Transform with Teams

A blog full of actionable ideas for quickly transforming your business with Microsoft 365.

The Executive Weekly Report with Hundreds of Contributors

The Situation

Soon after the merger that doubled our company’s size in 2012, the Senior Vice President of Power Generation Operations informed his Regional Vice Presidents that he needed a “Weekly Report” by Sunday morning each week so that he could in turn, compile and present his own report to th...

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Risk Management – Quick Organization of Randomly-Kept Data

The Situation

The company had been hit with a couple of untimely negative news stories in national, state, and local news. One was the result of a serious environmental event due to a pipe failure. Executive management conducted a risk assessment to identify potential future disasters having low pr...

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Compiling Shirt Sizes - How A Small, Quick Solution Saved Administrative Assistants Hours of Work

The Situation

While on a large conference call, a general manager asked several dozen employees to email their shirt sizes to his administrative assistant because the organization was going to buy polo shirts for employees on a special occasion.

Being one of the employees on the call I realized th...

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LOTO Requests - Standardizing for Safety and Efficiency

The Situation

In 2005, employees at our largest coal power plant (and the third largest in the country) used various, inconsistent means to request “Lockout Tagout” before working on equipment. “Lockout Tagout” is a process by which mechanics, electricians, and other maintenance employees ask the o...

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High Risk Activities Approval - Ensuring Safety and Environmental Stewardship with No More Public Relations Incidents

The Situation

Due to very negative publicity resulting from an environmental issue in early 2014, the company began an effort to increase oversight of all activities having any risk of environmental consequences. It was decided that all such activities first be reviewed and approved by a team consi...

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Technical Assistance Facilitation - Matching Experts with Needs Across a Large Organization

The Situation

After the 2012 merger, and with a workforce of more than 5,000 employees in just the fossil-hydro generation section, the fossil-hydro organization was struggling to match those with technical needs and issues with the people responsible for high-level technical decisions and consulta...

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Work Management Barrier Resolution - Radically Reducing Time Spent Tracking Improvement Progress

The Situation

One large generating station conducted a regular weekly meeting in which recent barriers to efficient maintenance work were discussed and actions planned to eliminate such barriers in future work.

These barriers were such things as mechanics getting the wrong parts due to incorrect p...

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Help Desk Process - A Simple SharePoint Solution for Emailed Support Requests

The Situation

At one point during my career, I was the only SharePoint support person for more than 5,000 employees and contractors, about 90 locations, and more than 300 SharePoint sites. What compounded the difficulty of this situation was the fact that I also had to serve as developer, trainer, ...

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Facilitating the Review and Certification of 170 Procedures in Thirty Days

The Situation

At the end of 2014, a station was ordered by the COO to ensure that 170 procedures were reviewed, certified, and organized by the end of January. Most source files were stored on a station shared drive at that time, but a few were on the plant’s SharePoint site and a few were being de...

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Using a Single Source to Display Information in Dozens of Locations

The Situation

The fossil-hydro fleet had a goal of radical improvement in safety, environmental, and operational performance. Implemented tactics involved heavily publicizing negative events fleet-wide and forcing awareness and learning across the fleet every day. While this effort involved much mo...

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