Forum Discussion
Manage automatic creation of direct reports group
THANK YOU all for your feedback, please see an update in this new thread: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Update-Auto-creation-of-Direct-Reports-group-in-Outlook-MC96611/m-p/55318#M2740
MicrosoftThe telemetry is getting pretty good these days. I think with modern ML techniques it should not be that hard to spot a "lost" user based on their previous and next actions. It is time to apply the "AI" that Satya champions so much.
That being said, I agree that the community aspect is important to point out the "Really?!?" type things, like the original issue that started this whole thread. Let's not forget that Microsoft did step back on this feature to re-evaluate after considerable pushback. Where I have issue with some of the "grumpy" community is the language used sometimes. Go back and read this thread and it feels like Microsoft is committing war crimes. "This is one of the worst ideas I've seen come out of Redmond for years, if not ever. And that's saying something." Is that really necessary? Do we think that whatever PM was in charge of this feature is going to want to engage with a community that says things like that about them? Taking a stance like that makes them engage because they have to, not because they want to.
There are people behind these features. Some more practiced than others, and some who need our guidance a lot more than others. I think we've all, myself included, spent too much time combating internet trolls and it has changed our default language for the worse.
To help show a positive, go check out this great article that Rahul Kayala just published on Medium: https://twitter.com/RahulKayala/status/846236286998331392 Rahul is a PM on Microsoft Teams and does as great a job thinking about and probing actual usage as he can. Behavior like that should be celebrated and multiplied as much as possible.
As for the lift and shift stuff, I challenge my Microsoft account team pretty hard quite often. Too often I see people treat them with kid gloves because "They're Microsoft" but I certainly don't. I have small business ownership and sales in my background, and turning difficult clients into good relationships is part of the job description. No different for sales/account people at Microsoft. I think they actually dread emails from me because they know I'm not going to settle for sales and marketing fluff and they'll actually have to get me some answers or I'm going to go around them to the respective PG I'm interested in. I think these account teams are the last remnants of the Ballmer era whose time for change will come. The "selling seats" model needs to die IMO. It is time these people get incentives for selling the best solution that fits the business need as measured by adoption, engagement, and customer satisfaction. Do that well and the seats and revenue come automatically.
I didn't see anything in this forum that I thought was over-the-top commentary on this topic. If anything, it was measured compared to some of the expressions I saw elsewhere, including those shared privately with Microsoft. No one insulted anyone's mother or cast aspirations about the circumstances of their birth. No one said that the individuals behind this decision had brown smelly bovine emissions for brains. It was all in good taste. Healthy debate is fine as long as it stays within acceptable boundaries... and the Microsoft PMs that I have met have seldom been shy, retiring types who cannot accept criticism. The good ones (and I have met many over the last 25 years) take criticism of products as part of the ebb and flow of development.
I accept that decisions are taken in the best spirit possible. However, two things get in the way of some of the decisions that we have seen inside Office 365. First, (as in this case) an unreasonable assumption that Office 365 tenants use AAD in the same way that Microsoft does. We don't. Second, a rush to move people to use Office 365 Groups that is sometimes over the top.
Telemetry often guides decisions and it is very useful in terms of user features. But this is not a user feature. It's something that goes to the heart of organizational structure within companies and it affects the view that people have of that structure. The telemetry failed in terms of telling Microsoft how people use AAD and it cannot tell Microsoft how people use Office 365 for business purposes. The old adage that even the most skilled and experienced consultant only has 50% of the solution holds true here. The 50% controlled by Microsoft (the code and the ability to flight it to tenants) is perfectly good. The other 50%, which is the context in which companies run Office 365 to assist them in business operations, was lost. Understanding context is extraordinarily difficult, but that's the trick that turns ideas that are potentially good into ideas that are absolutely brilliant.
TR
- I agree 100%, IMO fixing all of the one that's auto provisioning gets wrong will take longer than just managing it right in the first place
Auto provisioning cannot possibly anticipate every kind of HR structure and change in the world, job titles change frequently as well. I got around to listen to the interview you had with cfiessinger and I do get the points about giving new managers a collaboration group to handle their team.
From a document management perspective however, having a group for the team where the owner changes if the manager is switched out makes more sense. This of course requires procedures to switch out owners/members when you change position.
So, I'd rather try to fix the procedure to automagically make sure people are members of a Group set in some org/project structure - instead of letting the manager be the boss. Which leads to: if you indeed has this in place, the auto-groups would never be provisioned in the first place :)
Ideally a new Group would be autoprovisioned based on the rules set in the support article, but the name/e-mail would not be tied to the manager by name, but to the manager by position/role (if possible at all). I think this actually might be the real issue. Then, if you switch out the manager, the old one onboards the new one in the existing group.
I was really fortunate to have Christophe on the Hyperfish Podcast which was published today talking about this topic. Would highly recommend it for those interested in the discussion that happened in this thread.
https://blog.hyperfish.com/automatically-created-office-365-groups-with-christophe-fiessinger-of-microsoft-hyperfish-podcast-cc00abd63b54
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