 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat interview. And I'm here with Emily. Hey, good morning, good afternoon. Hey, we're the same. We're like close time zones. Usually I'm talking to people that are continents away. Yeah, I'm Emily Mancini, an architect at Sympraxis Consulting and I am based out of St. Petersburg, Florida. All right. And how long have you been an MVP? About a week and a half. Yeah, exciting times. I'm on this stint of all like the brand new people. I see like the, like the now people don't realize this too, that it used to be that MVPs were were added on a quarterly basis. Now they can be added, you know, every month. And so when you see those notifications hit LinkedIn, I usually go and I stalk that the MVP buzz hashtag. Who's new? Who's like excited about it and like a great time to introduce you to get to know you. Get to know me interview. So why don't you give us some of your background? Like how long have you been in space? What's your MVP, your practice area? Office apps and services. So I specialize in user experience and information architecture and I've been at Sympraxis Consulting for just about two years before joining Sympraxis. I actually worked with Mark and Julie as I was a platform owner at a biotech. So they were one of the partners who helped us do our custom development. So I've known them for quite a few years. So it was a quite the dream job to then leave there and join them and be at Sympraxis with our amazing group of Mark, Julie, Todd, Derek and Mike. They are great. I know everybody on the team friends with them for a long time. So I miss seeing Mark is a great, he has a great sense of humor, but it's always great to do something that's just silly and ridiculous and he automatically plays like the straight face. Like I don't know what you're talking about kind of great to play off of, but always enjoy being around that team and Todd, of course, like to poke fun at him all the time. But some smart people, great team over at Sympraxis though, those that aren't familiar, go take a look if you can figure out how to spell it. I think you guys probably should have variations of URLs that you own for people that don't know how to define it, but it's pretty much spelled the way that it sounds. Well, yeah, based based off the Greek word for collaboration. So for those who are fluent, you know, maybe not as hard to spell. It's worse than Pataco. I mean, I've got talk, which is my community effort. So it's all about collaboration. Well, very cool. So what's some of the stuff that you talk about and present it because I know everybody at Sympraxis is very involved in community activities as well. So what kind of stuff are you out talking about? So it's been a pretty exciting week and a half. I also just joined the PNP team. So I'm part of the sharing is caring initiative. So a part of that kind of overlaps with all the other areas that I'm interested in, which are also the Microsoft Community Docs, which I know Mark has been working on for quite a while. So creating that documentation for the businesses and IT pros under Microsoft Community Docs. I'm also working on the maturity model for Microsoft 365. So something at St. Van Buren kicked off quite a few years ago. I've talked a lot about that. So yeah, very involved. In fact, I did a governance version of that and a social collaboration version of that years ago, all built off of Sadie's work. Yep. Oh, excellent. Well, we probably have some upcoming initiatives that we'd love your feedback on and always feel free to go into that repo, read those articles and give us some feedback on what you think. You know, I point people to the work that was done the stuff that's on a docs now. So I know that there's been some partners like Peter Carson up in Canada and other, you know, Eric Riz also up in Canada that have been doing some work around the maturity model and kind of mapping that to tools and working that into their consulting practices as a way, which I think is a really smart thing. And Microsoft has written some articles as well where they're encouraging that kind of thing for partners to go and do. Makes sense. Yeah. We see a lot of organizations not really knowing they turn it on and they're like, great, we're all going to work together a lot better now, but they're really trying to not missing that framework of well, what do I want to be doing and where should I be depending on these different aspects of your organization? Because for example, a six person company like Sympraxis, we don't necessarily need the same maturity that you need at a 30,000 biotech, right? Well, that's that's the thing. It's one of the most common questions that I I hear. I say this a lot. So I'm feel like I'm repeating myself, but new to you Emily, where people want very prescriptive guidance. They want to know specifically like which tools do I use at which part? How is the, you know, the kind of the orchestration of the various tools? How do I make it work within it? And they don't like the answer of well, it really kind of depends. It depends on the size of your organization, the collaboration culture of your organization. What are people accustomed to? Are you very process oriented or is it more social or email based? Is it more project management based task based? And each of those you can have a completely different assortment of solutions that you might add into the mix. And so what's great about having something like the maturity model concept is to have an idea to go in and assess where you are. And it's great to get help from a partner to help do that assessment, but assess where you are. And then just in you might be fine at that level. I mean, we're at a level. I know what you see them level like level two. Do I need to be a level five? No, I think three is really where we want to be in this category and the do that per workload and think about overall. I mean, it's it's a it's a healthy operational activity to constantly assess and reassess where you are and look at what else could we be doing? That's what digital transformation is all about. Knowing where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow and then figuring out a path to get there. That's digital transformation. Agreed and you know, not just based off the tech based off of real