Mastering Microsoft 365 Change with Ally Ward, M365 Global Service Owner

Ally Ward, M365 Global Service Owner at a major legal firm, unravels the complexities of managing Microsoft 365 change, sharing effective strategies for handling frequent updates and ensuring seamless IT operations.

• Ally's role in managing Microsoft 365 changes, focusing on assessing the impact of updates and determining necessary actions for adoption or compliance
• How change information can be distributed through Teams channels and how to alert relevant subject matter experts to the appropriate information
• Balancing the need for awareness with the risk of information overload in terms of end-user communication
• The value of investing in resources to manage Microsoft 365 change effectively

Thanks to Ribbon, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support.

Transcript

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Ally Ward: It's all about making sure the right people know about it. If you know, if you're a team of 10 people and you're the only one that needs to know, that's fine. You can pick and choose, but even then you can be messing with your compliance on something, even when it's that small. And certainly we get sort of a thousand plus users in the firm thousand to 10, 000.

You've probably not got a huge IT team. But that task still needs doing you've got hundreds of thousands in your, you've probably a much larger IT team. You can probably divvy it up and manage it, but it's an effort that doesn't change no matter how big your firm is. And I firmly believe it's absolutely crucial.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams insider podcast. One of the things we spend a lot of time focused on is managing and understanding Microsoft 365 change. Indeed, Empowering Cloud has a Change Pilot service where we help organizations manage and workflow and Microsoft 365 change. It's a really interesting area and this week I'm excited to have Ally Ward on the podcast.

Ally is a M365 global services owner for a large legal firm. And I've known her and worked with her in different organizations over a number of years. She's a real expert on Microsoft 365 change and how different organizations manage those changes. So in this podcast, Ally dives deep into understanding Microsoft 365 change, how it works, how you get that information, how you can manage it and distribute it, both from an IT management point of view, but also from an adoption and user comms point of view.

Many thanks for Ally for taking the time to jump on the podcast. And also many thanks to Ribbon who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud. On with the show. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Excited for this one. We're going to talk about something a little bit different.

Um, I've had the pleasure of, uh, knowing Ally for a few years in our space. Now we've done a couple of panels and, uh, bits and pieces together, but first time on the pod. So Ally, welcome to the podcast. 

Ally Ward: Hi Tom, nice to be here. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So maybe we could start. You could give us a little bit of a background because we've crossed paths at a couple of organizations and you've had various roles kind of culminating what you're doing now.

But maybe you could talk us through that journey around kind of Microsoft 365 and Teams and everything else. 

Ally Ward: So, um, yeah, I've been in IT for Over 30 years now. Started as an applications developer in those days when you used to spec the system, design it, code it, test it, implement it, and then have to support it, get up in two o'clock in the morning if you broke it.

So, um, being, being all, you know, most of the roles across, um, App Dev for a long time now. Since 2012, I've been working on the Microsoft stack. So, um, started implementing Lynk those that remember Lynk that we then upgraded to Skype for Business. That then got upgraded to Teams. I've done a lot around the security and compliance in M365.

And most recently, I'm the global product, product owner in a large law firm, and I'm responsible for the whole of the Microsoft stack there, essentially. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And what does that, what does that role look like? Because that's a like. That's a huge thing. Look after the Microsoft 365 stack. What does that look like?

Ally Ward: Um, so I, I managed the changes that are coming through and obviously that's key for the conversation today. Um, what, what are Microsoft doing? What are they changing? What impact is it going to have on our firm? What's new? What functionAllyty have we got? How do we want to, um, adopt it? Do we want to adopt it?

Do we want to turn it off? Those sorts of conversations. I mean, it's, it's more than that. Um, I have fingers in pies across. Pretty much anything that's even vaguely related to Microsoft, as soon as someone wants something, it's Ally, what is this, how does it work, can we use it, those sorts of things, so, you know, it changes, changes on a daily basis, what I'm doing, but, um, it's, yeah.

Anything Microsoft, I'm probably the first port of call for pretty much anyone in the firm. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And yeah, as you said, we're going to kind of dive into change because you've been, uh, had a lot of experience in that space and you've worked with different organizations with different approaches to it.

