Kicking Things Off – Writing the Right SOW

12th of September, 2018 / / 1 Comment

It’s one thing to convert a conversation around a broad scope of work into a well-defined and articulated, 3 to 4-page proposal (sometimes 20 +, depending on whose template you’re using), it’s another thing for a client or customer to read through this document, often, multiple times due to a review and response cycle, before finally agreeing to it.

Most don’t enjoy this process. Client stakeholders usually look for a few key things when it comes to the SOW: price, time (hours) and key dates.… [Keep reading] “Kicking Things Off – Writing the Right SOW”

The Yammer Roast

2nd of September, 2018 / / No Comments

Taking my inspiration from Comedy Central, the Yammer Roast is a forum in which we can directly address resistances around Yammer, its role, and past failures in retrospect.
Some of my clients have tried with Yammer and concluded that for various reasons it’s failed to take hold. For some the value is clear and it’s a case of putting a compelling approach and supporting rationale to sponsors and consumers who remain sceptical. For others, they are looking for a way to make it work in their current collaboration landscape.… [Keep reading] “The Yammer Roast”

IT Service Management (ITSM) & Operations – Overview of the Availability Management Process

25th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Background

In many cases ITSM Availability Management Process is overlooked due to other frontline processes such as incident, problem and change management. I have provided a summary of this availability management process and significance below. I hope that the information is useful for your organisation in order to define and implement the process.
Objectives:

  • Availability management has to ensure that the delivered availability levels for all services comply with or exceed the agreed requirements in a cost-effective way and enables the business to satisfy its objectives.
… [Keep reading] “IT Service Management (ITSM) & Operations – Overview of the Availability Management Process”

SharePoint Integration for Health Care eLearning – Moving LMS to the Cloud

21st of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Health care systems often face challenges in the way of being unkept and unmaintained or managed by too many without consistency in content and harbouring outdated resources. A lot of these legacy training and development systems also wear the pain of constant record churning without a supportable record management system. With the accrual of these records over time forming a ‘Big Data concern’, modernising these eLearning platforms may be the right call to action for medical professionals and researchers.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Integration for Health Care eLearning – Moving LMS to the Cloud”

The Present [and Future] Landscape of Data Migrations

17th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

A rite of passage for the majority of us in the tech consultancy world is being a part of a medium to large scale data migration at some stage in our careers. No, I don’t mean dragging files from a PC to a USB drive, though this may have very well factored into the equation for some us. What I’m referencing is a planned piece of work where the objective is to move an entire data set from a legacy storage system to a target storage.… [Keep reading] “The Present [and Future] Landscape of Data Migrations”

Branding the Consultant: what can I do versus where can I add the most value?

19th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Engaging new and potentially challenging clients can always be daunting, particularly when an expectation has been set as to what role you will play as a part of a team. Whether consulting and road-mapping potential outcomes and future work, to delivering a full project. In my time working with Kloud, the broader sense of the term ‘consultant’ appears to be at an all-time high in terms of what it means to the professional marketplace. I view today’s Business Consultant as someone who guides an individual stakeholder or group, based on engaging and understanding given circumstances or a proposed business case, to help make decisions on adopting a specific direction – one which is considered the most appropriate or in their best interest.… [Keep reading] “Branding the Consultant: what can I do versus where can I add the most value?”

Your Modern Collaboration Landscape

24th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

There are many ways people collaborate within your organisation. You may or may not enjoy the fruits of that collaboration. Does your current collaboration landscape cater for the wide variety of groups that form (organically or inorganically) to build relationships and develop your business?
Moving to the cloud is a catalyst for re-evaluating your collaboration solutions and their value. Platforms like Office 365 are underpinned by search/discovery tools that can traverse and help draw insight from the output of collaboration, including conversations and connections between people and information.… [Keep reading] “Your Modern Collaboration Landscape”

Agile Teams to High Performing Machines

17th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Agile teams are often under scrutiny as they find their feet and as their sponsors and stakeholders realign expectations. Teams can struggle due to many reasons. I won’t list them here, you’ll find many root causes online and may have a few yourself.
Accordingly, this article is for Scrum Masters, Delivery Managers or Project Managers who may work to help turn struggling teams into high performing machines. The key to success here is measures, measures and measures. … [Keep reading] “Agile Teams to High Performing Machines”

Major Incident Management – Inputs and Outputs

7th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Definition

A major incident is an incident that results in significant disruption to the business and demands a response beyond the routine incident management process.
The Major Incident Management Process applies globally to all Customers and includes Incidents resulting in a service outage.  This process is triggered by Incidents directly raised by Users or via referral from the Event Management Process, which are classified as Major Incidents in the Incident Management Process by the Service Desk.… [Keep reading] “Major Incident Management – Inputs and Outputs”

Automate network share migrations to Sharepoint Online using ShareGate PowerShell

7th of June, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Sharegate supports PowerShell scripting which can be used to automate and schedule migrations. In this post, I am going to demonstrate an example of end to end automation to migrate network Shares to SharePoint Online. The process effectively reduces the task of executing migrations to “just flicking a switch”.

Pre-Migration

The following pre-migration activities were conducted before the actual migration:

  1. Analysis of Network Shares
  2. Discussions with stakeholders from different business units to identify content needs
  3. Pilot migrations to identify average throughput capability of migration environment
  4. Identification of acceptable data filtration criteria, and prepare Sharegate migration template files based on business requirements
  5. Derive a migration plan from above steps

Migration Automation flow

The diagram represents a high-level flow of the process:
 

The migration automation was implemented to execute the following steps:

  1. Migration team indicates that migration(s) are ready to be initiated by updating the list item(s) in the SharePoint list
  2. Updated item(s) are detected by a PowerShell script polling the SharePoint list
  3. The list item data is downloaded as a CSV file.
… [Keep reading] “Automate network share migrations to Sharepoint Online using ShareGate PowerShell”