AMA: Driving Microsoft Teams Adoption

Decide the basic skill set you would want your employees to have. Have a plan for continuous training, because employees come and go. The basic skill set could be for example: "Employees have adjusted their notification settings and arranged their teams and channels. Employees have active discussion in channels and collaborate on documents together. Employees have meeting best practices and write memos in OneNote." That's already A LOT. What comes to all the extra cool new stuff: have champions to pilot those functionalities and applications and promote them to the more advanced people in the organisation. Not everyone in the company has to know about Lists or Loop. They need to know about functionalities that help with their day-to-day processes.

I've worked in orgs like this -- and led governance/change management efforts within them. What worked for us is scheduling regular, consistent communications and giving people a place to ask questions, and get responses. I'm a huge fan of setting up the sync between Message Center and Tasks so that you can readily see all changes as they happen within the platform, and address those that impact your org. You can then send out a weekly/monthly update of what is changing, what is new. Holding a consistent change mgmt board review and allowing people to ask questions and then to openly, transparently talk about what the org is doing, what can be supported while still remaining secure/compliant.

I relate to your challenge Caroline-Hackney. The tech continues to improve and change. 

It's best to start with the scenario. What is the need?

• If it's to improve conversations while collaborating on a document, start there.
• If it's organising and event and co-ordinating related tasks, begin there. 

Introduce 2 or 3 skills around that need. Make your own learning pathway that you want to introduce to people. It becomes easier to follow and people can absorb it at their own rate. 

 

These scenarios and needs don't change. The tech will continue to improve. But with a learning pathway that suits your organisation, you can give people a starting point that they can relate to. Continue to add the new skills and features onto the tail end of that learning pathway as time goes on. 

it works very good for us to have regular "evergreening" meetings where we go through latest news of the month which affects the specific customer. Key persons attend that event and spread the world from there. customers are very happy so far with that approach.