But certainly it feels like you and the teams you've worked with have had, um, very well thought out approaches to managing change, managing the admin side of change and the comms side of change as well. 

Ally Ward: Yeah, I mean, it's true. So. Microsoft change is vast. It changes on a well, every day there are more changes coming through and it could be anything.

It could be something to Windows. It could be something to to Outlook. It could be something that's that's in Azure. It literally could be absolutely anywhere. What you have to do with an organization is work out. Do I care? Some of these apps you're not using. You can just say, just don't don't care about that.

Some of them, all of your users are using it, your Outlook, your Teams, they change and suddenly the whole of your organization is going to say, well, what's going on? Um, I was about to say something not quite as polite. Um, and it's deciding just where, you know, what is the impact and who needs to care about it.

And that job, yeah. It's the same job, whether you're in a firm that's got 10 people, a thousand people, 10, 000 people or several hundred thousand, you need to care about that. Um, and it's the same job to do the assessment on it. So, um, a significant part of my job is doing that impact assessment and then deciding, well, do I need to tell anyone else about it?

What do we need to do about? Do we need some user comms? Do we need to, um, decide? Actually, does my compliance not want it turned on at all? There's a whole load around that that we need to do. So I've where I am now. We've got a quite comprehensive process on it, but actually in the past as well. It's the same job.

And, you know, based on the same process, we've managed that. That change, which is, you know, I don't think I know you've got better stats on it and I have, but it's probably 20 or so new changes a week. 

Yeah, it's, um, 

you know, throwing a double that or something about 

Tom Arbuthnot: 1500, 1501 specifically should average over.

We monitor 22 tenants. That's about the average. It goes way up. If you use Dynamics, because Dynamics is super noisy. Um, and I think what a lot of people don't understand. Is that message center feed, which is how much I'll give you all the changes is tailored to your organization. So if you're using different types of licensing, you have different use cases, different configurations, you will get messages targeted at you.

So it does vary from organization to organization as well. 

Ally Ward: Yeah, and as you say, so, um, perhaps we will jump into what do I do with it? So Um, Message Center sends up all these updates and you can turn on a bit of Power Automate that will automatically take it from the Message Center and will dump it into Planner for you.

And that's fine, it's all just in one place in Planner, um, but that's really hard to manage. So what I've seen is that you might just do it in Planner, so you might have a bit more Power Automate when it gets in that says OK. Is this an Exchange change? Is it a Teams change? Is it a, um, Microsoft apps and Dynamics?

Whatever it might be, which ones of these do we care about? So at the most basic, you can just do a little bit of power automate and I do. I not only put them into various buckets, but I also label them so that I can tell. Whether they're user impacting, whether they're admin impacting, whether they're things that I want to know.

I've got my own labels as well that I've put on them. You can manage them there. And if you've got dedicated teams, yeah, your Exchange team, your Teams team, SharePoint team, whatever. If you've got dedicated teams, you can probably just point them at those buckets and make them responsible for staying on top of them, closing them, doing whatever they want to them.

as a dedicated teams are. If you're in a somewhat smaller firm and maybe there's just two or three of you that are doing absolutely everything, that's maybe not the easiest of places to manage it because there's still other people you need to tell about it and they don't live in Planner. It's not their place where they live.

Yeah. Um, what I've done to make it real, to make it visible. Not much real, but visible to people that don't live in planner and actually have got other day jobs. And this is just a one small part of it. I want to be able to tag them in Teams. So when they've come into planner, as I say, I've, I've put 'em in buckets and then I triage them there and say, okay, are they something I just don't care about at all?

If it's, you know, you, you say Dynamics, let's say it was Dynamics. Automatically close those ones. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Mm-hmm. 

Ally Ward: And then are they ones that are, I think of that significantly impacting that I need senior leadership to know about it. So then they need managing in there as well. So I sort of leave those ones open.

The rest of them I paste out to Teams and then close them and then Microsoft reopens them whenever they've updated the data on it, which especially in Teams they do on a ridiculous basis. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, so 50, 59 percent of items on average get some kind of update or change and Microsoft over the course we've been watching change.

