Office 2010 – Preparing Your Environment

With template identification/migration and the training plan well under way, one would think that the next step would be to start worrying about the application package and rollout plan, but with an application as far reaching as Office that would still be jumping the gun. One still needs to make sure that the environment itself is ready for Office 2010.

Office 2010 – Addressing the User Training Problem

With any new product comes the need to train the end-user. When the product you are changing is something as significant as the Office Application Suite, this fact goes from need to NEED.

Office 2010 – Start with Templates

When the assignment comes to start working on your organization's Office 2010 upgrade, don't immediately reach for the installation media. Due to its ubiquity, Office upgrades come with a far bigger opportunity to impact your organization's efficiency than most other products.

Formally Close Out your Projects

In too many organizations, projects never really end; they simply "fizzle out". All too often this leads to confusion in both the user community and the support organization.

• Is the system in production or is the migration still happening?
• How are people added to the system?
• Are there any approvals required for change?

Setup a Self-Help Portal

Ever wonder why people are always so frustrated when they call the Helpdesk? Even in an environment where the Helpdesk continually does everything absolutely right and the problem usually addressed immediately at the 1^st level, tensions are typically still rather high on most calls. Even in such an ideal support environment, users still are hesitant to call the Helpdesk. When you ask why there is such hesitation to call, People have courteously created a number of excuses:

• "I didn't want to bother them with my small problem"
• "I didn't have time to work on it"
• "I am too busy"

1% Improvement Every Day

In an Industry that seems to pride itself on "reinventing" itself every 12-14 months, change is a given in the day-to-day life of the IT professional. Unfortunately change, especially change at that high of a rate, cannot be absorbed by most end-users; and if the end-user community doesn't adjust have we really gotten our money's worth?

Involve the User Community Early, Including Your Detractors

"There's no way that if you get participation out of a person can they say you didn't rock it." ~Jam Master Jay
Many organizations feel that the best time to begin engaging the end-user community is during the pre-rollout testing phase of a project. While this is an important time to be talking with the user community, hopefully you are engaging them far earlier than this. Otherwise, you are at serious risk of adversely affecting their processes/workflows.