The question came about as we started them on the Microsoft 365 Intranet and SharePoint Online migration journey. Of course one of the issues, when you move content to web-based tools like SharePoint, is that people worry that they cannot find their documents anymore.
Finding documents on a network drive is much harder if you do not know what you are looking for. However, with the network drive, if people cannot find the content they will either ask someone, give up and re-create it. With tools like SharePoint and its search engine the users will most likely find the content but it may take more time than it should.
So then how can we help Microsoft 365 understand what our content is and improve the experience for the people we work with to find our content?
This article explains some ways that you can make your content more discoverable, it is focused on Microsoft Word documents but some of the tips will also work with the Microsoft Office suite.
The number one way that Microsoft 365 search establishes a match to a search query is through the file name. So, make sure you give your file a good name that makes it discoverable.
Think about what terms others or you would use to when searching for the document. If you name it well it might save you or your colleagues from having to write the document again!
Every document, workbook, and slide deck in the Microsoft Office suite has a Title field. This is one of the key values that Microsoft 365 search engines use to indicate relevance.
Where to find the Title field property in Microsoft Word
To populate the title field property in Microsoft Word, click File -> Info and fill out the Title field with the name of your document.
Admittedly this is not the most discoverable location for this field and will likely get forgotten about.
Help your users make their documents more discoverable by embedding the Title field in your organisation’s template.
In Microsoft Word, you can embed that Title field that we discussed in tip two into the main part of the document. Now, a user can fill out the Title field whilst they are writing their document in their flow of work.
To do this do the following, in your Microsoft Word document add the Title field into the document by choosing.
From Microsoft Word, click Insert -> Quick Parts -> Document Property -> Title
Menu options to add the Title Field
This will insert the Title field into your Word document.
The Microsoft Word document can now be turned into a Word template and formatted with your company’s branding and shared across the organisation. Now when users create a Word document with the template then they will fill in the Title field as part of the process.
If you have read the introduction post, then welcome back and I hope that you are finding the series useful.
Rolling out the OKRs to the Team
So, this week we rolled out an OKR to our development teams! This represents a big milestone as now we have a business wide objective which is mapped down as child objectives and key results to two individual teams!
In this post I will discuss what we did, why and then how we setup Viva Goals to roll up these objectives to the top-level organisation objective.
Firstly, I have been talking to the teams on our stand ups about Viva Goals a lot. So, the setting up of the OKRs should not be unexpected.
So, what is the objective?
It is to establish a learning culture within the organisation, to incentivise curiosity and learning to improve the knowledge in the organisation. The reason being is that, the more we know the better our deliveries for our customers!
The challenge that we have is that whilst we provide people with half a day per week (Friday afternoon) dedicated to learning. Some of the team feel that they do not have the time or permission to do the training. By setting up one of their objectives on learning, I am hoping this will help them feel that they can stop working on a project and spend some time learning. This will help them improve the way they work and what they deliver.
The measurement that we are going to use is Microsoft Learn XP. Each person is assigned a Key Result which they check in with their latest XP result. Whilst this might not be an ideal measurement, we can try it out and see how it goes. What will be interesting is to see whether Microsoft Learn XP is the right metric, It will work for now but we might need to change as we go along.
For each team, an objective is setup which for each team of two is asking them to Increase their Microsoft Learn XP by thirty thousand, or fifteen thousand each per quarter.
Finally, these teams are rolled up together and that forms the overall business objective to establish a learning culture at iThink 365.
So, now we have covered the why and what we are looking to achieve. Let us delve into how we setup Viva Goals to achieve this.
Setting up Viva Goals
The following section discuss how this objective and key result was setup in Viva Goals.
Firstly, at this point we had no users added to Viva Goals and so teams were setup in the following way. In our organisation we have a Delivery Team which is broken down into .NET Development Team and Power Platform Development Team.
A team called “Delivery Team” as created and then two teams called .NET Development Team and Power Platform Development Team.
The Delivery Team was created as a department team type.
The .NET Development Team and Power Platform Development Teams were configured with the Delivery Team as their parent team. The two sub teams were created as Team team types.
In order that I had control of the teams, I edited the team settings and made it that only the Team Admins and Team Owner could configure OKRs or Projects for this team. This was achieved by:
Clicking on the Team
Choosing Team Settings from the tabs at the top
Under “Who can create OKRs or Projects for this team?”
