We would love to hear from you on your experience and thoughts on returning to work:

With the further easing of restrictions in Victoria the speculation and conversation that started with the directive to work from home has shifted to questions about how will we know when it’s time to return to the office and importantly what will a return to the office look like?

 have made remote work a permanent thing whilst 

 and Cloud Guru are among the companies extending remote working well into mid 2021.  US reports suggest that almost half (48%) of employees indicate that they would prefer to work from home after the pandemic and also that the move to remote working had resulted in them having a more positive view of their organisation.  Similarly 

 indicated that nearly 9 our of 10 want to maintain working from home as an option after COVID. 

Locally, some companies are further cashing in on the remote working situation by reducing their physical office footprint including  NAB who are discussing remote plans with their employees for well into the new year and who are also rumoured to be “mothballing” one or more of their older Melbourne office buildings. 

 has even claimed productivity benefits because remote employees work 1.4 more days every month than those who work in an office and “on those workdays, they spent more time getting things done”.  The suggestion being that the combination of savings in commute time may contribute to the former and office-based non-work related conversation (particularly with management) contribute to the latter. 

It hasn’t all been beer and skittles – there has been a widely reported increase in cybercrime simultaneous with the move to remote working under COVID-19 with reports that “

”.  The stampede from the office has increased the vulnerability of some businesses as employees use the tools at hand in a relatively less protected network, hardware and software environments. 

The benefits and demands associated with the move to remote working have also been unevenly distributed.  Parents with school age children have faced a difficult period.  Single parents and those who rely on extended family have been some of the hardest hit. In many cases 

 raising the question – what does this mean for mothers and equality?  And also – what does it mean for stress levels ? 

In addition, there has been a slowly increasing awareness of the more vulnerable members of  society who use 

 that lies at the heart of many of these cases by extending support to 

 managing challenges associated with domestic abuse, providing dedicated support to 

 and even shutting down some of the misuse of the financial system for perpetrating such abuse. Beyond questions of what responsibility organisations have for supporting people facing these difficult and sometimes deadly situations are concerns about what the implications are for these people if remote working is the norm or indeed is expected. If people want to work in the office but are encouraged not to, will they be forced to declare a home situation that they feel uncomfortable or embarrassed about? 

As we look forward and prepare for a COVID Normal work environment, there is going to be quite a range of factors for organisations to consider. 

Whilst many principles for how to be efficient and effective remain similar between on site and remote work we can also expect there to be some changes too.  Performance and management techniques based around command and control or focused on “line of sight” micro-managing are likely to be ineffective in an on-going remote working environment forcing those managers for whom this is a default working style to shift instead to managing to an outcome. 

What also is the future for open plan environments under a social distancing scenario.  Small meeting spaces have been part of the reconfiguration of many office buildings recently in an effort to provide for the various types of collaborative activity and increase building occupant density.  Are these physical collaborative workspaces now feasible places to return to work in? 

Some organisations are considering more creative approaches – for instance two team or green team/blue team approaches where one team is in the office for a week whilst the other works remotely followed by a switchover.  This aims to minimise both the risk of infection and the impact of any infection by simultaneously minimising the likely infection impact to only half of any team. 

However, there are social and political challenges and tensions from this approach too – what do you do if your manager is in one team and you are in the other such that you rarely see each other face-to-face? 

Some may even recall that before the pandemic 

 to promote better collaboration and integration between teams. 

One thing that has stood out is those businesses that have seized the opportunity and demonstrated business agility by pivoting to each new situation.  Some, like Bunnings have identified new customer demands and ramped up an existing digital offering, leveraging it for better value whilst other organisations like food retailers have taken advantage of allied digital offerings like Deliveroo and Uber eats.  Whilst there is an acceptance that people will return to many of the activities they previously enjoyed (like eating out with family and friends) there is also a 

.  Consumer expectations have been raised around availability of products and services online and frictionless digital-meets-logistics.  Now more than ever digital is no longer optional. 

