a promoted result, you define the query you want to match, and then you set the result(s) you wish to promote. This is typically done in the search service application in Central Administration.

Coveo for Sitecore has multiple indexes, one for each Sitecore database. The process for creating a top result is similar (you can create them either by specifying the query first and then the result(s), or navigating to the result and then defining the query which will match). However, you must define the top results in each index you want it to be in. If you have multiple published indexes (one of our applications does), this doubles the work for the search administrators. Coveo is looking into a way to manage the top results in Sitecore, which would push the results into multiple indexes, so this functionality may change in the future.

Infrastructure

Coveo for Sitecore relies on an open-source message-queueing application called Rabbit MQ to manage the content pushed from Sitecore to Coveo. When a piece of content is updated in Sitecore, Sitecore sends a message to Rabbit MQ with the content, including any custom fields or modifications that are made in the Sitecore pipeline. Rabbit MQ then passes the message to Coveo for indexing. Rabbit MQ has a rich management interface which allows you to view the queues and the messages being relayed.

In a few cases, we found that Rabbit MQ stalls and messages coming from Sitecore piled up in the queues without being relayed on to Coveo. Restarting the Coveo search service resolved the problem. We didn’t do much investigation on this, but we did write a small application which monitors the queues and sends a notification if the queues become overly full.

Habanero: Insights

Beyond Compliance The Business Value Behind Document Management

7 Strategies for Managing Change on Your Digital Workplace Project

Records Managers honoured with trio of posters

People before technology

Systems designed for the way that people want to work

The posters are an expression of respect and empathy

The right way to migrate from file shares to SharePoint

“Let’s move off file shares and onto SharePoint”

Don’t recreate your file share problems in SharePoint

Oranges and Apples — don’t try to treat everything the same

What belongs on your team site

What might not belong on your team site

Build business process-centric sites or solutions

Make sure governance documents are easily accessible

Start with the big picture

Workplace awards: how we find our tribe

Choosing the right awards

Building relationships

Finding our tribe

What does a 2017 Nielsen Norman Group award winning SharePoint intranet look like? We'll show you!

HR and the Modern Workplace: Using Design Thinking to Create Successful Digital Transformation

Leveraging Aspose for PDF to Excel migration

Step one - Licensing

Step two - Workbook

Step three - Worksheet

Step four - Import data

Habanero innovation initiative – Chatbot, your workplace assistant

The reboot of the chatbot

The same old enterprise problem

The vision of the enterprise chatbot

How organizations and employees benefit from utilizing chatbots

Human resources

Marketing and sales

Mobile

Why now?

State of chatbots

The experiment

Initial research questions:

Is your file plan technology ready?

What employees say about great digital workplaces

What *is* a digital workplace?

There are so many new and useful tools available – what’s the problem?

Great digital workplaces resemble great cities

The future of digital workplaces

“I understand how and when I should use the different tools available to me.”

“My digital workplace helps me have an organized mind.”

“I don't need to piece together my own digital workplace to get things done because our IT group is proactive in supporting us.”

“I see what inspires me and makes me proud to be part of this organization everyday.”

“My organization is transparent.”

“It’s easy for me to share my knowledge and skills.”

“Our digital workplace helps me build on the ideas of others.”

“I’m not tethered to my desk – I can work where I want to.”

“I feel connected to my colleagues in different offices.”

“I feel informed and up-to-date with all the context I need to do my job.”

What’s going on in your organization?

Five reasons you need an ECM roadmap

1. Address the cause, not the symptoms

2. Break-down a complex initiative (provide better visibility)

3. Change management (you can’t start early enough)

4. Alignment (because we need all stakeholders to engage for success)

5. Establish good rhythms (and practice makes perfect…)

Habanero ECM roadmap template

Rethinking ECM

Habanero ECM roadmap template

10 signs you have a design thinking mindset

What do you think about design thinking?

What is design thinking?

A bit of background

So what can you use design thinking for?

10 signs you have a design thinking mindset

1. You know the value of taking time to pause and define the ideal experience

2. You know the value of understanding the perspective of the people you’re designing for (also known as empathy)

3. You appreciate the value and challenge in getting the science into social science

4. You appreciate the sentiment in Einstein's quote

5. You understand that while your role is important, it's not about you

6. You also have a scout’s mindset

7. You know that while it's fun to design change, it’s not always easy to be on the receiving end of that change

8. You know the power of shared understanding

9. You know you need to surface the most promising ideas and then test them

What is a digital workplace?