Is your business prepared for Microsoft Teams?

What’s your adoption strategy?

On Tuesday 14th March 2017, Microsoft flicked the switch on its latest addition to Office 365 and upp’ed the bar for modern collaboration with Teams. Microsoft Teams is the chat-based workspace in Office 365 – a digital workspace built on four core promises: chat for today’s teams, a hub for teamwork, customisation options and security teams trust.

Office 365 empowers individuals, teams, and entire organizations with the broadest and deepest toolkit for collaboration. Office 365 is designed to meet the unique workstyle of every group with purpose-built, integrated applications: Outlook for enterprise-grade email; SharePoint for intelligent content management; Yammer for networking across the organization; Skype for Business as the backbone for enterprise voice and video; and now, Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365.

This blog isn’t about the technology itself – there are loads of those out there… this is a message around adoption – plan and simple!

Prepare, Plan, Succeed.

The days of complex implementations are over – Teams is now simply enabled across all Office 365 tenants (unless admin specifically turns it off). This means the likelihood is that your business (or at least pockets of it) will start using it, testing it out and in some cases using it relentlessly.

When introducing a new technology to your users and organisation, adoption and satisfaction do not occur by accident and require planning and deliberate preparation.

• Does your organisation have a Microsoft Teams release plan?
• Will users know to install the application on desktop and mobile devices or access the service through a browser?
• Is your IT help desk prepared to support and guide less tech savvy users and execs?

Here at Cisilion, we provide a comprehensive user adoption and success service to our clients to help ensure success with technology enablement projects such as Microsoft Teams.

We work with our clients to allow them to empower their employees to choose their preferred method of collaboration and productivity with Office 365 while enabling mobility of experience.

There are lots of way to control and ease the adoption of teams across the organisation. Our 5 initial tips are:

1. Make sure Admin/Help desk try it out and use it – this way you are best equipped to help your users when they ask… at least make sure they know what it is (you’d be surprised)
2. Make sure you understand the per-user, organisation and group level controls – your organisation can define a release strategy that is appropriate for your business. Usually this start with IT Professionals and your Help Desk Folk. Then expand to Power Users / Champions, and then roll out the application across business units, geographies, or any other subset of users that you choose. Not only does this make targeted release possible, but it also allows you to determine how to make the new Office 365 services available to your users.
3. Run some workshops to “email monkeys” – you know the ones – these are the ones that do everything by email and are most resistant to modern working and collaborative working
4. Start using Teams for day to day communication – create a focus “team” perhaps write a support bot?
5. Encourage use but don’t enforce it – Teams supports email integration, Skype IM/Video/Audio so it should be easy to use for most – some wont see the point, others will love it.

Book a bespoke workshop

These are just high-level tips of course. At Cisilion we have a specialised User Adoption Team that can help your business get started. You can also come and see what all the “fuss” is about by visiting one of our Modern Collaboration Workshops at our Innovation Centre in London.

To find out more, book a bespoke workshop by filling in the for below: