Problem - our Enterprise Applications Leadership is struggling to find value in Teams collaboration. They "feel" they should be using it - but despite my best efforts they can't see how they should be using it. They continue to ask me exactly how they should be using it. I keep asking them - what problem are you trying to solve - what isn't working for you today? They can't answer me. I've given them the basics of how Teams works, the core functionality, etc. I've had business people come in that are using it heavily within their areas (agile project work, sales groups, business unit leadership). I had Microsoft come in and do a 4 hour immersion event with them where we walked them through the scenario of a weekly staff meeting and how you can use Teams to run that with the agenda ahead of time, taking notes during, using planner to track action items, having links to BI dashboards that are commonly reviewed during the meetings etc. Nothing so far is resonating with them. They keep repeating - tell me what to do. I keep repeating - I can't tell you what to do if you don't tell me what you're trying to do. Fundamentally I feel they are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole simply because they feel like they should be doing something. Does anyone have any other ideas of what I can try to get this to click with them? Or at least accept that what they are trying to do really isn't collaboration - and there is no reason why they can't keep doing things the way they are doing them?
Small Background - we have approximately 16,000 O365 license holders globally. Our approach to O365 has been - if we have a license it is out there and available - but we have certain strategic things we will do formalized launches around. OneDrive was one of those. Teams is the next one. However, Teams has seen HUGE organic growth within our company - simply from it being out there and available. We have over 3,500 active Teams users without us ever trying. :thumbs_up: Those 3,500 active users are using it hard and are helping to spread the word about using it.
Future State - we are working through our Skype to Teams migration plan. We have about 1,700 people in our Early Adopters group that have been moved to TeamsOnly mode. 1,000 of those have been there for about a month. 700 were moved today. Our thinking is we are going to convert the rest of the organization in a big bang the middle of August. Our focus initially is simply - this is what you did in Skype - this is how you do it in Teams. We are not including the collaboration aspect of Teams at this point. The reasons for this are many. Fundamentally it comes down to change burn out - we have tons of change going on within the company this year. If I try to throw collaboration at people - which at it's core is a totally foreign concept to at least 60% of our work force - their head's will explode.🤯 We also hear complaints about giving them ANOTHER tool to use......I already have email, skype, sharepoint, file shares......now you're giving me something else you want me to do? By getting rid of Skype - we are eliminating one tool and adding another. Then once we have everyone in Teams and they are using it every day for the things they've always done - chat and meetings - then we can start to talk about the other things they can do.
