5 Best Practices for Deploying Microsoft Teams

Elaine Murray

By Elaine Murray, Arkadin

The introduction of Microsoft Teams into Office 365 is creating clear business benefits, offering a simplified IT system with centralized management, built-in security and compliance features and the potential to maximize customer productivity. Microsoft Teams also has the capacity to enrich employee’s teamwork experience, enabling effective collaboration and driving greater business outcomes.

While Microsoft Teams isn’t the only collaboration software game in town – see Cisco’s Webex Teams, Slack, Google Hangouts and others – it was expected to have 33 percent of the market by the end of the year.

Every organization is unique, but common trends around employee expectations and work culture are becoming evident across the board as workforces seek more collaborative environments, a deeper connection to the work they do and a greater sense of purpose. As trusted advisers to an organization, it’s the responsibility of the service provider to identify and offer the best technology solutions with the most suitable deployment approach.

Implementing new software is more than just a technical challenge, it is a people challenge, with 50 percent of U.K. business leaders claiming that employees express fear of change when digital transformation initiatives are introduced, according to Microsoft research. Providing effective end-to-end change management to your customer while introducing Microsoft Teams will empower individuals, enhance their teamwork experiences and drive a successful digital transformation.

Consider these best business culture practices for a service provider to ensure end-user awareness and adoption:

1. Build the right team to consult on complexities. Before anything else, it’s the service provider’s responsibility to bring together the key stakeholders, senior team members and technology champions in an organization and begin to build a trusted team to help with later stages of implementation. It’s important to make sure that a cross-section of people and departments are represented to ensure feedback from a range of perspectives and pain points. IT professionals can provide insights on health, security and operational capabilities of the organization, while senior business users can focus on specific scenarios and how they envision the role of the service provider in contributing to wider company goals.

Once the team is briefed, help to establish the individual roles and permissions of each team member in advance, and more importantly, create early enthusiasm. It is key that employees understand how this new technology will improve their work life and get excited about the prospect of being in the heart of this deployment.

2. Prioritize business scenarios for accurate planning. To ensure strong foundations for a digital transformation strategy, it’s important to communicate that implementing collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams is centered around the user. With the help of the internal team, discuss the different scenarios and potential pain points of the business and end users, rather than just focusing on functions and IT solutions. It’s important to know how each team and department works in the organization so you can design the most meaningful and effective deployment strategy for each group.

Ensure that the workforce is highly engaged in the process of defining business risks that are company- and employee-specific to create an accurate picture of concerns and how your change management strategy can address them. By investing efforts in determining business goals and keeping team members in the loop, your customer can be sure that …