Wrong Tool? Here’s Why M365 Feels Overwhelming

Mitch: Hey. Welcome back to Make Others Successful, a podcast where we share insights, stories, and strategies to help you build a better workplace. Matt and I are cozy here in our, like, little living room setting today. We're gonna talk all about process management. Well, more like the overwhelm with all the tools and finding your way with all the tools, and we're gonna go through an illustration here.

We got a TV set. For those of you watching on YouTube, you have a nice illustration here about the different Microsoft tools. If you are listening to audio, I will tell you. So Go paint the picture. Yeah.

So the the premise here is that you get tons of different tools with Microsoft three sixty five. Some are more complex than others. There are natural ways that people kind of find themselves in using the tools. Some are more approachable than the others, and we're here to talk about kind of why that is, how you should think about it, and kind of give you some insights of how we view the the suite of the tools and how we think you should find your way. Is that accurate?

Yeah. Any notes? No. Okay.

Matt: I think that's pretty good. You didn't reference where it came from, so.

Mitch: Yes. It came from my amazing process management video on YouTube.

Matt: Yeah. He made this cool diagram and

Mitch: I needed some way to to illustrate how how all these tools kind of relate to each other. So, yeah, let me the video is all about this complex process. We wanted to talk more in-depth about it Yep. Here in the podcast. But it is an ocean drop off diagram.

If you've ever seen kinda like the side view of a sand kinda coming down, going into the ocean, and then suddenly it dropping off and then getting way deeper, we have that on a TV here next to us. And along that drop off, along the the beach and everything are the different Microsoft tools and kinda where they land on complexity, ability, approachability. Lots of different ways to think about it, but we're going to kind of talk through this concept, what we mean by it, and how you should think about it. So we're calling this like maybe the kiddie pool versus the deep end.

Matt: Shallow end versus the deep end.

Mitch: And this is shallow. And and none of this is meant to imply much more than this is our perspective on the tools. It is no implication about, oh my gosh, you're only playing in the kiddie pool. You should think less of people like that and more of the people who play in the deep end. It's just it's just different.

Matt: It's it's a way to think really it's about, you know, if you're talking about the shallows or the the lower end of the pool, there's a lot less risk. There's, you know, you don't really know how to swim. You can always just stand up. You know, there's not a lot of extra things to think about. If you're gonna be 400 yards offshore in the deep end, you better be ready to to swim.

Yeah. And better be be able to, you know, not be sun baked and tired and in a bad way. You need to be thinking about that a little bit more. Yeah. Right?

When you're by the beach, you can always just get right out and you're no problem. Right? That's the that's the type of thing that we're trying to imply here.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk through some of the tools to kind of, like, illustrate it. So so up here on the top left, then in the shallows, we have Outlook and OneDrive and Microsoft Forms and Planner and SharePoint in some respects and Teams. These are all tools that we've seen people use all the time where they say, oh, I think these tools can help me at my work, and let me try to stand something up and configure it and and have it help me with with my daily workflow.

These are all things that are okay, and we've seen people get really far with just these tools. Yep. Down the slope a little bit, a little little ways is loop. Loop sort of bridges this gap a little bit and I will probably talk more about loop later. I wish it bridged this gap a little bit more, but it starts to introduce a little bit of complexity around managing information and laying that out and and structuring things for your work and integrate some of these tools into one spot.

Let's go deep. In the deep end is we have tools like PowerApps, Power Automate, Dataverse, Power BI.

Matt: Dynamics three sixty five.

Mitch: Well, I was gonna say I don't have the Dynamics logo on here, but I would I would view it as deeper.

Matt: Yeah. It's somewhere between loop and the other the other things.

Mitch: That's where you think it would go.

Matt: Yeah. Like, you do No. No.

Mitch: No. Here's my thought. I think Microsoft poses it as that, but it truly is deeper.

Matt: I in my my opinion, it really comes down to whether or you have a consultant that's coming in doing an implementation and they're gonna go If you don't have be

Mitch: the one to set it up, it's really easy.

