Every now and again we get to hear fantastical SharePoint tales and bear witness to some really odd behaviour. Here’s our latest top 11 ways to ensure your attempt at moving to Office 365 / SharePoint is going to fail miserably…

1. Have a fork-tongued salesman talk you into software you don’t need.
2. Make sure the salesman has no SharePoint experience.
3. Don’t do any research on what Office 365 is and what the governance implications behind it are.
4. Don’t do any intranet planning, just migrate all your data as is from your fileshares and legacy systems straight into SharePoint.
5. Tell you staff they will use it with immediate effect – but don’t explain what for and why.
6. Send 0.015% of your staff on half day, completely unrelated training and don’t tell them what the training is for.
7. Expect them to successfully maintain and use Office 365 thereafter.
8. Don’t tell the trainers anything about the project and refuse to let them engage with the stakeholders.
9. Don’t engage all the roleplayers and tell people different versions of the story.
10. Refuse to spend any money on change management.
11. Shoot from the hip and do zero enterprise architecture planning.

Let us know how your migration to Office 365 works out for you….