Project Description

“We didn’t want to read a manual or sit in a room and learn features and benefits. We wanted to tell a consultant how we live our daily lives and goals and have them customize a strategy for using Microsoft Teams.” – Competitive Intelligence Manager, US Strategy Team

Overview

The group CTO decided to have their group test Microsoft Teams as a new collaboration and productivity tool. The leader of the Competitive Intelligence team within had his team become one of the first to pilot Microsoft Teams.

Situation

The Competitive Intelligence team began using Microsoft Teams in August 2018. General impressions were that it was a very powerful tool and they saw the potential “if they could learn how to use it.” Microsoft provided training videos for Microsoft Teams, but members of the team were looking to “learn by doing.” A member of the Competitive Intelligence team had previously taken the Take Back Your Life!® for Microsoft Outlook program from McGhee Productivity Solutions(MPS) and heard that they offered a course for effectively setting up and deploying Microsoft Teams. This member received approval for the Competitive Intelligence team to take Driving Productivity Through Microsoft Teams from MPS later in 2018.

Solution
Before the training took place, a Microsoft Teams expert from MPS met with the Competitive Intelligence team for several hours to determine how the team interacted with each other on a daily basis, and how they managed their projects and goals. From this meeting, MPS was able to begin the training with a custom strategy in place for the Competitive Intelligence team’s infrastructure and communication standards. Unlike “feature and benefit” trainings, the MPS Teams program focuses on fundamentally shifting human behavior before training on how to use the tool. With the help of MPS, the Competitive Intelligence team agreed on how to shift their behavior, and from that they were applied to create their new workflows in MS Teams.

Results
The Competitive Intelligence team left the MPS training with group “buy-in” for Teams, along with custom workflows and infrastructure. They are now primarily using Teams for their group work, reducing emails by the hundreds and improving the speed of collaboration. “I’m spoiled working on projects inside my team. I don’t want to send attachments anymore. I look forward to broader adoption of Microsoft Teams within the company,” said their team leader. Since taking the training, attendees have shared their success and benchmarks with their group leadership, along with advice for implementing Microsoft Teams further into the company.