Matt: Well, or or if you stick to the deep the basics. If you just follow what their their pattern is, you're good. Right? The moment you wanna go more, it's it gets super deep super fast.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm biased against it a tiny bit because I know they have a suite of, like, 80 some products and it is very

Matt: All labeled dynamics.

Mitch: Intimidating to to to get into, but you'll hear someone uses this tool and it they'll they'll show you a case study of how it changed someone's operations. And that's not to say it's it's a bad tool, but it it it can be a little bit fuzzy. So I don't I don't like it for that aspect.

Matt: Let's talk about what we mean by this and what what that looks like. So on that that shallow end, the, you know, Outlook and SharePoint and Planner, and this would be Planner Basic primarily, Teams, these are things that are meant squarely, like almost exclusively for end users. They're meant for people to open up and do things themselves and make things happen themselves. They're not meant for super custom, super advanced enterprise implementations. Mhmm.

People try to do that, but quite frankly, the reason we list them there is that if you were to try to do something like that, that's actually one of the mistakes that people make is you're gonna have a lot of problems because they're not meant for that. They're really, like I said, they're meant for end users. They're meant for power users to do these things.

Mitch: Use it kinda out of the box play within the confines. I had someone ask me recently, can I just, like, get to the code behind Microsoft Teams and customize it to work the way that I No?

Matt: That's no. On the other end, on the deep end, these are things that are at their core enterprise developer tools that have end user features and functionality. Like, people call them low code, no code. That is very true. They have a low code nature to them.

But at their core, they're an enterprise application development. That's what they are.

Mitch: They have the tooling behind Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. That is what they're there for. That type of thing. Right? They're built on that infrastructure.

They're for that purpose. And so they're gonna be a little bit more challenging for the average, everyday business user to just go maintain and develop this thing, or make that process be great with these tools. Yeah. So that's why we put them in these two categories. Again, that doesn't mean that, you know, you can't take SharePoint and do a bunch of custom stuff.

You a % can. But if you were gonna do that, I'd probably do it in Power Apps instead. Same thing with Planner, same thing with a lot of these other tools. Right?

Mitch: Can we sow some seeds here of when we're talking about these tools, what are we actually trying to accomplish with them? Like, what are some examples, scenarios

Matt: that Yeah. Why are we talking about this all? Why does this even matter?

Mitch: Right?

Matt: Yeah. So there's two scenarios that we often see. Actually, I'll talk about three. One is a Microsoft person or another person that you're aware of may talk about another cool tool within the stack and be exactly what you were saying. I see this great user use case saying they solved this problem with this tool.

Right? And those use cases are probably valid, but you don't necessarily know the amount of effort it took to create that and then therefore maintain that.

Mitch: Or Microsoft partnership funding.

Matt: Yeah. Paid for some of those things. Right? And so, you know, one of the contexts that we want to bring this into is that just because you heard that you can do something with a particular tool doesn't mean that it's the right thing for you to do with the tool. So that's one thing.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt: The other thing is we often see people who, for licensing, for skill sets, for lots of reasons, try to stay in the shallow end to their detriment because the value that you could get by solving the problem that they have, they should just work in the other end. It would be a lot better solution, it would be more scalable, it would be a better solution overall. Right? We also see people who gravitate immediately to the other end for something that when they don't even can't even figure out how to use Teams or how to use some of these other tools. And they really should figure those things out before they go mess in the deep end.

Right? Because quite frankly, all of these other tools integrate into those tools. Right? Like this is an ecosystem and it's all kind of they play together. And so now when you're in a Canvas app or an app and it wants to integrate with Teams, but you still have your Teams set up, you're gonna struggle.

And really you should figure out Teams, you should figure out those other things first. And then if you need to bring in these other things. So we see it both ways. And this is all about trying to express that. We have so many people from the community to talk about, how can I use Planner to do this?

Well, the answer might be, depending on what you're trying to do, Planner's not the right tool. Right. Like, you're trying to automate something that does, let's say it's a process that does hundreds of times a month, there's Planner is not your solution. Right. Like that is 100% not what you should be using ever for that type of thing.