Are doing that more and more they'll push a message out early just saying this is coming wait and we'll give you some links to further documentation or this is coming or the other thing that is the biggest change is date slips like constantly like okay it was we were aiming for March now we're aiming for April.

Ally Ward: Yeah, almost every single Teams one that comes through seems to do that, but each of the may not be obvious to others. Each of the product Teams has got different ways of managing what they're posting. So they're slightly different structure to them. They'll, they'll organize them slightly differently.

And my bugbear, they don't have dates in a standard format of when they're going to happen. They're just in the text from this date to that date. And they might say what's in early access. It might be that it's. Everyone or it might be for the various different tenant types, you know, got government or whatever else on it.

And it's just not easy. There's not a defined place on it in a defined format, which would be so easy to think. And that's the biggest challenge is managing those dates on it to be able to, you know, you can't then filter it in planner, to see what are the ones that are happening this month. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's really weird, isn't it? You say there is a there is an API to get the data. So you think that then at work, I could just pull the data myself, but all the person data is in one giant blob in a body.

So, um, what we've had to do is actually we run that through Azure Open AI to pull the dates out to map them to specific fields in a SharePoint list in the case of how we do it. 

Ally Ward: Coding going on that yet. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, but it's a huge overhead to 1500 items, like if you're taking this seriously, you should be looking at the items at least to check they're okay.

So immediately you've got some cognitive need there to understand what the change is. Do I care about it? When's it happening? And then and then that whole cycle all over again when the date shifts because the information has been updated as well, 

Ally Ward: indeed. So, um, So yeah, so you have to do that. So what I then do is I then take it out and I post it into Teams.

Um, and I've got a team that is basically accessible to pretty much any IT in my organization where I've got channels for each of them. So I've got one for exchange. I've got one for Teams, one for SharePoint, et cetera. And I paste them in there. Not only do I paste them in there, I then tag the people that are responsible for it because depending on notifications, they will or won't see it.

And I don't want to spam them. I don't know, I've got over a thousand people, I think, probably in, um, in my team there at the moment. So I don't want to spam everyone, so I will tag the security SMEs, the Outlook SMEs, whoever it might be, and say these are ones I think you need to care about, including also change management.

So it might be I'm just telling admins, it might be actually you need to tell your change management folks we need to do some knowledge articles on this, or you need to consider if you want knowledge articles. If you've got different regions, as I have, they may have different approaches to who they tell about things.

Depending on their compliance levels, depending on how they do their interaction with their users. So each of their teams needs to make a decision as to what they want to do about it. So there's a whole host of different people that I want to tell about without telling everyone about everything. The value I'm bringing to this is I'm triaging it and I'm deciding who ought to care, which then means that they only get the things that ought to matter then.

They still get lots of notifications, but only the ones that ought to be relevant. To them 

Tom Arbuthnot: and that kind of centralizes the information as well. So they know that there's a channel with a, a history of message related to this workload or this scenario. 

Ally Ward: Yeah. Always go and find it. They can easily go and find something.

They're not searching in a planner somewhere. They can go and search in Teams, in, in the Teams channel, in the team for the things that they're interested in. I make sure I post the MC number as well, so if they're IT, they can go and have a look in the background and go and, you know, go look at the post themselves if they want to go.

do whatever they want to do on it. Um, there is, as you say, then the updates. So when the date changes, I tend to also then post new dates on it. And most of the time it's just shifting the dates out. Occasionally I'll come back and put it right around the circle again, but mostly it's pushed the date out.

Someone wants to know when it's happening, but they've got the latest date where they can see what's going on on it. Um, with that as well. So as I said, I've also got items that I want for. Senior level leadership. So I've got an automated bit of, um, power BI that pulls from my planner, things that I've tagged as being for, for leadership.

And once a month, they get put into a report on a roadmap of exactly when things are happening. And then the other thing is, okay, so I posted it, I've made it visible. I have a bi weekly meeting with all of my subject matter experts and change management for that matter, where we go through the things that are, then triage the level further down, so told you about all of them, and then these are the ones I think are actually impacting.