Certainly this pandemic and its implications were predicted by virtually zero economists 12 months ago and in a context where rules and restrictions change with minimal advance warning the move to technologies that facilitate collaboration and increase transparency has been unavoidable.  However, most organisations have done the minimum they need to remain functional.  

As we start to plan for some kind of return to work scenario, now is the time to start thinking about what the future work environment will look like and most importantly, make sure your business is ready..  

We believe the following must be high on the agenda when planning your return to the office: 

If you have any questions about the above – ask us how we can help. 

Returning to the Office

If you are a small to medium size business using Power BI, Microsoft has announced a change to licensing that will be of interest, especially for businesses that want to leverage advanced analytic capability.

Power BI has several licences each giving different capability and rights. Power BI Pro is by far the most popular choice across Small to Medium organisations not only because of its capability but also because its per user licence allows organisations to manage number of licences and therefore cost. Power BI Premium is a more capable offering but until now has been licenced on a Per Capacity basis where that capacity is shared across the organisation. The typical price point entry into Premium has been a minimum of approx. $5,000 USD per month.

Microsoft have announced a new User based Licence for the Premium Product. This will enable individual users to access the Power BI Premium offers with all of the capability of Power Bi Pro and in addition access paginated reports, integration with AI, some of the more advanced extract>transform>load capabilities and some other advanced analytics.

This is great news for organisations who want to access the capability of Premium, but don’t want the price tag.

Microsoft have clarified some of the finer points of the license features online. See below a comparison of the feature comparison between the Per User and Per Capacity offers:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/answering-your-questions-around-the-new-power-bi-premium-per-user-license/

However, there are a few limitations to the proposed license model. One of these is who can see what. Again Microsoft have clarified this online as well:

Microsoft intend to release this for public preview in November and will release pricing for Premium per user at around the same time.

If you have questions about what this means for or organisation, please feel free to contact us.

Power BI Changes

In today’s uncertain business environment, created by a pandemic that has touched every corner of the globe, the ability to understand financial and operational performance in real-time is critical.

Organisation that are “insight driven” will be best placed to grow when normal economic conditions emerge. An insight driven organisation will stand a far greater chance of maintaining their cashflow, keeping touch with customer base and keep a close eye on the operational metrics that will make the most significant contribution to their performance.

Some insight driven organisations will even take the offensive and grow market share, confident in their ability to scale while delivering on customer experience.

A shift towards an being “insight driven” organisation has been gaining momentum. Leaders are effectively using insights to capture value by moving from an industry view of profitability and strategy to one that is specific to their organisation and market position. They fine tune operations to optimize for the current environment and execute tactics to pull ahead of their competitors.

Companies trying to emulate the success of insight driven organisations quite often fall into several traps. Many organisations have democratised data and reporting, utilising the latest visualisation tools that have lowered the technical barrier to enable self-service analytics and visualisation, but to what end? Many analysts now spend hours performing data wrangling tasks to derive countless insights but fail to capture the value these opportunities represent.

The data visualisation explosion has highlighted a number of organisational challenges including data literacy, quality and governance. One must also question the value of constant “data wrangling”. An increasing amount of organisational time is now spent on once off data wrangling activities as the number of analysts proliferate. There is certainly a lot of value that can be attained from these visualisation tools. Thankfully, vendors are quickly addressing the gaps that will enable the appropriate governance to manage and repeat these processes.

Are we guilty of falling in love with the latest shiny toy? Too often the answer is yes! In this case it can distract us from allocating precious analytics resources and skills to the business levers that will return the most value. Business alignment is always key. That’s why we have KPIs, to focus us on the “Key” levers that drive business performance so that we understand how much to pull them, in what direction and when.

When considering any form of data related transformation or change, we tend to focus on:

As operational cost is scrutinised like never before, spending on data capability is unlikely to avoid the spotlight. Hard actionable insights that are aligned to business priorities and can be easily implemented are what is needed right now. Demonstrating your ability to do this, rather than investing in the latest shiny toy, will help build long lasting business relationships that will embed an insight driven approach to business performance.

November 2020

Returning to the Office

Power BI Changes

An insight driven organisation