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Microsoft Office 365 tackles management with StaffHub

lukasik — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 10:40:45 +0000

Microsoft is building new analytics tools to help companies better manage small and virtual teams

Microsoft is making a strong push toward building tools for human capital management (HCM). Perhaps best considered a replacement for older-generation human resources tools like PeopleSoft, HCM blends traditional HR features with new analytics tooling to help organizations understand more about their employees.

The Office Graph (as shown in Office 365’s Delve), for understanding social networks inside your organization, is one such example, while other HCM tools take advantage of platforms like Dynamics to develop models around resource requirements and productivity.

There’s a lot of data in our business systems that can promote efficiency and help find the best teams for tackling various business initiatives, and mixing query graphs across platforms combines information sources to answer what can often be complex questions. Adding LinkedIn’s social network to Microsoft’s existing tooling could help with a key aspect of HCM: talent management. Finding new ways to build teams, especially where a significant part of the workforce is freelance, can give businesses a significant advantage over its competition.

StaffHub is one such Microsoft tool aimed at HCM. Replacing what had been ad-hoc paper-based solutions with services that can capture the implicit data in a small team, StaffHub is a simple, powerful tool for smaller organizations that can greatly improve the productivity of your staff. With the rise of virtual and contingent workforces, it may find an effective place in the enterprise as well.

StaffHub: Scheduling plus

Microsoft first announced StaffHub in September 2016, with the public preview of its tool for frontline workers. Last week it finally went into general availability as a new feature in a wide set of Office 365 subscriptions: K1, E1, E3, and E5. It helps provide scheduling and shared files, as well as links to key back-office applications, to users who don’t have PCs.

StaffHub is best thought of as the electronic equivalent of the workboards you see in many businesses where IT isn’t really part of the day-to-day operations. Take a look behind the door at a coffee shop and you’ll see them, covered in staff schedules and printouts of policies and announcements from headquarters. They’re where a lot of work gets done, deciding who gets what shift and what break, as well as informing staff of new offers and new products.

Much of the underlying technology in StaffHub comes out of existing Office 365 features. The scheduler is a combination of a calendar and a planner, while the file sharing tools are a fresh look and feel on top of a SharePoint-based OneDrive store. Links to external applications are delivered via PowerApps, and StaffHub teams themselves are based on the same Office 365 Groups that underpin Microsoft Teams.

Starting with StaffHub

Admins get access to a StaffHub admin page to seed teams, link in applications, and deliver documents. Users log into the website and get the option of downloading either an Android or iOS app by clicking on a link that’s texted to them as part of the registration process, which can even be used to automatically provision new Office 365 users.

The app is likely to be how most users interact with the service, as it lets users see their schedules and make changes. Once a schedule has been defined, it can be published and emailed to all team members, and users can make requests for time off or swap shifts with colleagues.

One useful feature is the ability to add notes to a shift, so staff can see what managers expect from the day — for example, if a bar is expected to be busy because of a big game. Notes can also be used to remind staff about new product lines and special offers. In addition, staff can quickly message each other, arranging breaks or letting each other know about regular customers.

There’s no direct back-end link into Microsoft systems yet, though a private beta adds links to the Kronos HR suite, and Microsoft has indicated that further integration points will be made available in the future. There’s also a very basic export feature that lets you take data from StaffHub as CSV files, while linking StaffHub to PowerApp endpoints gives you a quick way of collecting data directly from users and bringing it into your line-of-business services.

Tools for flexible workforces

If StaffHub sounds like fodder for the food services industry alone, think again.

Adam Warby, the CEO of IT consultancy Avanade, talks about bringing together pools of talent; associate networks of people that simplify the task of finding the right resources from inside and outside the company. HCM tools will work here as part of a more flexible workforce, where it’s the network of talent that matters more than the employer. By providing a cloud meeting place for information and scheduling, StaffHub can help bring together these virtual teams without requiring significant IT infrastructure, building a workspace for a project and tearing it down when it’s no longer needed.

HCM is an interesting space for Microsoft to explore. It’s controversial in its focus on the ad-hoc gig economy and flexible work at one end of the scale, but able to support more complex business models for freelance professionals at the other. Some of Microsoft’s experiments, like the GigJam collaboration platform, haven’t been successful, while others, like Delve Analytics and Planner, have shown considerable promise.

The key here is that Microsoft is putting a cloud-based integration layer across its services, using its PowerApps development framework to link new experiences like StaffHub to Office 365 features like Groups and to the services built into its Dynamics platform, as well as to other third-party tools and APIs. StaffHub may not do everything you want yet, but it’s another pointer to the importance of the Office Graph and Office 365 in Microsoft’s enterprise strategy.