So they, I'm not choosing for the Teams what they need to know, but there's ones I want to highlight, and you can't talk about it, there's just too many to talk about everything, so then I have a bi weekly meeting, so I then extract from my teams. The ones that are since the last meeting, what is it that we're going to be processing, what we're going to be dealing with, when are the dates on them, um, and quite often, I'll then dig a bit more into it as well.

And if Microsoft said, run this report, and it will tell you that these users have got this out of compliance, these, these Windows machines that are the old version, whatever it might be, I quite often run those reports, and then I can come to my technical working group with This is what you need to know about it.

This is your region. This is you. So there's a level of needing enough technical knowledge to know what it's about, which most of the time I do not always. Sometimes I go to that meeting saying you know, I've got no idea what he's talking about. I'm hoping you do. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's the interesting thing about the, how many SMEs you have and how big the org is.

I know you've worked in some huge a hundred thousand orgs where there's like, And there's literally an SME for meetings, an SME for calling, an SME for chat, like, like, and then a smaller rules, you're obviously not going to get SMEs for sub features. Um, so how do you deal with that when you need that expertise? Like, is that farmed out to the next nearest SME?

Ally Ward: Um, well, I've got a team that report to me. So I've got a technical team that know a level of detail more than I do. I'm able to ask them. But equally, sometimes it's only relevant to I've got multiple regions and sometimes only one region cares about it. So their SMEs in those regions, right? So that technical working group takes that information and I can share it then.

And, you know, I've been running a while and I can say, I don't know what this is. I hope you do tell me. Do we use this? Are we using SIP gateways? Are we, do we have Windows 11 machines? Whatever it might be, you know, if I don't know, it's, it's a learning exercise for me as well. So yeah, I have to lean on other people in the firm because I don't know everything.

My team don't know everything. And there are some things that actually,

Tom Arbuthnot: I don't think anybody could know everything about the stack. It's too wide, isn't it? 

Ally Ward: That's it is, yeah, it's vast, vast, vast, vast. Um, and some of them I've been in this world long enough. I've been in the Teams world since 2012. So we didn't have Teams in 2012.

Whatever. So, you know, I know a fair bit, but, um, yeah, there's always other people that have got a different take on it as well. It's a fascinating conversation often of what the different regions will say about things, what, you know, Australia will have, you know, they'll be asking about the date of residency.

Inevitably, um, U. S. will be talking probably about whose personal information is it that we've got on there? What do we do with that person? There's a whole load of compliance things that regionally specific perhaps. It's, um, interesting. Yeah, it's a place where we all have to talk about and decide what do we care about?

What are we going to do about make some actions on it? And then there's always Copilot that can that. Pull out the minutes of those meetings, tell you exactly who decided what, and you can share that afterwards. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And how long does that call run for, like, just to give you a sense of it? 

Ally Ward: So, I do two hour long calls every other week on that.

I normally, there's probably, I do two or three topics on things that are important at that point in time, whatever it might be. Um, you know, uh, cleaning up of accounts, whatever it might be, and then I'll go through the major changes. So, there's probably, I don't know, maybe 20 changes or so. That we're going through.

It's a solid data rich conversation. Yeah, two one hour meetings every other week 

Tom Arbuthnot: and that's dedicated to M365. So is that part of a motion where other IT changes would also be discussed? Or is that just this is M365 stack? 

Ally Ward: Just M365. So we'd have a similar technical working group for ServiceNow or and actually got.

SharePoint is the one part, part of Microsoft that's not mine. So SharePoint has its own tech working group. Yeah, there's, there's different groups that manage in a similar manner what I do with my M365. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And, and how do you approach and how have you seen approached in the different orgs you've worked with the, the tracking of the actions like this change is happening, a policy needs to be agreed.

How does that work get assigned and tracked? 

Ally Ward: I've seen it in different ways. Um, in some, you know, having it in the planner, once it's been addressed, you know, you put the comments into the planner, it says, I've done this with it. And you close it. That's the, that's the simplest way of doing it, probably. Um, I track actions from my technical working group of who's, who's agreed to do what.

