Many organisations seem to struggle fitting the necessities of Microsoft 365 planning, migration and governance to their legacy organisational structures, policy framework and process-architecture which seem to miss the mark with a continuously changing cloud-based platform like M365.
What could, or should an appropriate organisational and governance structure look like to successfully migrate an entire organisations staff and content onto M365, adequately train them on the tools, support them indefinitely, and respond to a constant demand for enhancements, all within a constantly changing environment that is Microsoft’s constantly evergreen architecture?
As it turns out, NASA’s approach to planning for, launching and managing space missions is a pretty good template for that.
NASA launches rockets from the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral Florida; but NASA Mission Control is in Houston Texas. What are the respective responsibilities between Cape Canaveral and Houston? When does the handover happen? And more importantly, why have separate teams, in different states?
In the early years of the US space programme, NASA more or less consisted of one large team that was focused on design, build and testing of rockets. As that progressed, a launch-phase was added. Once the Apollo missions kicked-off, NASA also began managing the mission and recovering the capsule and crew.
NASA quickly worked out that there were two quite distinct phases, with different objectives that required different skills: design/build/launch and manage/recover. So NASA split those responsibilities into two teams. Having done that, they further realised those two teams didn’t even need to be in the same building, or State. The design/build/launch team remained at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, while Mission Control was established in Houston Texas, with the hand-off occurring once a rocket clears the launch-pad-tower.
Immediately following that hand-off, the Kennedy Space Centre team turns its attention and resources to the next launch, while Houston managing the mission through to recovery.
Implementing and supporting Microsoft 365 should follow a similar model to NASA by separating the two key phases: 1) planning/build/migration and 2) support/enhancements/governance. The Kennedy Space Centre Team training and launching users onto Microsoft 365; the Mission Control Team Team dealing with all the “Houston, we have a problem” stuff.