Chatting about this topic with some colleagues last week there were some interesting comments such as “You should know what to do…” or “We haven’t hired a new person in 12 years and don’t know what to do”. Most organizations don’t know how to onboard an employee or are not very good at it.
Onboarding is a process of welcoming, educating, connecting, and acculturating new employees. It helps assimilate them into work and team processes and into an organizational culture. It provides new employees with the necessary tools and resources to carry out their jobs and clear channels for ongoing knowledge acquisition and collaboration. It instills in them a sense of connection to individual, group, and organization goals and a drive to contribute.
Keep in mind the onboarding experience sets the employees perception of the organization they joined. Therefore it’s in the employer’s best interest to make sure the experience is positive.
The best examples I’ve seen of onboarding are as follows:
Manager introduces employee to the team and persons they will work with directly.
The usual tour of the office and its amenities.
Provide laptop, IDs and access tokens as required.
Office dress code – give examples. I mention this because the policy is so varied now in organizations. Older workers might prefer suit and tie while younger workers jeans and shirt.
Mobile office policy/home office – provide employee with direction regarding policy surrounding working from home or mobile. Can they yes or no? If yes under what circumstances. Again this varies by company, some companies allow employee to work from where they need to as long as they meet their goals, some want butt in chair no questions asked.
Connect employee with HR for payroll and benefits information and enrolment.
Explain how their performance will be measured – the specifics prioritized. Such as utilization on billable projects, sales quota for services and products, winning proposals, project completion on budget and time.
Establish the communication rules between the employee and new hire – for example, use email? meetings? face to face? Explain how you prefer to communicate.
Highlights what’s in scope of the job and what isn’t giving real examples. For example, providing scope of services for the department, deliverables it provides and examples of the work the team does and doesn’t do.
Outlines required reporting, tools he/she will use and training required to achieve performance levels. Such as time management and billing capture.
Clearly outline demarcation points in the case of task handoffs, complex multi-owner scenarios and in writing notifies parties involved.
Quickly address team disconnects regarding new employees role – should they occur. Provide specific examples, steps and behavior employee should have taken instead.
Help employee understand company culture and politics – makes employee mindful of landmines.
Assigns a great mentor (Has people, technical skills, knowledge of environment and how to get things done) to help the new employee be successful.
Establishes regular updates to provide feedback and coaching – use specific examples with background, not “I heard this…or someone said…”. Use actual job activities and peoples names. Provide both positive feedback on work and areas requiring improvement and how to improve.
When it comes to people, they can be your greatest asset and helping them onboard sets the stage for their performance. Some great examples I remember are those that helped the employee focus their strengths and gave them work that enabled them to achieve. Bad examples were micro management, not helping employee navigate land mines or directing them to enter a minefield for political reasons – this only creates distrust and demotivates the employee. The following is an example of a general onboarding checklist you can use as a basis.
DURHAM — Durham police are asking the public for help in making the holidays a little easier for the region’s less fortunate,
The students at Bowmanville’s John M. James Public School were treated to a Wednesday morning of music and holiday spirit as the Durham Regional Police officially launched their 2014 Christmas Food and Toy Drive.
Durham Police Chief Paul Martin and Chief-for-a-Day winner Victoria Broomer joined Santa Claus and a crowd of students, parents and police officers in launching the annual charity event with performances by the police band The Heat, and the school band.
Using SharePoint 2013 for document management and digital signatures simplifies the capture, organization, and distribution of artifacts, whether they be records or and documents. SharePoint lends itself well to providing such functionality, as it has Sites and Libraries specifically designed to help manage documents. Additionally the Office integration, workflows, search and meta data services provide considerable usability benefits. But how do you make it work best for your organization?
In this webinar, we’ll cover what you need to know to make SharePoint succeed for your document management and workflow needs, from meeting legal compliance to getting executive sponsorship, doing program management to ensuring user adoption, and more. ARX the creators of Cosign for SharePoint will join me in presenting this webinar and will be available for questions.
We’ll discuss how you can use digital signatures with SharePoint to dramatically cut costs, speed your business processes and eliminate paper.
We’ll cover best practices that will help you navigate the organizational complexities, industry and government regulations, and technical complexities and constraints you might encounter as you work to make SharePoint a better product for your users and your organization.