To some extent, the, having told the regent, it's kind of delegated responsibility at that time. So it's for them to determine what they want to do with it. In some organizations, that's the way it is. In other organizations, it's going to be, that you're then accountable for doing it. So I'd be putting it in a list, you know, SharePoint list, probably, um, ideally get it automatically put into a SharePoint list and be tracking those actions against that.

I've certainly seen it in multiple ways. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Because that seems to be one of the talking different organizations. It seems to be one of the pain points is the different, because we've grown up with The SharePoint team, the AD slash identity team, the, the UC team, um, exchange everybody has slightly different working approaches, but now everybody's changes are impacting each other.

So, uh, I'm in Teams, I want to know the Intune team are on top of the changes because they impact my rooms and the, you know, the, the exchange team wants to know this thing's changed because actually it's archiving into the exchange mailbox and that's their data. Um, so it feels like we're at a point where.

That visibility of everybody's on their game with their changes has become more important. 

Ally Ward: I think that's true. And that that perhaps talks to the larger organization because where you were describing it there, you've got a larger organization where you've got different groups of different things. If you're a bit smaller, depending on how you organize, it might be one person, one team that's doing all of those things.

So 

it is in their interest to manage those changes themselves. Um, and then, of course, there's the user impact as well that separately has to be communicated or not. Decided on. So, um, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah. What have you seen on that front? Interestingly, because that's again, it's like a different, different skill set and often a different team or person that is responsible for communicating to end users.

It sounds like you've got different approaches in different regions in your case. 

Ally Ward: Yes, so what I will often do is I'll create a factual knowledge article. I'll have gone to Microsoft, I'll have got what they've said about the change, I'll have got the user experience, screenshots, whatever else. I'll give it to the regions and say, here you are, turn that into something that's got your branding on it, it's got your region on it, it's put into whatever you want to do with it.

So. I don't think it's reasonable to expect change management teams to understand the technical bits. So here's your techie bits, put whatever fluff you want to put around it to make it suitable for your users. And I think I've seen that fairly consistently, actually. I'm going to say you and I work together in a very much larger organization, but it was many, many regions in that place.

Many, many countries. They all had slightly different needs for how they wanted to tell their people. And that's. That's the way the organization works. So, um, yeah, you can give them facts and then they can do what they want to do with it is the way I approach that. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And where does the line get drawn on what, what warrants user comms?

I feel like Microsoft get excited about every single change and every single change says you should inform the users because we're changing the button from blue to light blue. Um, but then there's some huge changes like. Teams chat and channels, complete UI change. I feel like there's a real challenge to communicate the things that need to be communicated without over communicating to the users and wearing them out.

Ally Ward: Yeah, I think that is a real challenge around it. What I have seen done is VivaEngage, or Yammer, as it used to be, um, that's a place where people can self serve. So you can put recent changes coming. You can post it there and they can choose to go and find out about it. And if they see a change, they can go and have a look and see, is it posted on?

Is it something I ought to know about it? But that's one way. Um, others and some of my regions do this. They do a newsletter that says. Hey, here's new things you might want to do once a week, once a month, whatever it is they're sending out. They've got a list of the various key changes. That's again for sort of self serve, people can click on the link, they go find about it.

The ones that actually talk about, you know, chat and channels in Teams, new Outlook, new Teams, the things where there's a major impact to the user experience. Those ones I think I'd be expecting pretty much any region to be saying. There's a change coming. We're expecting about this date. This is what you're going to say.

This is what you can expect. And, you know, here's who you contacted. You've got a real issue with it. Normally, we've got some level of preview going on. So we've where we can we try and get our IT teams to experience the change first. So they got an experience of it. Um, doesn't always work like that. You know, not all stuff goes into preview.

Don't always get a chance to do it. The other thing, of course, that, um, It is worth talking about probably is the different channels that you can use for updating people. So, of course, you've got the current channel. You've got a monthly channel, you've got by a semi annual channel, and that also helps some organizations.

So, um, a lot of highly regulated firms are running semi annual, which means they only get the changes every six months. It doesn't work for Teams because they're getting them regardless anyway, but, um, you know,

Tom Arbuthnot: I see organizations. Staggered that as well. So they like, well, we'll give IT current channel. So we've, we've got a jump start on what's going to come down the pipe.

