Our second book is now available through Amazon Kindle.

This one is a little bit different to our first book which was called Microsoft Teams: A Manager’s Guide to Communication, Collaboration and Co-ordination.

This first book provided some ways for teams to be able to use a framework that helped support these. We had received great feedback because we heard stories about how our clients were taking considered approaches in building out project teams with the 10Ps which were:

• Determine your Problem
• Define your Purpose
• Determine the People You Need
• Define your Priorities
• Devise the Principles
• Determine Plugins Needed
• Determine the Permissions
• Set the Performance outcomes you want to achieve
• Determine how you will Provision the team
• Prepare for Perishability

These 10Ps enabled work teams to effectively set up Microsoft Teams and Channels for better communication, co-ordination and collaboration.

The first book helped many organisations pre-Covid and during Covid to be able to get their teams onto virtual collaboration quite quickly.

Gourmet Teamwork

Now that many organisations are already collaborating and using virtual platforms, the question has moved to:

• “How do we enable our people to work more effectively on Teams?”
• “What are some kind of typical business processes that use different M365 apps in Teams?”
• “How can we be deploying more M365 apps within our business processes?”
• “What’s next with how we can use Microsoft Teams? Or indeed, other M365 apps that our organisation has access to but unaware of how to use?

So we wrote the second book that focuses on the following:

• The ingredients (Office 365/PowerPlatform/Viva)
• The skills you need to get the most out of those ingredients (soft skills to be effective in the hybrid work world)
• The recipes you can use to cook up different cases for using M365 across different teamwork scenarios that would apply in almost any organisation)

My Writing

Once again, I enjoyed writing up parts of this book. I wrote all of the second part which was about the Modern Workplace Skills people can learn to do such as:

• Working Out Loud
• Curation
• Managing Your Time and Attention
• Building a Professional Network
• Communicating with Video and Audio
• Managing the Information Overwhelm
• Managing Diverse and Global Teams

It was an opportunity to pull together a lot of what I had been writing and sharing about over many years here and across social media and my YouTube channel.

At times, I had to cut short the pages. I could have written a lot more but mindful not to go too in-depth as the focus was on use cases – and not just skills we need for work nowadays.

(Who knows, maybe one day I will write up another book on just these – but then again, there’s another part of me that would instead like to write something a little bit more light hearted) OR write the above in a different way such as an allegory, exercise & activities, comic book or short story. I also need to focus it on being more about self expression at work. About life.

Anyway, I also wrote up parts of the first section too which was to do with the different M365 apps and one of the things I enjoyed about this section was reading up on each of them and coming up with some activities at the end of each of them to “Get to Know The Apps” by creating up to 5 basic exercises and activities about that app that you can do, read and learn about in 5 minutes.

At the time of writing, Microsoft Viva was also coming out and I remember I had to go through the book and change all the names (It was originally as Cortex and it pained me to think about whether it should or shouldn’t be in the book but as Viva effectively exploded in a short time, we had to put it in). It just goes to show you that at times, it’s hard to write a book when the technology is changing all the time. (Although, the way it’s written is that all of what we write about are around principles that can be applied regardless of technology changes).

The part about modern work skills though was an interesting process.

I wrote about this process back in 2020 in my blog post: Writing a Book. and you can see snippets of my draft work in that post too. This book took a little longer than the first simply because there was a lot to cover with regards to use cases.

My colleagues also had an opportunity to write and share their use cases but what I loved was being able to see and read their stories in writing. Too often, we work with colleagues on client projects but we don’t work together to co-create a book – an artefact – that can be published, promoted and shared to the world – or sit on our book shelves.

I’d like to think that when I’m older, long after I retired from work, it will be the BOOKS that I will remember as our co-created project. Not the customer work (which would long since be forgotten) or the customer projects or the customer problems.

The books are the tangible physical products and evidence of our work that live on (until they are found in the second hand book store many years into the future) at Adopt & Embrace.

We see them, we feel them, we smell them. I can point to them sitting on my book shelf if someone asks me in the future what I remember about work. Also, I will never ever forget the names of my colleagues because they’re there on the cover!

These books are our legacy – and a great and wonderful idea of Paul Wood’s to inspire us to do. Thank you Paul!

How to Order

If you’d like to order the Kindle version, here’s the links below.

• Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/Gourmet-Teamwork-Microsoft-Teams-Office-ebook/dp/B09KS4L12R
• Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/Gourmet-Teamwork-Microsoft-Teams-Office-ebook/dp/B09KS4L12R
• India: https://www.amazon.in/Gourmet-Teamwork-Microsoft-Teams-Office-ebook/dp/B09KS4L12R/
• United States: https://www.amazon.com/Gourmet-Teamwork-Microsoft-Teams-Office-ebook/dp/B09KS4L12R/

The physical paper version will be made available soon on Amazon as a print on demand.

If you have ordered and read, please let me know and share a photo or tweet about it! We’d love your reviews too!