Redefining Change Management

This guest post is the fifth in a series exploring the capabilities of WEBCON BPS by Microsoft Regional Director and Office Apps & Services MVP Christian Buckley, CEO of CollabTalk LLC.

The ways in which organizations collaborate and connect are changing, and both personal and team productivity are at the forefront. As productivity increases, so does our need for an increased focus on change management and operational improvement. Tools are becoming more seamless and integrated, and the ability to collaborate across workloads is becoming essential to our productivity. The more we understand about how to leverage the technology we have in place, the more value we can deliver to our teams – and the more we should be thinking about additional ways to improve our business outputs.

In a SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities keynote in late 2016, Microsoft CVP Jeff Teper pointed to research by IDC, Microsoft and partners showing the size of a typical SharePoint environment at just over 1TB of content, with growth rates of 50% to 75% annually.”

Additionally, end user needs are constantly maturing, changing at an equal or greater rate than the systems they are using. Our ability to adapt and grow beyond the scope of our technology often outpaces the speed at which our organizations can deploy these solutions.

One key failure of many content and knowledge management strategies is to “hard-code” a business process to specific infrastructure components and line-of-business integrations, architecting them in a way that does not allow the organization to quickly adapt and change as the needs of the business evolve. The volume of our data, and the complexity of connections we make to other systems and data sets will only increase. This requires organizations to evaluate their ability to adapt and change.

As I mentioned in my previous post, not only is change constant, but the rate of change is only increasing, and organizations that can master change will have a distinct advantage over those who struggle with change. The competitive landscape does not sit idle: technology will continue to innovate, customer needs will continue to change, and even your employees will not remain satisfied with the current slate of tools forever. Life is an escalator — it’s always moving up, or down. If you come to a stop, people will find their own path forward, with or without you.

One of the compelling advantages of WEBCON BPS over competitive solutions is their ability to model real-world logic, and respond to more events than just “new” and “changed.” WEBCON is not limited to building a linear, sequential flow with perhaps some looping and branching along the way. With WEBCON, you indicate which steps are necessary within your business process, and how you transition from one step to another. If that means going backwards, sideways, or anything else, it’s fine. It’s a true state machine approach, and more closely reflects the way in which we manage our business processes.

Power Apps and Power Automate can respond to:

• UI element actions,
• web service calls,
• inserts to data,
• updates to data,
• timer events.

WEBCON can do all of that, too, but it can also trigger actions when entering or exiting a workflow step. Or when deleting something. Or when adding or changing an attachment. Or when cancelling a workflow instance.

Read more about how WEBCON supports the build once, deploy everywhere philosophy in the eBook “Top 10 Reasons Why a Power Automate Builder Should Look at WEBCON BPS“: