- Welcome to Microsoft Teams Essentials for IT.
Today, we'll look at how to drive user adoption of Teams,
along with some tools and tips
to save you time as an IT Admin
as you validate, communicate, and scale your Teams rollout.
If you're new to this series
or want to learn more about what Microsoft Teams is,
how to enable and configure it,
the available security and compliance controls,
or upgrading from Skype for Business to Teams,
check out our complete playlist
at aka.ms/MicrosoftTeamsforIT.
In many cases, Microsoft Teams will represent
a fundamental shift in the way
people communicate and collaborate.
This means that it's too late to think about
user adoption after you have deployed Teams.
Having a plan for user adoption needs to go
hand in hand with your planning for technical readiness.
To help you get set up for success,
we've gathered the learnings from thousands of organizations
who have deployed Teams to give you
guidance and tips for your deployment.
As an IT professional, if you have deployed or upgraded
end-user experiences in the past,
much of what I'll show you today should look familiar
to the plan, build, and deploy approach.
But along the way I'll point out tips
and best practices specifically for Teams.
Our recommended Teams adoption model
is based on three phases:
Start, Experiment, and Scale.
The first phase, Start, contains many of the steps
you'll know from planning other rollouts.
Importantly, the key focus here is to establish
a multi-disciplined team to assess
your organizational readiness at both
a technical and people level as you rollout Teams.
You'll first need to make sure that you have
all the prerequisites for Microsoft Teams in place,
such as dependent services
like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange deployed.
Your user accounts need to be Azure Active Directory,
which if you've already deployed Office 365,
is already taken care of.
And, of course, Teams licenses need to be
assigned to your users.
All of this was covered on previous episodes in the series.
In parallel, in the Start phase you'll want
to build your plan for initial adoption,
assign your project team,
create your first teams and channels in Microsoft Teams,
and assess your organizational readiness.
Let me explain.
One of the most important parts of the Start phase
is to get the right people on board
and supporting Teams adoption.
Teams will represent a new experience for many users,
so it's different from upgrading
from an older version of an app to a newer one.
This means that it's important to have an executive sponsor
to get others on board and excited about using Teams.
Additionally, we recommend someone on point
to make sure your user and business stakeholders are happy.
This person should work together with the person on point
to set deployment goals and oversee the rollout.
It's also a good practice to identify champions
across departments to help evangelize
and help others build their skills in Teams.
A good champion is a motivator willing to help others
and interested in new technology.
You'll want to ensure their help
and contributions are recognized,
give them formal training,
and have a clear execution plan
so they have what they need to help their peers.
Check out aka.ms/O365Champions for more information.
Champions support the training and readiness effort,
but they don't replace it.
So, structured training along with a training lead
is also a great resource to have on the team.
At this stage, you'll want to also plan to train
your HelpDesk staff to take incoming requests for support
and to document common issues.
Depending on the scale of your rollout
or the size of your organization,
the same person on your rollout team
may serve multiple roles.
The important point is that you plan
for these specific functions.
A good practice at this stage,
is to leverage Advisor for Teams.
Advisor for Teams helps you to select the workloads
that you want to deploy from
chat, teams, channels, apps, meetings and conferencing
along with your specific project teams for each.
To help you to track against milestones,
you can use the integrated step-by-step project plan.
Our user experience survey can help you
to operationalize the process of
gathering regular user feedback.
Assessing user sentiment and user experiences
during your initial rollout will help you to assess
appropriate user training and adoption milestones.
This is also a great opportunity to build your first
teams and channels to manage the
planning and rollout within Teams.
Assessing your organizational readiness
is critical for planning your rollout
within the Start phase.
Here, you'll want to draw out a full left to right view
of the leaders in your organization.
Meet with each of them to gauge their
level of interest in moving to Teams.
This will help you understand if different levels of effort
are required for different user profiles.
Some things to consider here include
Are they conservative or progressive with new technology?
How do they typically work and collaborate?
Are they happy with the current tools in place?
And if so, why and for which processes?
Or are there things that might impact
their willingness to change?
These will also help you to craft the right content
and timelines for training.
For example, you may find that your marketing team leader
may be a technology advocate
and welcoming of new ways of working.
Whereas the finance team might be
closing out a fiscal milestone
or preparing for tax season.
In that case, you'd start with the marketing team
and circle back to the finance department
for a future round.
We also recommend looking for groups of people
that have to interact frequently,
such as sales and marketing teams or product launch teams,
that would immediately benefit from adopting Teams.
Parts of your organization heavily
using SharePoint for collaboration,
as shown in Microsoft 365 usage reports,
may also be a good place to start.
Let's now move on to the Experiment phase.
Now that you have the core team in place
and baseline information about
your organization's readiness,
you can move on to building the foundation
to start piloting Teams services
to specific groups or business units.
An important area to consider
as you start to experiment in Teams
are the policies or governance models that you need.
As we covered in the first three
Essentials episodes of this series,
there are controls available in Teams to manage
who has permissions to create teams.
You may want to limit team creation of teams
to managers or project leaders
to avoid over-provisioning teams or set expiration policies.
Equally, you may want to define
standard naming conventions for new teams
including defined prefixes and suffixes
for consistency and easier discoverability.
You can allow guest or external access at a group level
to comply with your information sharing policies,
or list the approved apps for use within Teams.
Equally, you can determine select capabilities
that you may want to enable for initial validation,
and set controls for information protection and retention.
All of which we covered extensively over past episodes.
You'll also want to plan for the scope of your Pilot phase
including your duration, goals,
and your Go/No-Go decision points
at various stages of your technical
and organizational readiness.
One powerful way of aligning efforts with the business
is to define the core usage scenarios
to focus on for your pilot.
This becomes the business outcomes to rally everyone around
that you can track progress against.
Some common entry-level scenarios
we see Teams easily adopted for are
increasing team and personal productivity,
improving meetings, and project management.
Of course, there are more scenarios,
and even role-specific and industry-use cases
that Teams can help modernize
such as for firstline workers who need
to consistently communicate on the go,
or hospital staff where the streamlined communications
and priority notifications are critical.
As mentioned, the best way to derive
your list of prioritized scenarios
is to ask stakeholders about where they see
opportunities for improvement
compared to what they are doing today,
which is part of your Start phase.
To onboard your early adopters,
you can implement Teams per user or by group.
Also, as we highlighted in our last episode,
if you're currently using Skype for Business,
there are five co-existent modes to choose from.
But it's recommended that you begin
your experiments in Islands Mode
since both platforms will continue to operate
in parallel to each other.
Here you will also be licensing users and groups
targeted to kick off the rollout
and ensuring all the other prerequisite services
are in place for the best experience.
You can also decide whether to begin your rollout
with the web-based Teams app as part of Microsoft 365,
or by distributing the desktop app
or mobile platform to your users.
To drive the best adoption results,
we recommend that the desktop and mobile versions of Teams
are made available to users,
and that you configure them to AutoStart
to help users discover them.
Of course, communication with early adopters
during the pilot phase is critical.
You can start by having an executive sponsor
send an email explaining why Teams is being deployed,
the support from leadership behind it,
and the importance of the pilot and early adopters.
Next, plan on sending an email invite to start using Teams
and point users to community resources.
It's good here to include frequently asked questions
or to build a bot integrated with Teams.
If your users work a lot with external people,
it helps to include them in your communication plan
and share top things they need to know
to increase their productivity
with your end users via Teams.
You should also plan for personal connection.
Hosting a kickoff call or short group event
over breakfast or lunch with all
the details of the early adopter program.
Remember to encourage active feedback between champions
and to conduct periodic surveys
to make sure you're hitting your goals,
or can address any challenges or gaps as they arise.
With your early adopter program running,
you're gathering the experiences and skills
to broaden your deployment of Microsoft Teams
and this will get you ready for the Scale phase.
By now, you should have the information that you need
to implement a deployment strategy to meet
your level of organizational and technical readiness.
If your organization is upgrading from Skype for Business,
for broad deployment of Teams
you'll need to decide whether or not to deploy Teams with
overlapping capabilities or select capabilities
such as only enabling Teams initially
for Teams channels and collaboration purposes.
If you need more guidance on this,
please watch our previous episode
about deployment and Skype to Teams upgrade.
For broad rollout,
you also need to expand your stakeholder groups,
implementation team,
and potentially update your governance policies
as you add more and more departments
or regions to your rollout.
Also, as you plan for broader rollout,
you'll want to set organization-wide level goals
by, again, working with your rollout team
and your executive sponsor to identify
the right metrics to measure success.
Example metrics include driving outcomes
tied to your work culture as the basis for teamwork
as well as tangible or measurable improvements
like reducing time spent joining meetings,
and individual measures
like employee engagement through usage.
And, of course, while usage goals are one thing,
in parallel, make sure to set realistic milestones
to get your IT environment ready.
For example, adding PSTN calling to Teams
as you phase out Skype,
may extend your deployment times.
The feedback and reporting channels
established at the Experiment phase
alongside your established champions
will continue to play an important role
as you scale your deployment.
The built-in reporting in Microsoft 365
and the Teams admin center will help you
to track end user adoption
and report these results back to your key stakeholders
while encouraging them to drive further usage.
Also, HelpDesk reporting will help you to continue
to troubleshoot common issues and refine end user training.
Be prepared to expand your user adoption programs
to meet the needs of all the impacted stakeholders.
As you scale, it will help to drive
internal awareness campaigns with materials
like posters, digital signage, and events.
In fact, you can provision Microsoft 365
learning pathway templates right into your intranet.
Go to aka.ms/m365LP to learn more.
Planning for additional resources
like help documentation,
regular check-in calls,
direct end user training,
and other direct user engagement
will also go a long way in reducing
HelpDesk calls with basic questions.
Finally, in most cases after Teams has been deployed
it's a good idea to continue sharing progress
with executive sponsors and the organization
including Teams usage, service health,
and new capabilities in Teams.
Keep in mind that Teams experiences will continue to evolve
to meet modern collaboration needs.
So, your deployment is a continual process
of assessing and communicating
upcoming changes to the services.
As a Teams IT Admin, keep checking back in
the Microsoft 365 Message Center,
Office 365 Product Roadmap,
and Microsoft Mechanics for details on recent
and upcoming enhancements to both
Teams for users and admins.
That was a quick overview of the process
and considerations to drive Microsoft Teams adoption.
As an IT professional, you play a critical leadership role
in the successful adoption of Teams
as you configure both your IT environment,
and ready and support the people in your organization
to be successful with Teams.
We're listening, so please let us know
what else we can do to help you on your journey.
To learn more, please visit our
additional technical resources at aka.ms/TeamsAdoption
and check out our training at aka.ms/TeamsLiveTraining.
And don't forget, you can continue to watch
our Essentials series for IT
at aka.ms/MicrosoftTeamsForIT.
Thanks for watching.