People. Context.

Microsoft 365 is designed to help people and businesses achieve more with integrated Office apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. It is a world-leading platform for the modern workplace. It includes everything you would be familiar with in the Microsoft Office suite, like Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. However, the platform extends well beyond the Office suite and includes applications and services that provide modern collaboration and productivity solutions suitable for any size organisation or enterprise. Applications like Microsoft Teams, Modern SharePoint, Planner, Microsoft Stream integrated with the Power Platform provide a robust ecosystem to deliver intranet, extranet (portals), knowledge and content management, task and approval workflow management, data collection and analytics capabilities, and much more.

The Power Platform is an enterprise-grade low/no-code development environment that truly sets Microsoft 365 apart from all other productivity platforms. The Power Platform is designed to allow ‘citizen-developers’ to leverage their business domain knowledge to rapidly implement solutions to address real problems within the specific business context. However, the depth of the platform enables advanced functionality to allow professional developers to seamlessly extend and integrate the work of the citizen-developer. This suite of applications is genuinely game-changing and includes:

• Power Apps – enables citizen-developers to create low/no-code custom business apps

• Power Automate – workflow tool to manage and automate processes and approvals

• Power BI – industry-leading business data visualisation and analytics tool

• Power Pages – secure and fully integrated customer portal

• Power Virtual Agents – intelligent low/no-code virtual chatbot environment

• Dataverse - enterprise-grade database which is fully scalable and fully secure

Microsoft 365 subscriptions offer any organisation, regardless of size, transformational tools. However, effectively using and embedding the capabilities of a world-leading platform to deliver defined business outcomes requires much more than simply purchasing and allocating licenses. Every organisation needs to truly understand and make sense of how the platform’s capabilities can effectively align with their strategy to unlock its real potential for their context.

This sense-making is key because context matters!

GenSol offers Microsoft 365 sense-making packages to help your organisation really get the most out of your subscription. We can work with you in the following ways:

Discovery Week - designed to be an intense, in-person, focussed consecutive 5-day period that goes broad rather than deep. The focus is on your unique context - people and work areas, business processes, the flow of the organisation and priorities moving forward. By the end of the week together, we have tangible demos / pilots of agreed focus areas set up in your environment - think Microsoft Teams, intranet, forms, automated workflows, reporting dashboards or whatever your priorities are - and an agreed implementation plan for subsequent deep dives to activate each of these priorities in a fully embedded manner.

Activation | Embedding subscriptions - designed to take a demo or pilot to full implementation. We get the right people around the table to dive deeply into each of your priority areas. This is how outcomes are achieved that are in line with your strategy, properly operationalised according to your actual business needs and context, and embedded - users are trained to be largely self-sufficient so that things remain sustainable when we move on.

We agree Microsoft products are world-leading but one thing we’ve noticed is that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM is big, unwieldy, and potentially a bit pricey for many of the small-to-medium sized for-purpose organisations we work with.

So we decided to address this by designing and architecting our own CRM product; an app called Team365. It’s built using the Microsoft Power Platform and leverages all the same Dynamics technology. It’s just much simpler.

Team365 gives you a 360° view of your organisation’s people ecosystem and enables you to be:

• Client driven

• Data driven

• Impact driven

Here’s a quick overview of Team365’s features:

Clients

• CRM designed for you

• Link to services and other offerings

Stakeholders

• Identify opportunities to work together

• Track progress on shared projects

Members

• Tailor to the needs of member organisations

• Link to services and events

Knowledge Management

• Collate, curate, and control knowledge across the organisation

Business Development

• Track opportunities and share information

Marketing

• Fully integrate with Mail Chimp and leverage Microsoft suite to give you 360° control

Strategic Operations

• Build data and reporting aligned to your strategic plan

• Real-time data to support better decision making

• Track and instigate changes quickly

Data Collection

• Collect data to meet operational and funder needs

Data Reporting

• Team

• Organisation

• Funding bodies

Designed for small to medium sized organisations to leverage client and other data to deliver true value, Team365 is highly flexible to address your needs, and work within your unique context. It can be tailored to deliver value across any use case.

• Leverage client interactions to understand their needs more fully

• Access data in real-time

• Reduce waste and duplication across your organisation

• Once implemented you have full control

• Make changes as needed to meet your organisational needs

We highly recommend implementing Team365 using our Do & Adapt service to embed the solution and develop in-house skill to maximise its effectiveness.

One of the consistent problems our clients articulate is ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’. Sometimes it’s hard for an organisation’s leaders to know what technology, processes, and digital set up would best truly serve their people and business, and rarely is there one right answer.

But digital sense-making is about so much more than technology; it’s how technology weaves with people, information, and ways of working too. We help leaders think holistically in order to identify the right digital projects for their workplace and wade through choice. We navigate contextual complexity with curiosity, perspective, capability, humility, courage, and EQ, helping leaders uncover what they don’t know, what they need to know and why, and how to set a clear, tangible direction with confidence.

Advice. Evaluating ideas. Testing thinking.

GenSol bring a raft of skills to this service; business leadership, strategic management, corporate services, operational management, business technology consulting, business mentoring, diplomacy, systems thinking, business technology architecture, and exceptional facilitation.

This offering is subscription-based, purchasable in 1-, 3-, and 6-month blocks of time.

We know that solutions and outcomes are stronger when we weave our skills with your skills, strategy, business plan, stories and values, and apply collective thought to problem solving.

But how do we do it in a way that delivers quick wins and harnesses momentum?

One of our key implementation tools is Do & Adapt labs.

Basic lab structure:

1. Put together a strategic team of stakeholders, to work quickly and with commitment on a single high-level topic

• Clarify the problem or opportunity facing each stakeholder

• Define the desired outcome and minimum success criteria

• Hypothesise possible approaches collectively

• Map the basic process

2. Engage with the technology

• Discover and share similar concepts

• Explore and assess possible options

• Rapidly prototype the best of these options to evaluate limitations

3. Prioritising based on business value, develop a functional (not perfect!) working prototype with

• A user interface (app) that is intuitive and makes sense

• Manual and automated data collection that is relevant

• Integrated notifications & alerts relevant to the process and stakeholders

• Automated processes where possible, aligned to the business process

• Any other activity that adequately addresses the problems

4. Test and revise the prototype

• Stakeholders test the prototype for a defined (short) period

• Capture and prioritise all issues and proposed improvements

• Revise (or replace) the prototype as required, for further testing

5. Evaluate the solution

• If the solution is suitable, define an agreed plan for rollout

• Identify the documentation and training resources to be development

• Capture lessons learned

A defined outcome to a real issue, aligning people, strategy, information, and ways of working for your context.

Do & Adapt labs are purchasable in batches of four, eight, or twelve 1-day labs.