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>> Welcome to another episode of the Azure Enablement Show.
Today, we are going to talk about how you can assess
your Cloud journey using the Cloud adoption strategy evaluator.
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>> Welcome back. My name is Thomas and
I'm here with Kezia to talk about
our new assessment platform and
especially the Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator.
Kezia, obviously it can be very challenging for
customers if they are on
their Cloud journey to figure
out what are all the things they need to do,
how they build the strategy,
what do they need to think about.
What are the challenges there?
Can you tell me a little bit how
the assessment can help with that?
>> Definitely, so Cloud journey starts probably in some meeting.
Someone set an idea,
"I think we need to move to the Cloud."
That can happen a year or two before
the work actually even starts.
In that time in between,
a lot of folks need to come together
to make sure that this is going to go well.
The the assessment that we've put together helps with that.
Let me show you. This is docs@Microsoft.com/assessments,
you'll land here and there are
a ton of assessments but the one I'm going to
focus on is a Cloud adoption strategy evaluator.
At a very basic level,
it's a questionnaire, so I'm going to start a new one.
It is not pass/fail,
there are no tricky answers.
It's more about,
"Tell us where you are in your journey and we'll give
you some good next steps to help you along that journey."
Everyone's journey would be different.
Some folks are really dialed in to what
the finances are going to be. That's cool.
Some folks need help with the technology,
and this is this is meant to help you figure that out.
If I start here,
let's assume someone told me,
"We're moving to the Cloud at my company."
Where do we even start?
Well, let's say for this pass,
I only want to talk about
the financial considerations and the technical considerations.
There are other interests here that I could choose,
but for now, let's just assume this is what I have information on.
It asks me a couple of questions.
Have I developed a financial model?
Maybe, I think someone in finance
might have done it. I'm not sure.
I don't know. Next one,
do you understand the costs begin?
Do I know what you which one? Yes, I know
that we want a cost center model.
cool. It goes down this way.
There aren't that many questions and that it
will take me down to my results.
It'll split me over to my results,
and basically I'm a medium and by medium is readiness medium here.
I'm not super low not high,
there are things I can do,
and this is where it gets interesting here.
The next three immediate things I can do,
if I do nothing else and I just do
these three things it'll set me up for success.
The first one cost estimated because
that's one of the things that I was interested in.
It gives me this modeling.
I'm looking at the tabs here,
model it so I can figure out all the things that I
might need and it'll give me some pricing.
It also, if I go back here, the template,
let's just say I need to start from scratch here,
here's a template I can start filling in
in a Word document. Who do I need to talk to?
Who are the stakeholders?
Why do we want to do this?
What are my KPIs?
In addition, there's a really fancy schmancy calculator here,
I can go in and figure out what my VMs,
what my accounts are,
how much is this all going to cost?
Some examples scenarios.
All that is listed here in my recommendations.
Then further down,
in order to improve my results here,
there are things I can come and read.
How do I create a financial model?
What about investing more in the Cloud,
so I open this document and I can read it at my leisure.
I don't have to do this on on the call.
But as you can tell,
there are things I need to do.
>> That's pretty awesome. Let me
quickly try to see if I understand everything correctly.
I go through and if I build my Cloud strategy,
I obviously want to think about different things.
It's not just about technology,
it's also about the organization,
about spending, as you just showed,
about like business cases and so on.
It actually I enter all these questions and
then I get some feedback on where I stand,
depending on on my answers,
and then I get these recommendations,
which are absolutely awesome.
Even what I love is the template,
I can prepare and actually like fill out and
get that information as well as the cost estimation and so on.
Now you showed this assessment and the results, obviously,
now as a person in this organization,
I have now these these results,
how can I share this with the rest of the organization?
>> There are a few ways we can share.
Let me show you.
I can take the straight URL and send it to my colleagues on Team,
they would land on this page.
Now, the important thing is you'll notice I'm logged in.
We need you to log in in order to save
and share and things like that.
I'm logged in, I can take the URL and put it on to Teams.
