Office 365 Distilled EP50: The Value of M365 Maturity with a practical productivity score

Celebrating episode 50, with some nice gifts (how did I know Steve likes whisky?) and talking about our Wish.com failures. But then we also talk about M365 Maturity and the Maturity model!

M365 Maturity Model

This episode we are looking at the M365 Maturity Model. This is not from Microsoft, but it is built from the community in 2010. It is designed to give people working with Office 365 ways to understand capabilities, figure out what level your organization wants to go to and to improve on their capabilities.

The Maturity Model is a 5-level concept, and your organization will be in one of those layers around how far along you are Office 365. Because we like things that we can measure, this is nice concept to see how mature your organization is. It is not tool that you need to run or download, it is a model that you can measure against.

Practical measures

Who will run the change? Will it be the person who has been doing the same job for 40 years? Can they still dream up what you need to change to go ahead?

How do you know what level a person is? Or the department? Or the organization? You cannot train the whole organization on the same level because no one is on the same level.

The outcome here is to set goals for departments to get to a certain level. First you need to set a baseline and an outcome. But of course, as always, it depends.

How do you get your baseline? How do you work with Office 365 being greenfield and a moving needle to comprehend?

Maturity Level 100

Level 100 is often defined by the lack of consistency in how Microsoft 365 is used across the organization, leading to confused and frustrated users. Islands of Expertise are positive but as people move from island to island the experience is different.

Maturity Level 200

At Level 200, a common understanding exists that new changes and updates can be fitted in… Level 200 means that an organization has a set of common policies that the whole company can work towards.

Maturity Level 300

Level 300 is the minimum target where Collaboration becomes a standard process, and the role of the consultant is to ensure that the company gets to Level 300.

Real value is obtained when you measure the maturity of the company and productivity score together.  This way, they provide the reference points that can drive change and continual improvement.

At level 300 the organization will start to see real improvement in the way the organization communicates and changes. For us, this is the level that an organization needs to be to roll out extra things like Syntex.

Maturity Level 400

Reaching 400 means that the Business trust the technology and the service providers.  However too much formality can reduce agility…

Maybe the move to level 400 does not work for your organization so care is needed to ensure that a formal approach with automation does not reduce the ability to develop further.

Maturity Level 500

At level 500 the company is better managed with automation as standard replacing many regular functions previously manage manually or driven by manual processes. Everyone who is now still using Lotus Notes, should be at a 500 level because they have been using it for so long!

Is this an unattainable dream? Or is this the sign that the organization is an IT company? Is this where Millenials come in, because they have been growing up with all these apps to make life easier?

In conclusion defining the development and levels of maturity provides a basis for management to define the level of change needed and to justify the costs that it will take to get there.

Whisky: Arran Machrie Moor 2017

On the Isle of Arran, where they just opened up a 2nd distillery, there is a stone on a peat bog. A stone with a great story behind it. The legendary warrior Findal has tied his dog to this stone.

This is the peated Arran is called Machrie Moor, a special release (8th edition, 2017) with a long elegant finish. Good full blown vanilla taste, lots of peat.

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.