Right? They just don't understand that, hey, forget about that. Don't spend your time there. Spend your time down a little bit deeper in the in the waters.

Mitch: Yeah. We're maybe commiserating a little bit with the fact that this is not easy to figure out. So this is sort of an ode to mister business leader, missus business leader. Let's say you're trying to fix an onboarding process or support intake is another common one. Something that is maybe painful with the current way that you're you're managing your work right now, and you've heard one of these other tools can do the job.

Should I invest the money in doing this thing? Will I regret it? I don't feel confident. How should they be thinking about this? And this illustration is is is meant to start to help you understand some of the lay of the land as far as we see it.

Matt: Yeah. So let's talk about the let's talk about the process intake, the the support intake tool. Sure. So we've had that problem. We've solved that problem for customers.

It's a combination for a lot of these people. Right?

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt: So for one of our customers, as an example, that we use Azure DevOps, they use Azure DevOps to manage their tasks. The team that's doing the support, that's how they manage their tasks. And so, they needed a way to have a form on the front end. So, it's a Canvas app that pulls in, asks specific questions, and people can go fill out that data. And then it sends automations that go to various places, right?

On the other end, we have people who are doing document approval management, which is pretty much all done in SharePoint, right? So I upload my documents, I review my documents, and then I kick off a process that goes, hey, give me some approval. And it's almost all in SharePoint, right? It's really dependent on what your skill sets are, how comfortable you are, and what the value is of that. You're gonna find that on the shallow end, it's easy to implement and get started.

It's easy to make something simple happen. But you're not gonna have a ton of customization. You're not gonna be able to lock down permissions every way you want. Reporting is not gonna be as easy as you want it to be. Right?

Yeah. And if those things are valuable, like that support intake, that was for a team of five, six people. Right?

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt: That's a fine solution. If you're trying to do that for a 400 person organization, I would never ever ever ever ever do it that way. Yeah. That would be a nonstarter. I would do everything in Dataverse.

Would do a Canvas app. I would do a model driven app. Like it would be completely different than what we would do for a smaller team that's just trying to improve these things. So some of is size, like scale. Some of it is skills.

Right? We talk to customers and they don't have IT at all. Well, I'm never gonna recommend you move down this path over here to do these really complicated things without someone who is an IT or at least power user.

Mitch: They're gonna have to rely on somebody.

Matt: Yeah. They're gonna need to

Mitch: talk

Matt: to now, that's another piece of it. Hey, we don't have somebody like that, but I'm more than happy to work with a partner to go develop and manage and maintain these things. Great.

Mitch: We have a client like that too.

Matt: We have clients like that too. It really comes down to that nuanced choices. But if you're a business leader listening to this, and you're looking at the tools that you have, I would be asking my team, have we already tried Planner? Have we already tried Forms? Have we already tried SharePoint?

Like, what are the problems with that? Yeah. Oh, the problem is it's not manageable. We wanna make changes to it all the time and we can't manage it well. Or, hey, you know, we ran into list limit in SharePoint.

We've got too many in the lists. Right? Those are all signs that I go, yeah, you probably should be playing a little deeper. Playing a little deeper into the waters.

Mitch: Yeah. I'm reminded of we have another client that uses a form, a Microsoft form to log when they find bugs or Yeah. They want features, things like that. And and so I'm thinking about the process that happened when we went that, like, the Canvas app route for the other client. And and so I'm trying to, like, come alongside someone who might be thinking, I don't know which way I should go.

What we did was we said, can we use forms for this thing? And we we hit a roadblock pretty early on where we said, we want to dictate the user experience a little bit more and give them different paths that they could go down visually and give icons, give give some sort of symbolism to what they were doing. And that's not feasible with forms. It doesn't work with forms. And so we said, okay.

I think the next best option would be to investigate building a PowerApp for that where we can then lay out three very clear paths. Someone can click there, get clear instruction, fill out a form. So, like, there's there's aspects of forms that would have worked perfectly fine, but we found a specific limitation that didn't facilitate the user experience that we wanted. I wish I could tell everyone the labyrinth of paths that they could hit those roadblocks at. It's very difficult to do.

