Liane Scult
Tapping into the human cloud
As the first Freelance Program Manager at Microsoft, Liane leads the dynamic team that recently prototyped and launched the first-ever Microsoft 365 Freelance Toolkit. To learn more visit: https://aka.ms/freelance
She spearheaded Microsoft’s pilot program that embraced the freelance model to increase efficiencies, scale operations, and provide access to expert freelancers from around the world. They launched their Gig Economy pilot to deliver for their customers, increase the speed of innovation, and provide different resource models for scaling with speed, agility, and specialized expertise – online and on-demand.
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Chapter 4
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Featured Quote from Chapter 4, Why Changemakers Are Moving to the Human Cloud
As Liane put it, “A lot of people who haven’t freelanced don’t do well in chaos. As a full-time employee, someone above you generally decides your fate. The perceived good of this is you have a playbook and bullets to align with. Not in freelance. It was 100% my input what I did, which meant I created the bullets and was accountable to the outcomes of those bullets.” Thus instead of asking for bullets, Liane taught herself various technologies within the Microsoft 365 stack, specifically Teams, Power Automate, SharePoint, PowerBI, and Forms and merged the requirements above with these technologies to operationalize an enterprise human cloud program.
The program was a smashing success. Her enterprise went from no processes to over 5,000 freelance projects in under two years. Our industry doesn’t have a Super Bowl. But if we did, she’d win MVP.
The deeper insight for us changemakers is that her time working in the human cloud gave her the skills to thrive, whether on her own or within an organization. One of the skills of a freelancer is extreme ownership, or as she put it, “You don’t just throw sh** over the fence – it’s your reputation at stake that impacts your ability to get future gigs.” Another is training by doing (aka figuring sh** out), or as she puts it, “You don’t have those pointless hours for required, but not useful, training.”
