We don’t eat but indulge in our own dog food…
Did you know that the expression ‘eat your own dog food’ originated from Microsoft in the 1980s? What they were saying was, if you expect customers to pay and use your products and services, then as a company so should you and your employees.
The Inform Team loves to eat its own dog food😊 We passionately campaign for technology adoption on behalf of our clients, showing them the way to get their employees to embrace new technology and experience a better way of working. Many of our clients want their employees to adopt Microsoft products, and lucky for them we walk the Microsoft path! In fact, we indulge in their dog food and our own!
Here’s six ways we eat the Microsoft and technology adoption diet…
It’s our heart as we have no office
Many of our consultants are based in our clients’ offices, but the core team all work from home if they don’t have client meetings; and we are spread out across the whole country. So, we rely on the full Office 365 suite to do our jobs – we chat and call each other in both Teams and Skype for Business; manage and share our documents across our SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams platforms; and quickly gather who we need in an online meeting to make urgent decisions.
We’re not The Inform Team without Teams
If you took the Teams app away from us we would cry and crumble – quite literally – as it’s what makes our heart beat. We house our Internal and Customer channels in there, and within each channel we chat, plus store and share our intel. A customer channel includes: a OneNote tab where we centrally keep meeting notes and can add stuff to at the same time; a files tab for all client documents so they’re safely saved in the cloud and accessible; a conversation tab where we chat and determine actions; and, sometimes we have a wiki tab to document facts and next steps.
We love a huddle on Teams but we’re a little bit shy…
Every Friday the core team gathers on the weekly huddle via a Teams meeting to discuss the week – client work, prospects, internal projects that we’re working on, our social media posts for the following week, and so on. We take a note of actions and keep them in our Teams Internal Huddle channel. Our founders also check in with each core team member for a weekly 1:1 huddle, via a Teams Meeting, to discuss individual work. However, we can all be a little bit shy and tend to turn our video off!
Sam, one of our founders, is Mrs Mobile
Sam’s our strategist, so she’s often out and about meeting clients and prospects trying to solve their technology adoption woes. She lives on her mobile phone and Surface Pro tablet, which have the Office 365 apps on them. Great for us as we can always contact her via Teams and Skype, and great for her as she’s always able to quickly join in conversations, edit documents and give her recommendations at very short notice.
Emma, our other founder, is Mrs Operational Hub
Emma loves an Excel spreadsheet and she is the glue that keeps us together running ship-shape operations. Yet, this wouldn’t be possible without Staff Hub. As a remote, flexible bunch whose working patterns change week-by-week, Staff Hub helps Emma to keep track of our whereabouts, availability, and time we’ve spent with clients. Emma also put our Teams infrastructure and processes in place, and as one of our leaders we follow her style. A tip for technology adoption: To be successful, you need someone at the top who is passionate about the change to lead it.
Our mantra is ‘COLLABORATE’
Why? Because Office 365 really helps us to do this. If we need to review and edit a document with a tight deadline, we can all access it via OneDrive, Teams or SharePoint (as they all synch). We can all make our changes simultaneously in real-time, so there’s no waiting in line to take your turn, making our lives much easier. Or, if we need to discuss a document we all hop onto a Teams meeting where we can share a screen and handover control to each other, to amend content as we need to.
We’re so on the Microsoft diet and our bellies are full of all its software goodness! That’s how we’re able to help our clients get their employees onboard the Microsoft technology adoption train…
