The culture and focus for CloudWay in 2020, written by our founder and CEO, Ståle Hansen
2019 was the year CloudWay more than doubled the number of employees, established presence in 3 more countries over 2 continents. This is well reflected at the top of our website.
Personally, I am stoked to be able to work with a global team of subject matter experts, this has been a long-standing dream for me. A fun fact is that we are all Microsoft MVPs with passion for sharing our lessons learned in books, blogs, videos and as public speakers. It does not mean you must be an MVP to work in CloudWay, but we are looking for people with passion for learning and sharing lessons learned. 80% of our time is spent helping customers and partners implement secure productivity.
In 2020 we will share more about the types of projects we have been working on both from a technology point of view and our roles and impact through customer references. The activities we do are anchored in CloudWay\’s WHY, HOW and WHAT as inspired by Simon Sinek, I recommend reading his books \”Start with WHY\” and \”The Infinite Game\”
WHY we do CloudWay – Our WHY is to remove blockers so that our customers can combine existing services with cloud services. Most of the projects we are involved in, we help look at where you are, where you want to end up and how to get there in a secure way. It does not mean that we always migrate data, it may be that we are just integrating with the Microsoft cloud to get started with the security features. Most of the time though, we help migrate from on-premises to online, from other services to the Microsoft cloud and event tenant to tenant.
HOW we do CloudWay – Our HOW is through experience and passion for continuous learning, this is the way we bring value to our partners and customers. We take certifications, write down our lessons learned in blogs and practice talking about them in workshops and through public speaking which a big part of our personal learning processes.
WHAT we do at CloudWay – The what does not really matter as long as we know our WHY and HOW. The WHAT is the technology we work with today which is Microsoft 365 secure productivity. What we do by the end of the year or the coming years, we don\’t know. What we DO know is that we will be in front of the wave because of HOW we do CloudWay with continuous learning and through our WHY, which is always be available to help those who ask.
You will find that our mission statement is perfectly aligned with our WHY, HOW and WHAT.
Does this mean that we always succeed?
No, it does not. But we find that when we DO succeed it is because we have partners, customers, and employees that believe what we believe. What do we believe in?
- For our partners, we believe we can be a catalyst for success with our troubleshooting skills, our knowledge and our drive for competency transfers. If you want to partner with us, we need you to DRIVE the project and use CloudWay as an escalation point or implementers of specific technologies.
- For our customers, we believe that we can be a great asset for a competent IT department, those who have deep technical skills, but need a partner with up to date knowledge. We need to be able to envision how to solve a scenario, tell you how to implement it and delegate tasks combined with internal IT and CloudWay. We always need someone who can DRIVE the activity and someone who we can hand-over the solution to.
- For our employees, we believe in the ability to work from where you are. You need to be independent, but at the same time work well in a team. This is well reflected in where our employees are located today, but at the same time, we actually work very closely together on projects. On average we are more than two people involved in a project at any given time. We strongly believe in you, staking out your own career and focus, we will encourage you to do so, but you need to do it while being productive in projects. Most importantly though, you must believe in our HOW, to always be learning.
What CloudWay will focus on in 2020
This is well reflected in our What we do section which is events, workshops, and projects
Events
- We love to attend events as speakers and help out, in 2019 we were involved in over 38 events, in 2020 it will be even more!
- Jan Ketil is in the lead of organizing Experts Live Norway 2020 in May where CloudWay is an economic guarantor
- Mårten is in the lead of organizing Teamsdagen in March where CloudWay is an economic guarantor
- Josh is part of the organization team of Comms vNext in August.
Workshops
- We continuously run partner and customer workshops on Microsoft Teams, Security, deployment and Microsoft 365
- Recently we completed a couple of workshops via distributors such as TechData in Norway and MicroWarehouse in Ireland
- We are also planning 1-day workshop events which anyone can register for, first up is a workshop on Teams Meeting Room best practices for AV consultants, keep an eye open for future workshop events
Projects
- The current projects we are involved in are about
- Succeeding with Microsoft Teams telephony
- Migrating from Skype to Teams
- Best practice deployment and implementation of Microsoft Teams Meeting Rooms
- Moving to Modern Management with
- Intune and Autopilot
- Enabling ConfigMgr Co-management
- Securing the Modern Workplace and Identities with Azure AD and Conditional Access
- Slack to Teams
- SharePoint design for files and intranets
- Implementing the whole of Microsoft 365 secure productivity stack
- The roles we have in the current projects are as technical project managers, advisers, hands-on and escalation points of complex scenarios and issues
We expect this will be the bulk of the types of projects we will work on and our focus for 2020. We look forward to an exciting year with lot\’s of interesting events, workshops and projects. See our article on culture and focus for 2019 here