As part of my volunteer work I helped build some homes the week of June 17th in downtown Toronto. Four homes were being assembled for some families in the Danforth and St Clair area.
The day started with being assigned to a team lead that would assign work to us and help us with any questions. having done a lot of house related work and mechanical – I was in my element. Carolyn (Our team lead) had us first tear down part of a wall, redo the frame, vapor barrier and prep for a new window. We did this on both sides of the house – I guess the prior team had made the window area a few inches to high. After that work was completed, I was the Saw guy for a while, got to play with power Saw cutting 2″x4″s for wall supports. As the day progressed I was assigned othere tasks as well and the day flew by. Had a lot of fun – before I knew it I had to head back home for band practice.
For those that haven’t volunteered for Habitat for Humanity I recommend you sign up and help. Its a fund experience that helps families and gets you outdoors for the day.
This is the second technology conference I’ve attended in my native town of Toronto. Most if not all conferences I’ve attended have been in the US in places such as Los Angeles, Anaheim, Seattle, Orlando, Boston and most recently Vegas in 2012. Toronto is a great venue for a conference especially if you’re able to rent a car and explore the area outside the city such as Muskoka for its rugged beauty and Niagara for its wineries and the falls. With friends visiting from the US I had the chance to visit places downtown that I hadn’t been to in a while such as the CN tower. It’s a great city, lots to do, great restaurants and safe compared to some.
The SharePoint Summit 2013 was held at the Toronto Hilton in the heart of the downtown. There were over two hundred attendees from Canada, US, UK, Netherlands and Alaska. The Hilton offers a relaxing venue for the Summit with several conference rooms, great catering (Ruth Chris Steak House) of the meals and lounge for catching up on work related activities.
The registration process Monday was fast and simple. The agenda for the three days was full of great sessions from international speakers from the US, Canada and UK. The Key note packed the facility and was standing room only but the remainder of the events had adequate seating.
For those that haven’t attended the summit in the past I suggest you make it out next year to one of the locations (Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal). The presenters and the presentation topics were great – covering a wide verity of topics mixing slideware and live presentations. Also, the location was excellent providing attendees with a venue located centrally to some great tourist sites and entertainment locations.
The day began with waking up Sunday at 4am to catch a 4 ½ hour flight to Las Vegas that departed at 9am. Expecting Pearson to be busy I was surprised to see little traffic at the airport. I went through Nexus, picked up a Latte at Starbucks and relaxed in the lounge to read my new book for a couple of hours.
Once in Vegas I picked up my luggage, got in a Taxi and was at the Mandalay Bay in no time. A quick shower and emails to friends that were attending and off to the welcome party.
While relaxing at the welcome event I reviewed my conference schedule for the events to make sure I had chosen the sessions I want to focus on. Each day would start early around 8:30am and end at 5:30-6:00pm. For me, I wanted to focus on Mobility, Social and 365. Specifically, Mobility tools, support and direction especially Apple (iPlatforms) support, Social roadmap for Yammer integration, development tools and infrastructure and the 365 service offering and capabilities.
Mondays schedule and highlights:
The Key Note – The opening video was great. Social, Cloud and Mobile were the key topics. They view social as connect and empower – help people achieve. The Yammer integration Roadmap (think basic to deep integration further out, engineers are thinking about ways to integrate), Sharing the SharePoint way highlighting My Sites capabilities and RSS feeds, the 365 environment (Cloud) they have built is impressive (fast and resilient – the platform is optimized all-round) and Mobility support is greatly improved (Clean and usable). Note there were two engineering teams, one for 365 and other for on premise. The iPlatforms (Pad, Phone) are on the Microsoft roadmap (Finally) and look early next year for more announcements around this. Also look for deeper integration between Yammer and Microsoft products (Office, Skype, SharePoint, Lync).
What’s New in Search for SharePoint 2013 – search enhancements focused on the preview pane, making items more visible through grouping (people, sites, documents) instead of displaying in one big result. The visual aspect of this is powerful because you can now identify things quicker. The synonym engine is improved and will make suggestions (e.g. search on PPT and also get Deck) Also, to edit the results page there is a new wizard that helps with this, no more editing of XML to customize results (Finally!).