business need to support what the business is doing. And I feel like that's where people get lost really often is yeah, I get really excited about cool new tech as well, but if it's not relevant to helping my business, that's not necessarily where I should be spending my time. Right. Well, that's always the look. I started my career a long time ago as a technical project manager and I worked on projects where I was given like a directive like you will go and deploy in this technology and we deployed some beautiful things. It is highly functional and then then nobody used. Guess what it was looked at is viewed at a failure. Yeah, I did it right. I did what I was asked to do, but then my name was attached to something that nobody used and then therefore and adoption and engagement were never didn't really factor in. I did the trainings like people were onboarded. Yeah, it off the list. Then people weren't using it and that's why understanding why it's so important to like the culture of your organization and what do we really need to be doing because at the end of the day, you know, like collaboration technology. We used to say it's about SharePoint all the time and I was always one of these people that's like sometimes it's okay to be a laggard and stay on the older version that you've customized and do that if it's meeting those business needs. There's that opportunity cost. There's new features. There's new capabilities, better integrations, all those kinds of things and if the value of those things is greater than the cost of getting there. The time, the expense, all that kind of stuff. Then it might be, hey, you're fine to stay where you are for now. Right. And hopefully. Yeah. Sellers hate that. I should say that that's fair. That's fair. Hopefully those conversations are also coming outside of not just IT, right? So this idea that this whole collaboration platform is owned by that one department I disagree with, right? So making sure that all of those decisions of where you're spending your time on your projects is coming from some kind of cross-functional steering committee. So you're meeting all of the needs of the business and helping everyone across the organization. You know, just have one half the organization totally on Microsoft 365 and the other one on the file share. And I realize in some organizations, it might be very one-sided and you might have, it might be driven by the CTO or CIO or the IT department around those things, but and that's where, you know, really having good leadership team sponsorship for that to make sure that it is, hey, this is an entire company solution. Things like, you know, rolling out Microsoft Teams might be IT that supports the desktops and supports all the applications, but you know, again, it can't be a tech driven deployment. It needs to fit in and there needs to be ongoing, you know, community management, you know, success management type view of the world and then discussion about how do we make this a better solution for all of the business needs and that ongoing, it's a change management discussion. And most organizations are really bad at change management. Yeah, that's fair. When I was a platform owner at the biotech, when I joined the company, there was 150 people and then by the time I had left within a span of four years, we grew to 1500. So we had that really big challenge where we had all of our, you know, sales general admin really into Microsoft 365, but then we had this whole other wing of scientists who had legitimate use for using this public drive all the time because their instruments output their data there and this was a whole unmet need of how they were collaborating. And so one of the things I did there was make that steering committee get some of the scientific leadership into the room so they had a better understanding of the platform and could see align their goals to how I could support them with the technology because a lot of their goals are common and easy to solve with Microsoft 365. It's, you know, transparency and decision making, making sure that people can collaborate across cross functional groups. These are all things that we can absolutely solve with teams and all of these other solutions. So be honest with me. Was it difficult to get them to sit down to get to that point though where those meetings were productive? Did people push back and fight initially on, on having that kind of holistic discussion of, you know, of, you know, coming together everybody? Cause that was, that's been my experience. Yeah. Once people like feel they get like trust built within the change management process, they're okay, but that usually takes time to convince people. It does. I didn't start the initiation of that conversation until a couple years in. So we had a pretty solid background and track record of having successful implementations. And when we first launched Microsoft 365, I focused a lot on productivity training. So we essentially revolutionized the way people took and shared notes. We started out with one note, right? And trying to raise that transparency just from something immediately actionable that doesn't require a lot of IT support. So it's probably about a year to two years. And when I first joined the company, I actually had joined from the HR department and in a support role. So I already had established relationships with the C suite. So they already all knew me. So when I came to them with my pitch and proposal, which was very formal, the what's in it for them, I already had some mapping of their goals to how the platform could do it. And I didn't have anybody pushback at all. They were all absolutely there for it. So I think partly showcasing why it mattered. They saw the impact we could make and then coming to them with a clear deliverable of, hey, this is one hour of your time every month. I'm not giving you pre reads and I'm not giving you action items. I just need you in the room to make sure we prioritize the correct projects. They were all in. Yeah. Well, that's a that I think from what you just described, maybe that was one mistake that I had was I required pre reads. Effort. So I get that. So I do it again. It would be like you just show up. No, there's nothing you need to do. I just need you there. I need your attention in the room. You give