Matt: It is.

Mitch: Yeah. And so what we try to do is zoom out a little bit and focus less on features and more on how critical is this to the business? Mhmm. What ability do you have to support it? What financial ability do you have to to put into this thing?

If it's not a money concern and you're like, I just want it to to work well, you can do those things. It's not wrong. What would you say to somebody that is in that position where they probably don't need the Ferrari, they don't need the deep end, but they're like, oh, give it give it all to me. Should they be doing those things?

Matt: Oh, yeah. It's really hard. They can get themselves in really big trouble. If I'm talking to a business owner, okay. You you're you're gonna be responsible for the consequences.

Right?

Mitch: Yeah.

Matt: If I'm talking to a manager of a department, I'm gonna be hard trying to get them to go somewhere else. The reality is they're buying into something that the business is gonna have to maintain over the long haul. And when that there's a new manager, they're gonna be left with this Ferrari that has high maintenance and, you know, needs tuning all the time when they all they really need is a, you know, daily driver, you know, something that just gets gets the job done and and does does the work. Right? But it also depends on really what it is.

When you say they don't really need it, it's like if if, for the example that you that we've both one of the ones that we've both talking about, there's hundreds of those requests going on a month. Right? That particular one kind of sits in the middle between you have here, I could if somebody said, hey, if that customer said, I really want the Ferrari, I would go, yeah. Like, I can see it. Because you're gonna keep that's that's never gonna end.

You're gonna keep getting these. Yeah. And it's just always gonna it's just a matter of how much.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt: Right? You're still gonna need to maintain it. Right? But if somebody's like, I really want the Ferrari for something that happens once a month. I'm like, come on.

Right? Like you're wasting you're gonna waste everybody's time and money and energy. There's no point in it. Yeah. And I'm using the time, but I mean, there's lots things something that happens once a month, but takes has like a lot of steps and everything.

I could there's a lot of, like you were saying, there's a lot of labyrinth of decision matrix that's going on here. Mhmm. There's there's a lot of different ways you can go. But generally speaking, the number of times, the value it is to your business, the effort it requires, those are all metrics that I would use to kind of decide what it is that you what way you want to go.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. So I think my example to most people will be like, you're crazy. It's never a situation where we have more money than sense. Right?

Yeah. It's more we have the duct tape, hand me down systems. I can't get my leadership to invest in these things. Yeah. And I think that might be worth it, but I don't know.

How do you figure that out? How do you I don't even know what question I want

Matt: to ask because it's It's pretty it's pretty clear. I mean, the reality is if you still got duct tape systems and you're kind of patching together some SharePoint stuff, etcetera, but it's starting to bleed over and have problems, the reality is your options are pretty minimal, right? You can use another third party system that you're gonna have to pay another licensing cost for to do something very similar that you can do in the at the other end of the pool. Or you have to pay for a custom development, like Total Custom App, or you have to do this. Like, there are Or live with what you have, right?

Businesses make this choice all the time to just live with what they have. That is a separate conversation. But if you're gonna make the change, those are your real options, right? Like there's not much else. Once you have kind of exhausted the limits of what those tools have, you have to do something different.

You have to make a big change. And the question becomes, does it make sense to have it within this ecosystem, within, you know, the Microsoft three sixty five stack already integrated with some of these other tools? Or do you get a third party system? Or do you build one? And there's justification for all of that.

I'll be really honest and clear. There's truly people could go, we love monday.com and that's what I've used before, and so that that's the reason and they're like, we're gonna pay and we're gonna get this other license of monday.com. Or, you know, we have customers that this is critical to our business. This is this is the lifeblood of our business. This spreadsheet that I have is with macros and all this stuff.

This is this is what makes or break our business. Right? Great. Maybe you do need a dedicated third party or a custom developed application for this, right? Because you need it to be super intuitive and, you know, way more than what you can do with a low code, no code solution.

That's okay too. But those are your choices. And quite frankly, most people presented those choices. This is where you're gonna go. The cost of maintenance and managing.