Designing Your SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise Deployment – This session was fairly basic and reinforced so basic thoughts of gathering specific functional and capability requirements and then mapping that to features and services within SharePoint. Making use of the Site Templates and their features and the service applications. Then designing availability into the design thinking RTO and RPO.
Tuesdays schedule and highlights:
Customizing Search Experiences in SharePoint 2013 – The results page there is a new wizard that helps with this, no more editing of XML to customize results. The preview pane and new Meta Data features as well (if properties are blank the crawler will look inside to document to find properties) was demonstrated as well.
Overview of SharePoint Mobile and the New SharePoint apps – The mobile interface was demo’d on the iPhone and Windows phone. To drive home the difference between 2010 and 2013 they demo’d both and you could see how awful the 2010 sites were compared to today with 2013 – much cleaner.
Claims Based Authentication – Migrating to the new SharePoint 2013 Identity Model – In this session and upgrade was demonstrated taking a 2010 site from NTLM to 2013 Claims, 2010 Claims to 2013 Claims. No surprises here.
Designing and Building Your Yammer Community – Interbrew provided an overview of their experience in planning and deploying social. They focused on communication plans to facilitate awareness, purpose and adoption. Moderation to help the communities grow and thrive. Also that their communities were aligned with their brands and design to help people support their brands as best possible. Key message, foster a culture of sharing and helping and social will thrive on its own if you let it.
The attendee party was the highlight of the event, Bon Jovi performed some of his hits (great acoustic version of Living on a Prayer) and some covers at the Mandalay Bay Beach. He played for 90 minutes straight and did a great job of getting techie nerds into the moment – Microsoft did a great job of this event for sure.
Once Bon Jovi wrapped up, the fireworks show started accompanied by AD/DC. When done I was in bed by 10pm.
Wednesdays schedule and highlights:
User Profile Synchronization Best Practices in SharePoint Server 2013 – A very deep presentation and demo involving powershell. Spencer always delivers on his sessions. Key messages are; populate AD with the information required to enable social, have an operation plan and process to keep AD up to date (Critical). Don’t under estimate the impact UPS will have on your operational process and policy – Data ownership and Quality are the two main concerns and it’s a political endeavor not a technical one.
Bringing SharePoint to the Desktop: Building Windows 8 Metro Style Apps with SharePoint Server 2013 – During the session the covered developing Windows Metro style applications for Windows 8 desktops and the Surface. After evaluating the Surface look at how Apple applications look and feel. Don’t force people to use a stylus.
Best Practices for using SharePoint, Mobile and Media to Connect Knowledge and Communities within your Organization – Microsoft demo’d and application they had developed that contained Videos. No surprises, planning, design and modelling are key as well as keeping it simple. Create communities that align well with your objectives. Such as product communications, profession communities and assign moderators to foster it.
Deep Dive to Plan and Prepare for Your Users to Interact with SharePoint from their Mobile Devices – During this session new features within Visual Studio 2012 were demo’d to highlight wizards that create Mobile ready interfaces for applications. They used Northwind as the database for the Demo. Using the Mobile App Wizard in Visual Studio they created a Mobile application and demo’d it using a mobile emulator.
After the sessions I went back to the room for a shower and met up with friends and went to the Botero at the Wynn and then off to the Tryst for a few drinks and to see Pamela Anderson and finally end the night a Surrender.
Thursdays schedule and highlights:
Deep Dive of the Social Architecture in SharePoint 2013 – My Sites and Yammer are key to the Social architecture. My Sites have a lot of functionality similar to Facebook and Yammer is being integrated to foster discussions and create communities to enable people to find, connect and help each other. Download the sessions on Social to get a sense of the integration and possibilities.
Practical Deployment Aspects of Business Intelligence – The most powerful demonstration is the new visual capabilities in Excel. Many visual features have been added to help surface information and communicate facts better. Again, download the sessions and watch to see the power of the tools.
Getting Your Apps into the Office and SharePoint App Store – There are two store options available both public (Microsofts) and private (establish your own). There is an online article that describes the store well and the process http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp179933.aspx
After the sessions I relaxed and had dinner. Did some reading, checked email, did my Yoga and then went to bed at 9:00pm to get back in th EST time zone.
