Coaching & Mentoring
Empower your team with hands-on coaching and mentoring.
Our mentoring approach is about your team learning and delivering with our support. It is not about us delivering and your team having a hand over. Starting from a few hours of focused training through to regular weekly sessions we can create a mentoring program that meets your specific needs.
Do you have a person or team who has been tasked with managing or supporting Office 365 and SharePoint and don't yet have all the skills they need? Generic training courses have their place, but can only go so far when it comes to the real world practicalities of keeping on top of Office 365 and SharePoint. That's where our mentoring and support services can help you build that capability.
What do you get?
You get access to our team to mentor and grow your team. You get the combination of people and skills you need to meet the outcomes you're aiming for. We can work with you to design a mentoring engagement or programme to target the needs of your people.
Establishing good practices
We have a number of mantras that can help any team working with online services, in particular Office 365 and SharePoint. First is prove before you move. This has numerous applications but upfront its about learning to ask if we need this feature, will the business benefit from this app, let's test it and prove before we invest time and money. This quickly follows with think > configure > user test which is all about getting functional examples in front of users to prove what does and does not work for them. SharePoint is great for rapid prototyping, so learn to use it.
Skinning and branding
Lots of people can hack around a SharePoint site and there are lots of videos online that can tell you how they did it, but do know what you don't know? Spoke can teach your team about sustainable approaches that fit with where Microsoft are moving with their online services. We can provide the insight into when it is worth investing in skinning and when is it best to just let SharePoint be SharePoint, and we can give the real world tips and tricks about how to actual get it done.
Custom widgets and integration
While there is often no need for any code cutting there are times when a special widget or integration to another system or service is required. If this is a one-off requirement, we would highly recommend outsourcing this activity, however if you want to maintain this capability then we have the expertise to mentor your team to do this properly following modern online practices.
Sites and information architecture
Some days SharePoint seems simple and straight forward, then you hit a customer who has accidentally dug themselves a hole and it reminds us of all the lessons we've learnt. Through our mentoring service you can tap into these lessons from our many years of experience delivering SharePoint solutions, and this is as much about knowing what works for people on the ground as it is about how you might technically configure document library.
Microsoft 365 and all those apps
We live and breathe Microsoft 365, and even we struggle at times to keep abreast of everything that happens in the ecosystem. Your team needs to establish a way to keep across and give visibility to the apps and features that are added, changed and retired. We can help your team confirm what their role is and what they are actually responsible for and then determine the appropriate processes to manage the ongoing changes and most importantly how to trial, test and then introduce new apps into your organisation.
If you are interested and want to know more about Spoke's mentoring services, get in touch
