Office 365 Distilled EP 8: Live from F1 in Barcelona (and a Bruichladdich tasting with Nick Baeyens)

This time, we are coming to you live from Barcelona, Spain! We had a boys weekend in Barcelona to go to the Formula 1 testing days. So a perfect long weekend of roaring F1 engines, gorgeous hills and weird architecture.
Oh yes, and do some work and podcasts too!

Shownotes

The main topic today is how F1 / O365 projects are kind of similar..
An F1 car costs millions of euros to develop and make race worthy..; if you look at O365 projects: engineering, networking, design, certificates, conditional acces, … it feels the same.

And then you put it in front of the end user (the driver).. See what happens.. It all relies that one person (or group of people) to bring the win home. And if it goes wrong.. Who is to blame? The engineer who didn’t do the screw perfectly? The driver who wants to go too fast on that 3d left corner ?

End users, just as F1 drivers, need to trust the platform to be there for them when they need it = user is in charge of speed, level of craziness and that the platform is there to support them (and not spin out of control).

How governance is all negative: don’t let users do this / that versus another G-word: guidance: where you win or you learn: Enable stuff for your end users

Preparing / pampering the users: Teams still decide what to roll out

If you want to start your own team… (aka a client comes to you to start with O365), what do you need?
– R&D (analysis)
– Driver = customer
– Sponsors need to come with the driver

Winning is, both in F1 as in O365 projects: doing stuff more efficient
Therefore you need a mindset change = unstable in a nice way

It takes a lot of people to make O365 work. Security = limitation
You need testdata, make sure your car is doing crazy laptimes
But you want it secure too… So there is a trade off to be made here

Also, don’t forget the people in the pitlane, they are your helpdesk 1st line support

Whisky

We have something special for you this episode!
We sat down with Nick Baeyens, who is the Benelux Brand Ambassador from Bruichladdich for a tasting of 6 non peated whiskies. While we didn’t record that one.. But we had a really nice interview with him afterwards about what it takes to be a connoisseur, and how you can amp up your tasting profile. Thanks a million to Huis Verloo in Antwerp for organising the tasting!

About: Marijn

Marijn Somers (MVP) has over 14 years experience in the SharePoint world, starting out with SP2007. Over the years the focus has grown to Office 365, with a focus on collaboration and document management. He is a business consultant at Balestra and Principal Content Provider for "Mijn 365 Coach" that offers dutch employee video training. His main work tracks are around user adoption, training and coaching and governance. He is also not afraid to dig deeper in the technicalities with PowerShell, adaptive cards or custom formatting in lists and libraries. You can listen to him on the biweekly "Office 365 Distilled" podcast.