Friday I just relaxed, did my Yoga in the morning, met up with friends in the afternoon and walked the strip. I wrote this while having lunch at the Burger Bar before going out. I recommend the place to those who want good food that’s filling and not over priced – The staff are friendly as well. After four long days of sessions I was exhausted but learned alot.
By the end of the night I was ready to go to New Jersey (probably my last trip to NJ for along time), I had packed and went to bed early to help work myself back into the Eastern time zone.
Saturday morning I had breakfast, checked out and got to the airport early to do some reading and relax. On my way to the Airport I thought about what I could write about in this blog. How I could sum up the weeks experiences. This would take some time so I found a Starbucks and ordered a Grande Latte and began to write and before I knew it my plane was here on time. Once I boarded and settled in and continued writing and watch a movie called The Decendents – great movie. Before I knew it I was in New Jersey checking into the Marriott and having a few drafts at the bar and then off to bed.
I’ve wanted to write this article for a while but just haven’t had time between guitar and my articles for Penton and SharePoint Reviews. After working at an employer for a few weeks I realized they had mis lead me about the role. My new coworkers told me I was setup and in for a treat and not in a good way. Speaking with colleagues and friends we jumped on the topic of organizations that create new roles but don’t think them through. It’s a common problem at all levels in organizations no matter the industry. So I thought I’d share some experiences to help you out when interviewing for that role that looks so good on paper.
First off, if your unemployed and a new job appears and happens to be a newly defined position, you may not have the luxury of being picky but the last thing you want is to go from the frying pan into the fire. Many organizations create new positions as they see gaps or see opportunities in the market they work within. These could be persons that cover new regions or have a specific skill set or support a new business process. To get a sense of how we’ll thought out the role is, here are some questions you can ask and interviews you must request:
Have you defined the specific goals and success criteria?
Have they assembled a list of goals?
Do they know who you need to work with to achieve them?
Have they allocated funding to enable you?
Are the goals agreed to by all the stakeholders?
Or do they have grandiose plans but no detail?
Have you defined the specific duties?
Do they know what you are going to be doing at an activity level?
Do they know who you need to work with to achieve?
Or do they have grandiose plans but no detail?
Has this role or one similar been staffed in the past?
Looking for a history of success and or failure
Why people succeed? Why they failed?
If they did fail how will they prevent it this time around?
How will you measure success? In 3 months? In 6 months? 2 years?
What opportunity are you addressing?
What problem are you solving? Gap their addressing?
Who wins if you win? Who losses?
Are you being inserted into a political battle? Or someone that has a chance of winning?
Who will interface with to carry out my duties?
Do they know how the role will interface within the organization?
Who are the supporters? The enemies?
Where are they located? Do you need to travel? Have a budget?
Who will most benefit from the role?
Level of sponsorship?
Have they thought out what success means?
What are the key enablers for success?
Who will be most threatened by the role?
Do they know who will be most threatened? How will they make sure you’re not sabotaged?
Do you have the executive support required to be successful?
What steps have you taken to make sure the candidate will be successful?
Do you have the executive support required to be successful?
Have they enabled the role? Authority? Budget?
What obstacles did you encounter?
Have they thought out the role? Potential roadblocks?
Do you have the executive support required to be successful?
Have they enabled the role? Authority? Budget?
How will you deal with grievances generated by the new role?
How will issues raised as a result of the new role be addressed?
No doubt you will step on toes, how will they support you?
Who are my direct reports?
Will you actually have direct reports? Or are they lying?
You want to meet with them to get a sense of their expectations and cultural fit
What is my budget and its breakdown?
If you’re a manager, what is the budget?
Does it exist? Is it enough? Is it yours?
When can I meet my clients?
This could be difficult but you want to meet them to get a sense of fit, if they see value in the role, their view on the role, will you get along etc.
Find out what they think of the company and your new role.
These questions are designed to give you a sense as to whether the organization has the role though out and you have chance of success. You can also ask the same questions as you meet with others for testing alignment (how much work has the executive management team done in making sure the role will scceed?). My manager was a game player, manipulator of sorts that had no clue how to establish a role or structure a department team – his manager admitted this to me and said they have a hard time keeping people. My HR contact verified the same problem – others were complaining as well. In the end they closed the department and everyone on the team resigned and are doing well elsewhere.
