Recently I was approached by an organisation for support to drive Office 365 adoption. In amongst the bigger picture across the services, a key target was to increase usage of Microsoft Teams.
Interestingly, the customer had 83% of active users in Teams, looking like high usage, however it’s important to look under the surface with these stats in the tenant.
For anyone not aware I am referring to the Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics, the Power BI App you can get access to in your tenant. The data relating to Microsoft Teams still needs work but you can get some usage detail to help support and drive deeper adoption. I will do a follow up on what I look at overall, but in this quick article I just want to focus on Teams.
When it comes to driving value in Teams I approach this with quantitative and qualitative methods.
Quantitative
The Teams data in the Power BI dashboard is under 4 main areas:
- Conversations
- Chat
- Calls
- Meetings
In the recent work I reviewed across these core areas and found strong themes. People were using Teams to Chat. They had basically replaced Skype IM with Teams Chat. All other categories were low. So yes, 83% usage overall seems high. And I am sure the project reported success, but drilling down shows potentially that people learnt to chat and then didn’t absorb any more learning. The snippet below shows just how high chat usage was to the other areas of Teams.
So what did we focus on?
Further education on the benefit on other Teams functions. Some quick wins were:
Trying to get users to reduce internal email and drive conversations in Teams
A particular ‘ah-ha’ moment for people was learning to forward an email into a Channel as a new conversation to shift discussions there. As you drive this you can review across the data if internal emails are reducing and Teams conversations increasing, as an example.
Increase knowledge on conversation functions
There will be common mistakes like posting instead of replying in a thread, being unaware of the formatting features along with really understanding sharing of documents in posts.
Running further training on meetings
Consider why are they not using this feature. Here it was lack of confidence and some frustration still hanging around from the implementation. Its easy for people to still rely on using Outlook to schedule and join meetings, which is ok, however the less they do in Teams, the less they get a thorough feel for it and change much at all. Further education and support pushed people to try and push through the prior resistance.
I look forward to the ability to further analyse collaboration data across document uploading, sharing, co-authoring etc in Teams as the analytics advance in the future. For now it’s a bit of a guessing game to work out patterns and behaviour across the Power BI dashboard.
Qualitative
This area relied on end-user survey and focus groups.
For the survey, keep it short and simple. Essentially focussing on gaining how confident users feel across the Apps and if they feel their daily work seems more productive and easier with the implementation of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.
I like to focus on where they want more training, what are obstacles and overall feeling of satisfaction.
It’s always interesting to compare to the data across the services with survey results, especially because it’s often a different feel to what IT think is going on. Many people are lacking fundamental knowledge which is blocking further uptake and progress (for more detail see my recent post).
Focus Groups help drill down into challenges and how to support users further and to advance ways of working.
Don’t be fooled by high usage. Look at the detail. Get a full picture.
Look beyond the total active usage and under the surface to ensure good ways of working are being embedded.