Azure Readiness – Fundamentals Skills

Azure Readiness- Fundamentals and Leaders

Why would a manager or supervisor, or even a C-Suite leader need to understand Azure Fundamentals? Isn’t that type of knowledge handled by the technical people and why would managers need this knowledge? These are questions that I’ve seen come up regularly; and my answer is always the same: As a business moves towards cloud adoption, it’s important that all stakeholders understand the basics, terminologies, and have a foundational understanding of the platforms if they are managing and working with technical teams. Now, I’m not suggesting that the CEO is going to be setting up your Azure subscriptions; but wouldn’t it be great if they understood all the concepts and could help you communicate technical changes to other leaders? When ideas are understood and those new concepts and architectures are clearer for company leadership, we can take some of the fear of change and fear of the unknown out of the equations. This will lead to improvements in the outlook of everyone down the chain of command if the senior leadership shows confidence and understanding of the concepts.

Today’s article is less technical and more about building relationships between leaders and teams by improving understanding and optics. The overall mental health of involved staff and leaders can suffer when there are disconnects and this can be critical. These are some key behaviours that I’ve observed at different businesses; I hope that just one team of administrators will benefit from this. If you’re here for a technical article – come on back next week for a great walk-through! I have something really fun on deck!

Cloud concepts can be a shift in thinking. For this reason alone, if you are new to Azure or other cloud solutions, you should consider doing some learning and opening yourself up to new ideas. There are a couple of really great overviews and courses that Microsoft has published, and maintains, to help us learn about these cloud concepts:

How Does Azure work?
Microsoft Learn – Cloud Concepts

Take advantage of the many Microsoft resources that are free! Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Docs, and of course a Free Azure Trial to test your knowledge and do some hands-on learning. For the busy professional, all of these sites work great on phones and tablets! You can do some learning while your on the elliptical at the gym.

Once there is a a basic understanding of how Azure works, some of the mystery will be gone and we can really open up to some new concepts from what on-premises has shown us. Move towards resource management, groups of resources and templates for reproducing results consistently. Understand the basic design topology for Azure AD and Hybrid services that you are currently running, engage your technical people to bridge knowledge gaps with you. This engagement during learning will help to really show your teams that their leaders are fully engaged and interested in what they do — it is a great opportunity to build meaningful relationships and boost morale.

Ensure that as part of your fundamentals journey, you make the effort to learn about licensing, understanding costs, and layers within your subscriptions. This is a foundation piece that will help you to understand cloud costing no matter what your product choices are in the future. You can begin this journey towards Azure services here.

Teams will have increased confidence and engagement with leadership that is involved and genuinely interested in their work. Through observation, I have seen this lead to increased dedication and productivity as the team members feel an increased trust and bonding.

I know that this week’s thoughts were non-technical; however, engaging leadership is an important tool for success with any implementation project. From my perspective, leadership engagement and learning is equally important as the administrators learning and staying engaged. These together, will help lead you and your teams towards success.

If you are working in a high-stress environment and feel like there are difficult situations that you don’t know how to handle or they are causing you difficulties; I urge you to seek any counselling that might help:

In Canada you can visit:
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/topics/mental-health-wellness.html
-or- https://mindyourmind.ca/help/where-call
-or for a Crisis counsellor Phone: 1-800-784-2433

In the United States you can call: 1-877-726-4727 or https://www.mentalhealth.gov/get-help/immediate-help

If you are thinking about asking for help, don’t wait – do it now – it’s free and the professionals can help you.