SOLVED

Skype for Business to Teams Adoption Strategy

Iron Contributor

I love the change management strategy that Microsoft has published for Teams(link here). In our company, we are very close to starting a Teams only pilot and would most likely be using the same approach(as a similar strategy was very successful with OneDrive adoption).

 

The critical piece in Teams adoption plan will be to understand how the users are leveraging Skype for Business.

 

if the client is starting to use O365 as a new service; pitching for Teams adoption as per MS published article seems to be the best approach(welcome to hear feedback if you have had a different experience).

However, If they are using Skype for Business as the primary communication tool, then we will have focus a lot on feature comparison and try to explain the similarities and difference between the tools.

 

Has anyone worked on this yet and would like to share the experience and strategy?

 

Thanks,

Tanya

3 Replies
best response confirmed by David Price (Brass Contributor)
Solution

We were heavy users of Skype for Business and were even using the cloud based phone system.  We have spent a lot of time comparing Teams and SfB, but are finding that is best to focus on the things that Teams does that SfB doesn't.  For example, we have found the files (OneDrive) features is more exciting and compelling for users than showing them how to make phone calls.  There are plenty of other examples, like the ability to block numbers in Teams but not in Skype. 

 

We have also encouraged groups/departments to take our in-house Teams training together. We have seen several leaders influence others to start using Teams, even those that never used SfB.  

 

We have also created a PowerBi dashboard that compares Teams and SfB chats with email usage. Since we started our adoption drive in January, we have seen the amount of emails being sent decrease and the amount of chats increase.  The percentage of chats in Teams is also trending up with Skype trending down.  With only 34% of our user in Teams Only mode, over 60% of all chats are with Teams. There are other data points available in both the Office Admin and Teams Admin sites to help you understand how people are using Skype and Teams.

 

 

 

 

 

Hi @David Price .  What are the data sources for your dashboard?  Are  you importing usage report exports?  Using the M365 Usage Analytics?  About how many users?  Thanks. 

@Rob Schmidt I'm exporting the usage reports from the Microsoft 365 Admin center and combining emails sent, received, and read from Exchange, with chats sent from SfB, and chats sent from Teams into a single table in Excel.  Then I use that file as the main data source in PowerBi.  I also added several columns in PowerBi to calculate totals and percentages. Admittedly, this isn't the most automated way to get data, but is has been very helpful to how usage is changing. For example, last Thursday, more chats were sent than emails.  

 

We have about 200 employees in 7 offices worldwide.   

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by David Price (Brass Contributor)
Solution

We were heavy users of Skype for Business and were even using the cloud based phone system.  We have spent a lot of time comparing Teams and SfB, but are finding that is best to focus on the things that Teams does that SfB doesn't.  For example, we have found the files (OneDrive) features is more exciting and compelling for users than showing them how to make phone calls.  There are plenty of other examples, like the ability to block numbers in Teams but not in Skype. 

 

We have also encouraged groups/departments to take our in-house Teams training together. We have seen several leaders influence others to start using Teams, even those that never used SfB.  

 

We have also created a PowerBi dashboard that compares Teams and SfB chats with email usage. Since we started our adoption drive in January, we have seen the amount of emails being sent decrease and the amount of chats increase.  The percentage of chats in Teams is also trending up with Skype trending down.  With only 34% of our user in Teams Only mode, over 60% of all chats are with Teams. There are other data points available in both the Office Admin and Teams Admin sites to help you understand how people are using Skype and Teams.

 

 

 

 

 

View solution in original post