I can also do the Share button and share on Twitter,
LinkedIn, Facebook, and e-mail,
e-mails what we usually do.
In addition, I can get
all these recommendations downloaded and sent as CSV.
I click the button and it'll download the file for me.
Some people prefer that because
they want to take these action items
and put them into ADO and have them as ticket items,
but there are multiple ways to share.
Now, one of the important things is these results are a snapshot,
it's a snapshot in time.
It's what I did today, what I know today.
Let's assume that I take that CSV and
all these recommendations and I go and do stuff.
I go and do the things they wanted me to do.
I come back and you'll see that it's the one I took today.
It says, let me update that,
and I can go and do a new one.
A milestone here is considered like the next thing.
I went and did the thing and now I come back
and presumably my score will improve.
>> That that is pretty cool.
I think that is also a very important part to
understand that it's not just a one time thing,
it's something I probably revisit multiple times,
an update depending on where I'm in my Cloud journey.
You showed us a little bit of like
what questions are in
this assessment and obviously there are different types.
But can you tell us a little bit more
about what information customers should
have ready and prepared to actually go
out and fill out this assessment?
>> My recommendation is the first time you take it,
take it from scratch, don't prepare,
just go with what you know because it's going to
tell you basically what you don't know.
That's the whole point of this to tell you,
"Hey, you probably need to go talk to stakeholders.
You probably need to go talk to the accounting team.
You probably need to go figure out with
your tech if we have the right skills."
Come at this from scratch, again,
no pass/fail, no score,
it'll just tell you, "These are the things you need to do next."
From there, I would say that figure out what your stakeholders.
Do we have that top level organizational alignment and agreement?
That's where you would start, and then you work down the funnel.
This is not something that
one person is going to have all the answers to,
you're going to need to talk to a ton of folks on
your team and together you bring the info
here and hopefully set you up for a good Cloud transition journey.
>> It's awesome. What we talked about is, obviously,
you show me how like milestones work and that I
can obviously go and do that multiple times.
But I know that maybe
some customers are already on their Cloud journey,
they haven't really done the assessment yet.
Is it too late for them to now take the assessment
or when is the right time to actually take these assessments?
>> No, it's definitely not too late.
But for example, if you're in the middle of your transition,
you probably are already aligned with your stakeholders.
The plan is there, everyone signed off,
but maybe you need to dig into the skilling of your folks.
Obviously you have folks that already
know about the technology you're transitioning to,
but maybe we need further,
maybe we need to make sure that
all your product managers or the rest of
the engineering team that are going to inherit
these changes are aware of what needs to happen,
and so no, there's no bad time.
Beginning, middle, and end you'll always find something of value.
>> That's definitely good.
Also another question that just came up for me is, obviously,
you show me that it shows me where I need to
invest more and where I need to do for something,
and it gives me recommendations on what to do.
But how do I make these actionable?
>> Different folks do them in different ways.
Some people like PowerPoint.
There's a way to export this to
PowerPoint and people work through there.
Other folks take the straight CSV that I
told you and they work through each item.
They work line by line and you can
mark them as done there or you can put it into ADO,
Azure DevOps and mark regular ticket to get in, if you will.
But a lot of the outcome here is
conversations with your team. That's really what it is.
It's less about I need to go do this one specific thing,
push this button, it's more about,
I need to have this conversation.
>> Now, I think this assessment really helps to figure out,
what do I need to do and what's actionable.
What I also like is that it very well
integrates in the organization,
it doesn't matter if I want to talk it through in
a PowerPoint presentation with
my team or if I want to directly have it in,
as you mentioned, ADO,
with Azure DevOps,
I can do that too.
There's many options there how I can actually leverage that.
If I want to know more about
the Cloud adoption strategy evaluator and how I
take assessments, where do I go?
>> Docs.Microsoft.com/assessments.
>> That's awesome. That's very short and very good.
Thank you very much, Kezia and thank you everyone watching
and don't forget to go to aka.ms/adopt.
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