Mitch: Not He's drinking the Kool Aid, everybody.

Matt: I'm not biased. If you're given those options, that's what you're gonna probably what you should choose most of the time.

Mitch: I can't trust you anymore. I'm just kidding. No. It's an interesting line of thinking because we were actually just joking around before this about impostor syndrome and thinking about a leadership Yeah. Like a leader trying to decide which way to go.

And at some level, everything that we're doing is made up. Right? We're doing what we think we should do based on experience and knowledge and wisdom. But at the end of it, it is all making a calculated risk, trying to decide what to do, attempting it, seeing how it goes, and then adjusting from there, and then repeating and repeating. I think this illustration works well because it feels scary to go deep.

And I think when we start talking about like if one of the first things you were talking about with those tools is the enterprise, you know, tooling and and things like that, and it can start to feel like overkill. And we talk about licensing costs. I'll never get licensing costs past my IT or stuff like that. What would you say to to to someone who is maybe timid about

Matt: trying Again, it's all it's all about I could take other products from lots of other vendors and put them up here on the same thing, and there would be a lot of them that would end up on this this deep end. Yeah. Right? They're big things. Salesforce, for example.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt: Workday. Even monday.com probably sits somewhere in between, quite frankly, the two ends. You know, these things are not simple, basic things. And so, again, it's a choice about what you wanna do. I mean, do you want another license cost with another partner?

Yes or no, right? Like, it is I would question whether or not their their organization is committed to actually making a change. Because the reality is change costs money and it costs time, costs effort. And if you can't get someone to sign off on it, it must not be valuable to the organization.

Mitch: Yeah. I think business goals is an important part of it, trying to align some of that change to to business goals. If there's no basis for it, then and you're just fooling around trying different stuff. Like, it's not worth stay in the shallow ends. Yep.

Prove something out and, yeah, try to try to have a minimum viable thing before you Yep. Say this is this is worth doing. So that's one clear indicator. What are other maybe clear indicate clearish indicators that someone this might not be serving them well? You know, it's it really comes down to how frustrated they are.

Okay.

Matt: You know, I mean

Mitch: How do you measure frustration?

Matt: Yeah. That's a very individual thing. People are very frustrated with the tools, often are frustrated with the tools that they have. Some of the frustration comes from specific features, which that's a Microsoft problem, like, hey, I want I really want this feature. I really want the ability to have hyperlinks in my descriptions, in my Microsoft Forms documents, right?

Sure. It's a super, super small granular thing. But it can be life like

Mitch: It might make a huge difference.

Matt: Difference in what you're doing, right? You know, frustration and those types of things, I would say, oh, I don't think it's probably worth it, right? Maybe you need to pick a different a different tool, right? And I don't mean a Microsoft tool, I mean, pick a different tool. Like, go use something else for this purpose, right?

When you're frustrated because this thing that I'm trying to create is a multi stage process, and I'm trying to band aid 17 different things together, and I'm having problems because somebody left that was the one that was managing it, and that and when they left, we lost access to the stuff. And then I tried to transfer ownership to somebody else, and I want, tried to get help from IT to manage. When you're talking about those types of frustrations, I go, yeah, you need to be planned out here, right?

Mitch: Yeah, my Excel file is locked. Yeah,

Matt: yeah, yes, right? Like, when you have those types of problems, you have an architecture problem. You have an infrastructure problem, right? What you're trying to do is going well beyond what can be done with the tools that you're choosing. And choosing a third party tool usually isn't gonna make it much better, right?

Because either it will be way more complicated to implement than what you have already done. It will be additional licensing cost that you don't may or may not really need. Like, there's not It's not like switching to a different You have a different problem. Your problem is you're not treating this thing like it's an enterprise more like it's an enterprise thing or a or a real process problem, and you're treating it like it's a my problem or my little team's problem. Right?

So that would be one of the things that I would look at. Right? Like there's if it's like, oh, I hate the fact that I don't get a notification with, mean, yeah, I don't choose a different tool maybe that does notifications. Whatever. Right?

