History is known to repeat itself. When speaking to clients, we have nearly the same conversations around Microsoft Teams adoption strategy as we did around SharePoint adoption 10 years ago. If you don’t want your Microsoft Teams instance to become the wild west, you need to develop both Teams governance and adoption plans to maintain order, keep the environment clean and secure, and leverage the capabilities and features to their full advantage.
As organizations are finding ways to ensure their employees can remain productive and efficient while working remotely, many who already have Office 365 or Microsoft 365, have turned on Teams and their employees are using it, but it hasn’t been officially rolled out. Users are finding trainings online, or just feeling their way through and figuring it out as they go along. Other times, new users have heard talk of other colleagues using Teams, or are being pressured to use Teams by coworkers, but are confused on how to do so because there’s been no clear instruction on things like; here’s when a “Team” should be created, here’s who should create it, and, here’s how you do it.
What to Include in Your Teams Adoption Plan
In a previous post, we discussed what to address in your Teams governance plan, but we didn’t touch on Teams adoption. Teams is really easy to use and tends to be extremely popular with those who’ve taken the plunge to start exploring it. However, implementing an official adoption strategy is always the best way to rollout any new technology. In your Teams adoption plan, you’ll want to address questions like:
- How are we going to educate users on Teams and what training materials do we want to give them access too?
- How arewegoing to specifically utilize our Teams instance, versus how other organizations say they are using it?
- How will I do my job after the change is implemented?
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Some additional things we also recommend including are:
- A press release announcing the organizational adoption of Teams
- The development of a short 90-second video series for easy Teams instruction
- A lunch and learn series and/or workshop series on how to use Teams more in-depth
Adoption, as part of governance, helps to make sure everyone is following the defined
“rules of the road”, and using Teams in a secure and compliant fashion.
Working with a Certified Microsoft Teams Partner
Working with a certified partner can help you address any and all compliance concerns surrounding your Teams instance, as well create an effective adoption strategy that includes access to Teams’ experts you might not have in-house. At Withum, we’ve developed many adoption plans that have included things like:
- The facilitation of training and envisioning workshops
- One-on-one sessions that cover both simple and complex Teams’ use cases
- User experience sessions that cover things like shortcuts, quick tips, etc.
- Pre-created and customizable communication assets (emails, posters, page templates)
- PowerBI Dashboard
- Google or Azure Insight Analytics
- Interactive surveys
While we prefer to work with the people that will be using the tool most often in their day-to-day, we have also trained IT managers on Microsoft Teams including Microsoft Service Adoption Specialists, so that they can bring back in-house experience, and subsequently facilitate more widespread adoption.
Whether you’re ready to implement Microsoft Teams, or have already rolled it out, we can help you create an effective user adoption strategy. Contact us online, or give us a call at(240) 406-9960to speak with a Teams consultant today.
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