This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Teams Events Blog articles.
Microsoft Teams is a part of a larger strategy for transforming your business and empowering your users. In this session, Karuana Gatimu shared proven tactics on driving adoption through change management, highlighting key business scenarios & success metrics, driving awareness and elevating skills across your user community.
Her focus was largely around influencing user behavior. How can you make users more open to Teams? What will get them excited to use its functionality instead of persistently sticking to Skype for Business and email?
Karuana started off by going over the core advantages that come with adopting Microsoft Teams. Those included:
- Communicate - through chat, meetings and calls.
- Collaborate - with integrated Office 365 apps.
- Customize and extend - with 3rd party apps, processes and devices.
- Work with confidence - thanks to enterprise-level security, compliance and manageability.
Even more than those points above, though, Karuana spoke on how Teams solves the issue of the fragmented collaboration experience. Instead of having to jump between tons of different web browser tabs and devices to get your work done, Teams allows you to consolidate your workflow and stay more focused for longer periods of time. All of that said, how can you ensure that your adoption is successful?
Karuana emphasized that adoption is all about relationship management. Everything needs to be working from a technical standpoint, but what good is that if users don’t feel supported during the process?
Microsoft suggests engaging with them early for assistance. Every Office 365 subscription comes with access to a fast track team that can help get the process moving. If it’s a more complicated adoption, Microsoft can help you find reputable partners in your area.
Karuana then laid out the five steps of a service adoption framework:
1. Assemble Your Team
Tap into the technical and business change agents. Recruit multi-disciplinary teams of executive sponsors, technical talent, core stakeholders, change agents and champions
2. Define Strategy and Scenarios
Align the business and technical needs, access organizational readiness, and assign success metrics
3. Access Readiness
Determine the overall organizational readiness including user groups, technical ability, governance, security, support and feedback
4. Build a Plan
Plan the roll-out cadence based on proof of concepts, early adopter programs, champion readiness and intentional scope of change
5. Onboard Employees
Build awareness, deployment, onboarding, and continuous measurement and feedback into the plan including success stories
How to Think About Compliance in Office 365
The crowd was then treated to a compliance rundown and quick demo by Nishan DeSilva. Nishan described Microsoft’s Framework for how they look at compliance as such:
Access
- He highlighted the usefulness of Microsoft’s recent Compliance Manager
- Allows users to see all the different types of controls they have
- Effective data governance plays a role as well
Protect
- Microsoft is investing AI to do automatic classification and machine learning to help with this
Respond
- How do you respond to an internal audit? GDPR? Internal regulators?
Keeping this framework in mind, Nishan announced that, in terms of regulatory compliance, Microsoft now offers retention labels, immutable record labels, and regulatory record labels. When records are marked as immutable, they can’t be deleted at all.
He also touched on e-Discovery in Office 365:
- Easy to access GDPR dashboard that allows users to input data subject requests with ease - it covers Exchange email, Office 365 groups email, Skype for Business, To Do, My Analytics and even Teams messages
Microsoft Teams Use Cases
Bringing it back to Teams adoption, Karuana drove home the importance of brainstorming potential use cases before making the decision to adopt Teams. She also advised to adopt the software in phases (especially for larger organizations).
The slide below illustrates different ways Teams can result in a positive change in many different organizations. The gray boxes give examples of common office annoyances while the peach-colored boxes illustrate what these situations would be like with Teams implementation.
Organizational vs. Project Approach
Karuana went over the two different approaches one can take when designing their Teams layout:
- Organizational
- Designated teams
- Channels for each region/major initiative
- Project
- A cross-organizational approach
- Brings multiple users from different parts of the organization together to collaborate
- Helps to break down silos
Connectors Explained
Lastly, we got a quick overview of how to connect Yammer, blogs, and even social media to a channel in Teams via connectors. This makes it much easier for users to keep tabs on certain information streams instead of constantly looking for oscillating between sources.
Bonus Tips
As a bonus, here are some other useful tidbits of info from the presentation:
- You can email into a Teams channel - positioned as a gradual way of converting email users over to Teams
- You can launch Planner directly from Teams - totally customizable