Choose “Only team admins and team owners”
Click Save
Before I invited anyone in, I spoke to the Team via Microsoft Teams and said that I would be inviting them into Viva Goals and setting them up. I reiterated that there was nothing to worry about and this was part of the work that I had been talking about regarding OKRs and Viva Goals.
I then added the users to the Viva Goals and added them to the appropriate team.
Adding a user is achieved by:
From Viva Goals
Clicking on Users
Click on Add members
Find the user and then associate them to the team.
With the teams in places, it was now time to setup the Objectives and Key Results.
Firstly, the objective was setup for the Organisation:
Select iThink 365 OKRs
Click on the + at the top right-hand corner
Provide the Title
Choose the type as Organisation
Expand More Options and set the Permission to Anyone can view, only selected people can align
Added a description and set the Outcome to 100% complete
Expand Progress
Automatic via rollup from key results
Alignment was kept blank as Organisational Objective
Click Create
With the top-level organisation objective, an OKR was created at the Delivery Team level. This was achieved by:
Clicking on Teams and choosing Delivery Team.
Click on the + at the top right
Fill in the title: “Increase Microsoft Learn XP by 75000”
Set the Type as Team
Expand More Options and Set that Anyone can view, only selected people can align
Provide a description.
Expand Alignment and Add Alignment.
Search for the Objective “Establish a learning organisation…” be mindful of the period if you are running this over multiple time periods. Choose the appropriate objective and click Save.
Click Save to save the new Objective.
Finally, with the Delivery Team Objective setup, we can setup the same objective for each of the teams. So using the same process but at the .NET Development Team and Power Platform Development Team an objective was created called “Increase Microsoft Learn XP by 30000”.
These were each aligned to the Increase Microsoft Learn XP by 75000 Delivery Team Objective.
The key eyed in you will see that we have a problem at that is that 2 x 30000 does not equal 75000 XP. Well, that is because I also have a key result too as I want to lead by example, but I am not part of the development teams. More on that later.
Key Results
The next step now that we have the objectives setup, is to setup the Key Results for each person to a complete.
I performed the creation and setup of the key result in each person’s one to one. That way I could explain again why we were looking to do this and how it was giving them the permission to spend time training. Also, by doing it in there one to one they could ask any questions that they had.
The setup of the key result was achieved by:
Expanding on the Increase Microsoft Learn by 30000 objective for each team
Click on Add Key Result
Fill in the details of the Key Result
Title: Microsoft Learn XP ([Name of person])
Add Metric: XP
Target: Increase from [XP] to [XP]
Progress: updated manually
Expand details: Change the owner to the person who the key result is for. Make sure you do both owner and check in owner.
Change the permissions so that anybody can view, but only selected people can align.
Finally, set the alignment and associate it to the “Increase Microsoft Learn XP by 30000”. Remember to choose the one Objective for the right time period.
Click Save.
In their 121 we went through the process of getting their Microsoft Learn XP and showing them how to check-in their OKR. I explained how they would receive an email each Monday morning and if they could then follow the process that we had been through to update the Check in.
The setup for the Key Result was as shown below, with the rollup going to the organisation.
Example Key Result and its alignment rolling up from individual to team, department and then organisation.
The process for setting up the Key Results was repeated for both members of the .NET Development Team and the Power Platform Development Team.
Success
As I write this, Monday afternoon, the entire team have updated their OKRs this morning!
However, there were a couple of things that needed to be done at the Objective level to ensure that the Key Result updates were being picked up by the objective.
To check the settings, find the objective that is not being updated and then open it up.
Choose … and select Manage Contributions.
Check the Contribution is configured correctly, in my example it is set to 0% and need to be changed to 100%
Updating the contributions.
Once this was set, the Objectives all started to work nicely.
Hiding OKRs
One thing that organisations might want to do before they add the users is high some objectives that we might not want to share.
To do that do the following:
Edit the Objective
Expand the details tab
Change the permissions to “Only selected people can view and align”
Click Done
These objectives will now not be visible to everyone.
One last thing
I mentioned that the maths did not add up, 2 x 30000 does not equal 75000. I wanted to also spend some time learning and to achieve that I added another Key Result for myself under the Delivery Team. Now the objective is achievable!
Next steps
Now that we have an OKR setup, I am going to monitor the progress and I will report back.
It will be interesting to see how the teams find the tool and we will have to start expanding our objectives so that the teams know what is important to move the business forward.
Thanks for reading and would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.
Doy's Microsoft 365 and Azure Dev Blog 