Don’t be surprised if you leave an interview feeling like they have not answered your questions. Some companies don’t think through the role (due to lack of insight, skills and or organizational alignment) and will rely on the new hire to sink or swim. Also, don’t rely on Human Resources to know whats going on either, they are usually blind (I Google’d many HR sites and this is the advice they offered). The best approach is 3-4 interviews with different people and to leverage your network to get the inside scoop. Your decision comes down to where you are in your career, drive, smarts, luck and level of risk you can take.
I got to know about your grandfather through my parents who worked at ‘Campbell Chibougamau Mines’ in Chibougamau, Quebec, (I was working underground in my late teens as a miner at the same mine – mid-1960’s). Not long after I got my private pilot’s license ( still working underground to pay for the privilege…..) I met your grandfather and remained friends from then on.
Sometime after Ron and Liliane moved to Senniterre, he and I happened to be up at Fort George ( Indian village on the mouth of the La Grande River on the East coast of the James Bay. * (has been moved up river to a place called ‘Chisasibi’ ). I was flying a Beaver on floats at time & carrying in a lot of American tourists to various fishing camps – Ron & I had a deal where he’d come down to the float-plane dock at the time of my last flight – he’d get on board with the tourists & me – we’d drop them off at their fish-camp then, we had the airplane to ourselves to fish with right up until dark! * ( of course we’d stop off at ‘choice’ fishing spots that few people knew of). I remember landing on a place called ‘The Seal River’ – we’d hop from rock to rock catching 3 lb speckled trout on a bare-hook! *(No fish story).
Anyway Ron, enjoy sharing a memory I will never forget of your Grandfather – ( a ‘special’ guy). – caio
George Met James back in the late 40s flying him in to Georgian Bay to live with eskimos and learn their various forms of art. Mentioned in his book “Confessions of an Igloo Dweller” he tells the story of my grandfather offering him a lift into an eskimo settlement.
Jim also drew several one off pictures for my grandfather as seen in the attached picture from the late 50s.
Microsoft has a formula for calculating farm size (as a starting point) but it lacks some aspects of reality – more marketing ware than reality. To help SharePoint Architects with calculating real numbers I’ve modified the formula slightly based on what I’ve seen my clients experience.
What’s the difference with the formula? Reality. Most organizations don’t have a real governance program, understaffed and inexperienced operations team, no capacity plan and provision and customize environments over capacity. Why? Because management doesn’t have the balls to push for proper controls such a change control (across all parties that manage content and platform), capacity planning (Grow, it breaks, fix…repeat), to stop the business from over customizing and provisioning SharePoint into the ground. See it all the time and suspect your reading this because you have experienced this as well.
The formula modifications include:
Custom code packages are deployed and you don’t have a Quality Assurance department that performance and resilience test (CC) – Yes = 1.25 and No = 0
All stakeholders participate in the Governance program (NG) – Yes = 0 and No = 1.5
Your organization is full of incompetence (ID10T) – Yes = 1.5 and No = 0
Generally, you will often need to calculate workload to estimate the number of servers that you require for adequate throughput. You can calculate workload by using a worksheet to identify the number of concurrent users and the average number of requests each day. The following table outlines an example worksheet.
Characteristics
Value
Total number of users (Tu)
Concurrency rate (Cr)
Peak usage ratio (Pu)
Hours in the business day (H)
Custom Code (CC)
No Governance (NG)
Incompetence (ID10T)
You can then apply the following formula to estimate the number of Requests Per Second (RPS):
Requests Per Second = (Tu × Cr × Pu × Rd × CC × NG × ID10T) ÷ (H × 3600)
The key message? Go Cloud. I wouldn’t deploy this product in my data center, not after what I’ve seen companies do to it and the outcomes – its a costly and embarrassing nightmare. Read my SharePoint Shit Show Blog.
If you have to go on premise, do your planning (and not in a bubble), rigorously monitor and trend capacity, have strict security policy in place, enable all the governance features, enforcement monitoring and training in place and be prepared to scale for capacity over 5-7 years beyond whats been communicated (Read my blogs on capacity planning and testing), revisit every 4-6 months and factor in risk such as company Dogma, over provisioning and business and technical risks. Some guidance in one of several blogs.
I hope you enjoy using this formula, please suggest improvement such as your own special metrics at roncharity@gmail.com