Worth Reading – Why Staying Up-to-Date with Microsoft 365 Feels Like Hitting a Wall
I think everyone reading this has hit that wall. What’s interesting about this post is the question of whether we should even try to keep up anymore.
As someone who spends a good part of my week exploring the latest Microsoft 365 capabilities, I keep realizing that the vast majority of users simply don’t care about new features the way I do. They have jobs to do, tasks to finish, and results to deliver. The shiny new stuff rarely makes it onto their radar.
This hit home for me in part because recently I was researching agent usage, not anything fancy, just usage of Microsoft-built agents or users who built their own basic agents. What I found makes me question where I focus my energy: despite spending hours and hours testing, studying, and creating educational content around things like the Researcher agent, model choice, etc., the reality is that only a very small minority of users actively seek out those tools. But we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to help them use these tools that don’t interest them.
Which doesn’t really make much sense to me. The question is, what should we focus on if we can’t keep up with everything? I’ll go back to what I say often when talking about mental health in the workplace, and how trying to keep up with all the change contributes to the issue. Focus on what’s in front of you. What are the things that impact your work today?
That’s what many of our users are doing, too. They’re not playing around with Power Automate, for example. Some are, but it’s not many. Most are just trying to get through the overwhelming amount of work they need to do. Learning a new tool isn’t on their radar unless it can help them get that work done right this very moment. Meanwhile, we’ve got a bunch of IT leaders spending a ton of time learning these tools or testing the compliance issues involved in using them, which we should do. How much is enough, though? How much time do we dedicate to tools that are going to be used by less than 10% of the workforce?
That’s the question I think some of us are struggling with.
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