Forum Discussion
Classroom-based, instructor-led Microsoft Teams for large and dispersed companies
Chris Blackstone highly recommend a Champions network, built from multiple business units, across all regions, and strong visible leadership support. Microsoft did not have the training we needed, so we have a small in-house adoption team. We got them going with the hands-on training and AMA sessions, built the knowledge, developed use cases per area based on their feedback, and then did a full roll out. We had a learning hub for information which links back to the specific apps which plug into Teams. Teams is intuitive for a jump start, and then you need to Level Up - focus on your use cases and how you can help people solve specific issues, or template things. Depending on your demographic, gamification + swag has worked well.
Chris Blackstone when we rolled out Teams - our initial focus was on how it replaced Skype. This is what you did in Skype - this is how you'll do it in Teams. While they still had access to collaboration - we didn't focus on it. Our reason for doing this is a constant thing we hear from our users is "OMG you are giving me ANOTHER tool I have to go and look at? I have email, I have file shares, I have skype, I have sharepoint....and you want me to do something else?" This way we were able to say we aren't adding we are replacing.
Then once we had everyone in Teams and using it every day for communications (chat and meetings) - then we could introduce collaboration and show them all of the extra stuff they could do. For many the mere concept of collaboration was foreign to them - so it took more to help them to understand that.
For the communication piece - we used written communications, short how to videos for tasks from Brainstorm, for English speakers the Microsoft instructor led sessions on moving from Skype to Teams (Instructor Led Training), and then for non English speakers we partnered with a company to deliver the content in their native language via a webinar.
For the collaboration training - for our larger knowledge base worker locations - we did on site instructor led sessions. For everywhere else - we did webinars - either using the Microsoft retail store trainers for English - or our partner for the non English speakers.
We also have a strong champions group and a Help O365 user community (within Yammer) where anyone can go and ask questions.
We didn't require anyone to attend training. For the onsite instructor led collaboration training - we tried to make it fun. We did Teams Excite Weeks. Anyone that participated in any of the events during the week was entered into a raffle for prizes. Events were - Ask Me Anything (we had people from our Microsoft account team on hand for people to stop by and ask questions and get Microsoft swag), we had a professional photographer come on site to take profile pictures for anyone interested, we had cake, and the training. The prizes we gave away were:
- Lunch with Roy (Roy is our CEO)
- 1 extra vacation day (employees only eligible - not contractors)
- Pirates baseball tickets (we are in Pittsburgh)
- Teams swag (backpack and some other things)
- Surface Go - people had to attend one of the training sessions in order to be registered for this prize
Our Microsoft account team submitted into two programs they have available for customers to get us funding to pay for some of the prizes and the swag.
Happy to share any of the content we created for our transition if you're interested.