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Microsoft Teams Change Management & User Adoption

Posted by Errin O'Connor on Apr, 04, 2019 10:04

Microsoft Teams Change Management & User Adoption

How to boost your MS Teams Adoption

 

Change Management Strategy

Before you introduce the full power of MS Teams to your users it’s important to implement a focused change management strategy for training users on the new business processes that increase efficiency and reduce risk. Having a thorough Change Management Strategy in place will enable your team members to feel empowered and excited about the change.

A comprehensive change management strategy for end-user education and adoption of new applications is crucial to any successful organizational rollout. A successful Change Management strategy will ensure user adoption and boost overall satisfaction of the new MS Teams platform.

Since Microsoft Teams was created on top of Office 365 Groups it uses the Office 365 Group settings and policies in the background.

  

User Adoption

So why should your organization even consider adopting Microsoft Teams? In this modern workplace our goal is to be educated with the ongoing evolution of technology by revolutionizing your collaboration processes. For many organizations, excellent collaboration is the key to success and achieving the best business outcomes.

By driving adoption of MS Teams, you will create a much greater collaboration user experience and increase business value within your business. Microsoft Teams is available in a desktop version and compatible on iOS and Android. During this process you will decide who should be assigned a license and given access based on your organizations needs and security.

 

 

Microsoft Teams Adoption Framework

Microsoft Teams has an adoption framework that applies to all features within the application service. This framework addresses the core steps that your organization should take to succeed with MS Teams.

Adoption phases

Most adoption initiatives fluctuate in size and complexity based the environment, however most initial steps are similar. We believe that breaking the process down into three different phases—Beginning, Trial, and Scale this helps to streamline adoption for everyone.

  • Beginning – In this first phase, you will want to bring your team together, set up your initial group of teams, and begin using Teams for planning Teams adoption. This approach boosts your technical knowledge with the application and assists you with creating the skill-sets necessary to successfully take on the subsequent phases.
  • Trial– This stage is focused more on controlled growth. You will gather together your internal power users to identify the business scenarios that would benefit from better collaboration in Teams and yield the greatest ROI. Pay close attention to the feedback that will is vital to the adoption phase. During this phase you will need to make service decisions about governance and life-cycle management that will bolster the success of your deployment.
  • Scale– During this phase we have a broader focus in which you’ll turn on Teams capabilities for all your team members. In this stage, the number of users will determine whether you will deploy Teams for all your organizations employees simultaneously or if you’ll give this a more phased approach from department to department. Employees, stakeholders, and key business departments will want to expand their use of Teams. This will require the appropriate training to properly understand how to best utilize MS Teams and other features of Office 365.

 

Microsoft Teams Governance

The proper Governance strategy is crucial to properly manage and deploy Teams while reducing potential chaos and content sprawl, so your users will all be singing the same song when using this application.

Another important piece around governance and lifecycle management for Teams is the ability to control what features and permissions your users will have access to. You will be able to manage messaging, meeting, and calling features at the Office 365 tenant level or for each user.

MS Teams provides the necessary capabilities for controlling messaging, meeting, calling, and live event features via a properly structure and governed policies. Different policies can be applied to all users by default or per user as required by your organization’s needs.

Teams was created with the advanced security and compliance capabilities of Office 365 in mind and supports auditing and reporting, content search, e-discovery and retention policies. Each organizations goal is to create an excellent collaboration experience for its departments and divisions.

Most users have a different journey and need training and attention at a different pace with different needs. One of the key pieces to this is a well-written lesson plan. Our aim is to help your organization not only learn MS teams but thrive and excel with this new collaboration application.

Errin O'Connor
About the Author

Errin O'Connor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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