Ally Ward: Exactly that. Now that became a lot harder to manage with Copilot because Copilot is only really putting this stuff in current and monthly channel. So if you want to get on board the Copilot train. You actually do need to in engage in the Microsoft where we want to keep you current on it. So I am seeing that starting to change the approach to to change and to move away from the semiannual to actually maybe monthly channels all right on that.

And yeah, we will preview that monthly channel, which you get. I think three weeks beforehand or something each month. It could be an early version of it. IT can look at make sure it's not something that actually breaks your add ins. And that's the key thing about the updates. Is it breaking your your internal add ins?

On it. Yeah, definitely seeing a move away from the semi annual. People really can't have that change to and you know what their phones update all the time. Anyway, you get used to that your iOS, your Android update all the time. And I think perhaps users are a bit more comfortable with their world changing and not having to stay the same in quite the same way.

It always used to have to. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it feels like across the I. T. landscape these days, like you wouldn't, you wouldn't expect to sign up to a modern SAS platform and say, I don't want updates until every six months. It's a history we've obviously had in the, in the Microsoft space, but it does feel like Microsoft are, uh, gently getting a bit more aggressive to be like, come on, you want to be on the, uh, Look, we're going to incrementally change.

That's life these days. 

Ally Ward: Yeah. And I think perhaps people are getting a bit more comfortable with that level of change. Now there's always going to be certain groups of users that aren't going to like that change. Um, and you can, you can mitigate it where you can back to the user comms, tell them if there's something really impactful coming, we know that the chat and channels change loving it personally.

But it's a substantial change to the way you have to do it, and it takes a little bit of getting used to. Um, New Outlook, another one, um, we, we're struggling with that because of the add ins. There are no com add ins in New Outlook, and it's not fully functional, it's not, it's not parity. The classic Outlook, but those sorts of changes, you've got to manage that change.

You've got to explain to people, show them, do a bit training if they want to see the training. Um, yeah, there's a level of assessment of why do we care? Um, and that's, that's what change management is there for. There's, you know, I expect there to be user, people responsible for the user experience. In each of my regions to decide which ones do we want to tell them about?

If I give them the information, they can make choices on it 

Tom Arbuthnot: like I've been fortunate to speak to a lot of organizations doing how they manage change. I think you've got some of the most thought out processes and the Teams stuff you're doing. And, uh, Just a personal thanks. You've helped us a lot with like, Oh, this would be a good idea.

That would be a good idea. Um, what would you say to organizations that don't really have that process down yet? How do they start? And how do they get the, the business to understand? I have to invest some time and effort into this process because otherwise there's impact down the road.

Ally Ward: It's a difficult one.

I think. Examples of those big changes probably bring it to life talking about new Teams, new Outlook, the chat channels. It doesn't take much to pull out impactful ones or ones where something's going to stop working, things that used to work a certain way. It's going to stop working. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, 

Ally Ward: a little bit of diligence would find a handful fairly quickly.

So in terms of getting the business to buy into it. Yes. Um, it's a harder thing to put the effort into it because it is. a continual slog. So if you can find a way to automate it, and I'm dare say, um, yeah, they can talk to you, Tom, and they can find a way to help them with their processes to, to automate it.

Um, yeah, it's, Going to have to put together a level of effort to plan that level of effort on it because it's, it is a substantial effort. I do firmly believe that it's a substantial risk to any organization if they are not monitoring these changes, things just stop working or actually, you know, you can be going out of compliance with something.

Tom Arbuthnot: That compliance one is a really good point, actually, because there's a lot of things that are like. We've come up with a new default policy. It's like, well, I mean, that needs, somebody needs to review that and check your organization is happy with that default. You can't just, well, unfortunately some people do, they just inherit whatever's changed.

And we had one recently, the voice enrolment for Teams and face enrolment Teams went from 

off 

to on. That's a huge change that you need to be aware of. 

Ally Ward: Yeah, and then certain regions have got a real problem with that, you know, Germany in particular is going to have a real problem, I would expect in a lot of organizations to say, I'm going to know who you are when I walk into, when you walk into a meeting, it's.

It's not that the workers council and things it's an issue. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, 

Ally Ward: and not just Germany. Obviously, there's other places as well have have I've had challenges from some of my other regions on that as you know, we just we just need to turn that off recording policies, transcription policies, you know, what if Microsoft decided we're going to allow anyone to record anything.

Some regions have got a real problem with that. Some of my regions don't allow recording unless you've got specific permission to do so. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And again it feels like Microsoft Motion now is much more on by default and will give you an option to turn off. Whereas it used to be, if you go back three or four years, a lot of things shipped off, um, and then nobody enabled them.

So they, they flipped their logic because they want people to adopt. But that means that if you're not paying attention, you, you might only have, and sometimes you're only getting like 45 days notice of like, Hey, this policy's changing. 

Ally Ward: Yeah, yeah, that and then things that, you know, from an admin perspective, PowerShell, there's been a lot of changes to PowerShell recently, and things are just stopping to work.

So if you've got regular processes that are running regular reports using PowerShell, they're just going to stop working. If you're not paying attention, if you're not doing that transition to graph or whatever it is that you need to do on it. Um, you know, it is. The continual reacting to the change once it's dropped, rather than proactively making a plan for it, deciding if you care, and if you do doing something about it, um, it's worth that investment, but it is a substantial investment.

And yeah, to be able to automate it somehow to be able to have it in, you know, automatically going into Teams automatically reports to the right people. And then all you've got to do this, okay, well, I care about this one, this one, this one, I'm going to talk to my users about that. So I do a lot of that manually.

Um, I do know that your Change Pilot will offer things in it. Yeah. Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's what we're trying to do is take, take some of the heavy lift out of it. So you can focus the time on. The call with your organization, the comms, what's important. And, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's an exciting space to be in, but definitely, uh, the, the, the challenge and the slog is, is very real.

And I think it's funny because you always talk to organizations. It's like, well, like, are these, you know, recording and compliance policies, you know, labeling, or are these things important? If they change, of course they are. So there's, there's kind of an acknowledgement about, I need to do this, but then.

Making it part of the process seems to be the challenge. 

Ally Ward: Yeah, and making sure the right, you know, it's all about making sure the right people know about it. You know, if you're a team of 10, you know, 10 people and you're the only one that needs to know, that's fine. You can pick and choose, but even then you can be messing with your compliance on something, even when it's that small.

And certainly we get sort of 1000 plus users in the firm, 1000 to 10, 000. You've probably not got a huge IT team, but that task still needs doing. You've got, you know, if you've got hundreds of thousands in you, you've probably got a much larger IT team. You can probably divvy it up and manage it from planner, but it's, it's an effort that doesn't change no matter how big your firm is.

And I firmly believe it's absolutely crucial. With a Microsoft stack. If you're going to have the Microsoft stack, you bought into it. This is what you're using to manage your world. Then, like anything else, you need to stay on top of it. It's like paying your bills at home, isn't it? You know, paying, paying your bills, making sure that you, you're tracking your water meter, whatever it might be.

It's the same principle, but to keep your business running smoothly. You need to stay on top of that change. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Ally, thanks so much for giving us that insight. Uh, so you've, uh, you've been a really helpful influence on what we've been doing as well. So it's nice to hear that end to end and your perspective on how, how organizations can, can manage that, you know, kind of evergreen treadmill of, uh, Microsoft 365 change.

Ally Ward: You're welcome. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And, uh, Ally, I know you've done a lot on Copilot as well. So hopefully we're going to have you back, uh, back on the podcast in the future one, because we've had a lot of good conversations about real world Copilot adoption, and I've seen you do panels on that as well. So, uh, if that's okay with you, we'll have you back in the future to talk Copilot adoption.

Ally Ward: Always happy to talk Copilot. It's, uh, It's the best thing in my life at the moment. It's, it's just, uh, use it for absolutely everything. It's, it's got good and bad. Um, yeah, very, very happy to, uh, to talk about that in another call. No worries at all. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, listen out for that one in the future.

Thanks a lot for tuning in everybody. 

Ally Ward: Thanks everyone.