I wouldn't immediately go here probably. Or I might augment it a little bit with here, like, can do some notifications with Power Automate maybe. When you're, like, frustrated with the more architecture, the more big picture things, I go, yeah, you're you're probably you're probably beyond what you can do with those tools.

Mitch: Considering pulling back the curtain a little bit here, is there anything we do that should be treated more like a process that we don't treat like a process? And we have duct taped together?

Matt: That's a great question. We duct tape a lot of stuff together. That's such a loaded question. We are pretty good at using some of these tools because of who we are and what we're doing. You know, we've even had, like, Livy from the marketing team and and other people who would usually, in most organizations, not start trying to automate stuff.

Automate some things using these tools. So I don't know that there's anything, any one thing that I'm like, oh yeah, this would be, this is the end all be all. I I think there's, we do a pretty good job of assessing it, not all the time, but on a regular basis. You know, when I think about our digest, we were just working on that a little bit to try to make that a little bit better, right? You know, we take a very iterative approach.

And so I don't know that there's anything You

Mitch: gotta work on this. You're supposed to fold the promotion into the reference to the digest Yeah. Where you're

Matt: saying I'm not a marketing member.

Mitch: A weekly update to all the Microsoft Yeah. Updates that are coming out in plain speak and not dumb community. Yeah. And we'll tell you if you should care about it or not. And you get all of that delivered in our community called the workplace.

Go to

Matt: join org. Go join it. Go join it.

Mitch: Learn more. That's what you were supposed to say.

Matt: I'm not a marketing guy. Sorry. The the But like, seriously though, like, we're pretty good at that. When it starts to become a pain for someone, we try to automate things, generally speaking. Yeah.

And so far, we haven't had to dive too deep into the deep end. You know? There've been you don't like CRM you don't like dynamic CRM. Our current one is pretty is is we're on the edge of needing more. Know, I'm like, hey, maybe we should be doing that.

Like, there's there's little things here and there, but generally speaking, we're pretty we're pretty good at it.

Mitch: I think I fall into the traps that we're articulating with Dynamics because it's not as simple as I don't like it. I think it's scary. Yeah. Not like I'm not act like it's scary. Right?

And it's also it's unknown, but it's also we are accustomed to the tools that we use right now. And I know that there are some features that the tools we use right now do that Dynamics CRM doesn't And so it's exactly what you're talking about where it's like, am I beholden to

Matt: I mean, the the reality is for us on that one in particular, I think about it and I go, well, I I have the feeling we haven't dove into it in a lot of detail because it's not been painful enough yet.

Mitch: You're

Matt: right. When we have to go to the next level, which is significantly more money, we'll probably have to revisit it again and say, is this worth it? Is it valuable? Right? When we started using it, it was like, it's a no brainer.

Mhmm. Figure out how to make that work in the way that you want it to work or use this other tool that works how you want it to work, but costs a little bit of money. I would choose that all day long. Right? It's the same thing with Calendly.

Right? Bookings doesn't do everything we want it to do. And I have to choose this. Now, if you told me I had to get a Bookings account for everybody in the company forever, for all time, I might, eventually, might go, hey, I don't

Mitch: I don't know. Know.

Matt: I just I said Bookings. We had to pay. Right now we only pay for

Mitch: a calendar for a few Yeah.

Matt: Right? Right. But if somebody said, oh, we gotta get that for everybody as as we grow, right? Eventually, I'm gonna go, I don't know, really? Let's talk about that some more, right?

Is there an automation? Is there is there some things we can use in our stack already that will make it better? Yeah. And and that's the approach we take and and I think we've been pretty successful at it. But I also think we're a little unique because of who we are.

Mitch: I was going to say I think we're well, haunted is maybe a bad word, but because we know the tech, we can Yeah. Apply ourselves pretty quickly.

Matt: You or I spend an evening messing around with something that's annoying us and we fix it.

Mitch: Yeah. I wish I could bottle that up and give to somebody. Yeah. Like, I yeah. If you can have someone who can know their way around tech on your team and give them some leash to play a little bit.

Matt: A lot can happen.

Mitch: A lot of that pain can go away. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Hey.

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