By Simon Bisson, source by InfoWorld

ICT Hardware is one of Microsoft Partner

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Power to the people—people analytics, that is

kashalo — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:13:51 +0000

Companies are now using people analytics to uncover what makes a team productive.

An often-misunderstood, yet crucial, element in programmer productivity is the opportunity to collaborate.

So, a few years ago, when the managers of an online travel company wanted to boost their software engineers’ performance, they turned to Humanyze, a startup specializing in one aspect of “people analytics.” Combining big data analysis with information from sensors and other technologies, researchers investigated when and where programmers usually interacted during lunch.

Their finding: The more productive coders often sat at bigger lunch tables that seated 12 people and, as a result, regularly traded shop talk with more colleagues than those peers who chose spots for four. The result was a more than 10 percent difference in performance.

That led the company to swap some smaller tables for more of the larger ones, with positive results.

“Who would have thought the size of a lunch table could have such an impact on how we collaborate,” says Ben Waber, a co-founder of Humanyze. “But our analysis revealed that it did.”

Humanyze is riding the wave of people analytics, a new field that combines data from a variety of sources to look for clues to boosting everything from retention to teamwork, employee engagement and productivity.

Companies can also use Humanyze to uncover a wide range of insights that were once invisible, or to provide real metrics for what used to be hunches. For example, by detecting such information as how close teammates are to one another and their tone of voice, employers can discern whether they’re working cohesively or not.

“The power of people analytics is in its ability to challenge conventional wisdom, influence behavior, enable talent and business leaders to make and execute smarter and more strategic workforce decisions, and ultimately impact business outcomes,” says Jean Paul Isson, author of People Analytics in the Era of Big Data.

Analyzing interactions

One approach is to examine such data as employees’ email history, meeting schedules and contacts with customers to look for boosts to or drags on performance.

Take Delve Analytics, a new capability in Microsoft’s Office 365 office suite. Drawing on technology developed by VoloMetrix, a people analytics startup Microsoft recently bought, Delve allows individuals and teams to analyze all their interactions–their emails, chats, video calls, meetings and the like. The result: They can get unique insights that help them work more efficiently. For example, employees can discover how much time they focus on work without distractions or how often they’re in meetings.

“People can make changes that, across a company, can add up to real change at an organizational level,” says Ryan Fuller, co-founder of VoloMetrix and now a general manager at Microsoft, in a video interview.

Fuller points to a company that regularly had a weekly staff meeting for 11 managers. No one felt the gatherings were productive, but they kept on attending. After an analysis of the data, however, managers learned that, the business put in around 300,000 hours a year on the meeting, adding up to about a $45 million investment.

“Before this analysis, people just rolled their eyes and went to the meeting,” says Fuller.

“But now they could see how much it was costing them, so they made some changes.”

Collecting data from sensors

Boston-based startup Humanyze takes that approach one step further. A group of researchers at MIT Media Lab started the company in 2011, coming up with a way to combine several technologies to analyze ways to boost productivity.

Researchers outfit their clients’ badges with everything from a Bluetooth sensor to detect whether someone else nearby is also wearing a badge and how close that person is to an infrared scanner, which reveals employees’ positions. The scanner can determine if they’re facing each other, an accelerometer measures movement and two microphones record tone of voice and volume. Beacons placed inside rooms figure out what office employees are in.

All of this adds up to technology collecting more than 100 data points a minute, gathering data on everything from how often individuals are interrupted to how frequently they face other team members while talking, an indicator of engagement.

With all that data in hand, the system can analyze patterns of communication that correlate to effective team performance. It also creates maps of how teams are doing on various dimensions, like energy and engagement. Those displays instantly convey areas of weakness and strength.

Similarly, Hitachi recently started testing its own employee badges for measuring happiness, using data on employee movement—time spent sitting, walking and so on– collected by sensors.

The underlying idea is that the happiness level of a group correlates with productivity and can be determined by patterns of physical movement.

Some critics question people analytic systems, especially those using sensors, fearing potential threats to privacy. Advocates, however, say companies generally use the data in aggregate.

“This helps us better understand what makes employees happy overall,” says Isson.

For his part, Humanyze‘s Waber calls his company‘s process “Moneyball for business.

” That refers to the now-famous data analytics approach general manager and now executive vice president Billy Beane employed to improve the performance of the Oakland A’s Major League Baseball team. “We use behavioral data to build out the team,” he says.

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The contents or opinions in this feature are independent and may not necessarily represent the views of ICT-Hardware.

Used with the permission of http://thenetwork.cisco.com/.

| Artical by Anne Field

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