me that 3045 minutes and everything that you need to know will be encapsulated within that. That would have been a winning strategy. Yeah, as a former executive assistant for many years, I worked full time to pay my way through college. I knew that nobody did the pre reads at any company I've ever worked at. So it's like realistically, it's not going to happen for me either. So I'm not going to try. How can I better distill my message, which also helps you practice for external speaking in the community of what are the absolute minimum top points that I need to fit into this 45 to 60 minutes. Yeah. Well, that's where that whole that whole meme came from like, you know, could this meeting have been an email? Could this yeah, that comes from that if people not planning that out. Why do we actually need to meet? I have no problem when people respond to me to and say we had time set up to go through stuff like, can we just do this over email? Yes, we can. I have no problem with that. You know, we don't need to go through the rest of it and talk about weather for five minutes and then go to go through that structure. So that that is great. Well, it's really cool. So what else is what's coming up in this impraxis world? What are you guys working on? What are you doing? Anything that you want to share with the community? Sure. So we started this year, you know, in in light of the pandemic and us all being home and a lot of the speaking gig shifting. We started doing these bi weekly webinars called ask impraxis. So it's every other Wednesday for a half an hour and we always have a topic, but the goal is also to have it be kind of like an open office hours where we have our pre canned presentation should know and have a lot of questions. But we're also here to talk through hearing what our clients and anyone in the community is thinking about and trying to work through. So we just did one this week. You know, we called it the Todd show because it was about PowerShell and what's new in PowerShell wasn't about time. Okay, that's yeah. No, it was not. And then let's see. I'm looking at my calendar the 24th. We're doing another one and it's all going to be about reactions to Viva and talking about what's going on there. Yeah, I'll be interested to to check that out and your responses to that. I think there's a longer discussion. We won't get into it, but given your your background with you know, the the classification of data and metadata and all that kind of like that side of things and from the SharePoint world and get your thoughts. I certainly have mine about Viva and what it will take for people to actually start using the new capabilities. It's going to be an interesting discussion ongoing discussion. Yeah, we're actually it's the it's the topic. Can my place include you in the invites that I just sent out for this month's tweet jam is nice. I would love to and it's you know, I love that kind of stuff. Just I'm sure just like you guys are doing you you're going to present on stuff, but I'm more interested in to hear the questions. What kind of questions that people have and just kind of broad community pulse to the of the community. What are people thinking about this? Because often with that when you open things up like that, you're like, I never thought of it that way. It's like you get so you know, like single minded about and here's the target customer. Here's use cases. This is how here's what the features go and do and then somebody comes in and says, well, this is how we actually work and be like. It's a scenario we never thought of so. Absolutely. I mean to your point, that's my one of my favorite parts about being involved in the community is all of these different perspectives and challenging each other's thoughts and being able to expand all of our thinking together. I think we can accomplish a lot of different things and also I feel really grateful to the community early on when I was changing my career towards where I am now. I had met Sue Hanley and Mark Anderson early on and they just absolutely changed my interests in where I wanted to head and were always mentors to me as I went through this process. So I'm deeply thankful to them. Yeah, there are some of my favorite people out there. There's there's a lot of very smart people, a lot of fun people within the community. It's the it truly is the and I'm specifically talking about the SharePoint community that like built up. So these folks like Mark that I've known for over a decade, you know, all kind of met them at that SharePoint conference 2009 and and there's just a huge group of people that are still like I talked to in a weekly basis, although Mark is more stranger to me now. So it's a one of those the downside to the to the pandemic is people that I would do these, you know, these big catch up moments, see it events and stuff that aren't happening, but I'll have to track them down and waste a bunch of this time. To your point, that's my favorite part about be part of the sharing is caring team too is, you know, Hugo Bernier and David Warner and April Dunham, like spending time with them. It's also hanging out with friends while you're doing stuff for the community. So how nice that we can all connect across the glow from our desks and still have that relationship building time to exactly. Well, Emily, people want to find out more about you or get in touch with you. What are the best ways they can reach you? Twitter is always great. So at E-E-Man Cine, please feel free to reach out, ask me any questions. I'm always happy to talk through use cases and hear your feedback. Hear what you're struggling with. Hear cool success stories too. I feel like people don't often share those and I definitely want to hear more about something cool that you've done that you want to tell the world about and do you have like a short snappy URL for the office hours or is it long-winded drawn out? You've got to go search for it to find those. I'm sure that it's simp.info slash ask simpraxis and if it's not, I'll be doing it immediately after this meeting. All right, we're going to we'll check that. So, well Emily really appreciate the time and getting to talk to you and congratulations again on your new MVP. Well deserved. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. We'll talk to you soon.