Microsoft Teams Adoption Strategy

Microsoft Teams is the Hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. To maximize Microsoft 365 investments, it’s important to plan for a successful deployment and adoption. Planning to ensure that users adopt new services and embrace those services and use them as part of their natural rhythm of work is critical to Teams success.

I sat down with Paul Frederickson, Senior Business Systems Analyst at TDS to discuss the value of Teams and best practices for driving Microsoft Teams adoption.

Why Teams and how are companies leveraging it to drive productivity?

With employees accessing unsanctioned SaaS applications, dozens of ways to share files, and multiple communication channels, the modern workplace presents many challenges for teamwork. With Teams, you get built-in access to everything employees need to work, in one place.

We do often find that many organizations aren’t leveraging Teams in its entirety, but rather as a point solution i.e. the messaging functionality of Teams. The full value comes from leveraging the entire collaboration platform including chat, calling, meetings and content sharing; allowing Teams to become the Hub for an organizations’ teamwork.

What is the best approach to implementing Teams and driving adoption?

I like to break this down into 3 phases, pre-pilot, pilot and post-pilot.

• Pre-Pilot: An organization needs to ensure all the IT tasks are complete; determine baseline configurations and make key decisions on governance. For example, who can create teams, and Teams naming conventions, data security, etc. Adjustments can be made throughout the process, but organizations should attempt to do as much up front as governance decisions may impact the end-user experience.
• Pilot: Onboard early adopters to Microsoft Teams. Engage with your users, send a message or post in a channel, this will encourage them to interact with the platform. The feedback loop is a critical step in this phase. Knowing how your users are using Teams and what their experience is with Teams gives you insights on where to prioritize training and adoption efforts in your wider rollout.
• Post-Pilot: After an organization has onboarded an initial group of users leverage your go-forward plan to deploy Teams across the rest of your organization and continue to drive adoption.

How can OneNeck help organizations with Teams adoption?

As a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider, our goal is to get clients up and running so they can begin their journey with Teams. Our Teams Foundation Services offering includes consulting implementation and adoption services to help our client’s gain the most value out of the platform including: getting started with Teams and planning for the initial adoption, making the key decisions on governance that I addressed in the pre-pilot phase of implementation, determining baseline configurations, piloting and training.

Let OneNeck help you deploy Microsoft Teams and realize the power of modern teamwork in your organization. Contact us today.

Paul Frederickson is a member of the TDS Corporate Content & Collaboration Services Team. Paul is an expert with the Microsoft 365 toolkit, specifically with SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams and drives technology adoption within the TDS Family of Companies, comprising 10,000 associates. He is an MBA graduate from the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater.