Office 365 Rollout and Adoption

What was the situation?

The Crown Consulting Group had been engaged with the public sector client supporting them deliver their Windows 10 upgrade programme and their end user computing enhancements. In addition, we supported with the security enhancements and infrastructure improvements utilised through an Azure adoption and migration.

The client strategy was to migrate from a legacy on premise instance to the full Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Having previously upgraded to Microsoft Azure much of the architecture and associated infrastructure was already in place and ready to support the programme.

With a headcount of over 3000 employees, the principal areas for consideration were focused around;

Business adoption

Document management

Technology utilisation

Roll-out approach

What did The Crown Consulting Group do?

To best support the client, we decided to take a two-pronged approach whereby we would focus on the technology aspects and in unison would look at the people and the process elements of the programme. By default, our approach is to consider the three core elements to help ensure a holistic viewpoint is reached.

Technology In the first instance we used our knowledge and experience of Microsoft technologies and business transformation programmes to work with the client's technical teams to design and refine options around document migration and management from the underutilised legacy SharePoint instance to SharePoint 365 and from personal drives to One Drive. We supported the client in developing new document management policies, procedural guides, and business guidance about what should and should not be stored in the different document repository’s that would be available under the new Office 365 environment.

Having supported in the development of new document management policies we utilised some of the features available through Azure to automate much of the document governance procedures. For instance;

• We designed and implemented backend processes to ensure all documents on the central SharePoint instance were appropriately catalogued indexed and titled before being loaded into the new instance; And

• We designed processes through Azure that would take the data retention duration applicable to that business stream and any documents where a significant amount of personal information was identified would be flagged at the appropriate retention after authoring. Using Active Directory these flags were sent to the document owner the information manager and where appropriate the data protection officer. The objective of this was to ensure that no excessive personal information was retained past the retention periods as outlined in the document management and data governance processes.

“The technical specialists really knew the solutions well and supported us to design and deploy an innovative model whilst ensuring our internal teams were confident and equipped with the skills necessary to support and develop it further.” Head of Systems Architecture

Having helped deliver the governance controls and core system process is. We then designed how we could replicate the organisational structure across the platforms to give the best consistent user experience to the organisation. Having developed this, we then moved on to creating a proof of concept working with the IT team. By taking this approach we were able to identify any issues and take the appropriate remedial action whilst retaining the proof of concept to a smaller group of users.

Whilst refining our proof of concept we continued to create the organisational architecture, file structures and core business processes that would ultimately serve the business following rollout.

Business adoption and technology utilisation

With our technical team working in Unison with the client to develop the proof of concept and ensure the technical mapping infrastructure and processes were in place our business adoption arm focused on ensuring, once ready, the solution would be scalable.

Our business adoption specialists started by conducting user research. The objective of this research was to understand the organisational readiness and what if any changes would need to be made to ensure that the technology would best serve the business process. This organisational readiness assessment allowed us to create a high level roll out plan and qualify some key assumptions. In addition, it highlighted where in the business substantial process optimisation would be required both from a technology and process perspective to ensure uptake was high and continued usage. Our assessment highlighted the key areas for consideration across all the different business units both desk and field based.

“The group showed genuine enthusiasm in supporting. us to define a solution and model that would work for our operations. Having the technical and business focused teams really worked well and provided a wealth of insight that helped shape our end deliverable”

Departmental Head of IT & Systems Governance

Another aspect of the user research was to understand pain points and aspirations that the different business units, teams and individuals had. The idea behind this was to understand how the technology could best serve the business rather than having the technology dictate the business processes. Being able to identify the general themes trends and opinions of the business meant we were able to support both technical teams in developing and refining the proof of concept to suit the organisation as a whole and make the required adaptations where necessary. In addition, we were able to identify edge cases where substantial optimisation would have been required to prevent the technology hindering the day to day running of the business process is. Taking this approach not only insured business continuity for those areas but also served in allowing us to build relationships within the teams.

Having completed our period of user research we understood the opinions, aspirations and pain points within the organisation. From there, we set about creating a champions network across the organisation. We adopted a three-tiered approach to our developing our champions. First, we ensured we had executive buy in. In this instance the executive sponsorship was already in place having already completed the migration to Microsoft Azure. Talking to those sponsors we focused on the importance of the wider organisation seeing their adoption and support for change. Secondly, success coordinators were responsible for ensuring the business goals were realised, the compilation of feedback and the general sentiment within the champion network. Finally, we had our team champions, these were individuals across the business who following the successful prototype within the IT department were the first users to be granted the full productivity suite including One Drive, SharePoint, Teams, OneNote and the productivity apps. The role of the champions was to support change and answer any questions from within their teams. We felt they were best placed, as specialists, to answer questions relating to their specific areas.

“A refreshing guide to User Research that allowed us to really understand what our users needed from across the department.”

End User Computing - Senior Delivery Manager

Through the prototype and champion network, we were able to gather feedback around specific user scenarios, pain points and user enhancements. Collecting this information and analysing the results allowed us to understand what was working well and where improvements would be required to ensure the wider adoption of the technologies.

In addition to the above, our business engagement teams supported the internal communications team in the design development and delivery of a 6-month communications campaign.

Roll out & Training

Having the output from the user research, readiness assessments and champion feedback we designed a training package tailored to the specific needs of the business. In this instance we developed two distinct packages. One focused on how desk-based users could utilise the technologies and how the interface worked when using a traditional desktop environment. Secondly, we focused on a mobile ‘field worker’ specific package. This looked at how users would interact with mobile versions of the software through pre-installed apps, how work would be presented and how core customer facing processes would transition from paper based too digital.

The training programme ran in unison with the rollout to avoid users feeling out of touch with the information they had been provided in the training and using the live systems due to a lengthy deployment.

“The training programmes were completely user focused and designed to equip our employees with the right knowledge to start using the systems from day one. By user demand we’ve adopted the rolling training schedule principal internally”

Head of Human Resources & Learning Development

Having completed our organisational readiness assessment and identifying those teams which could easily adopt the modern technology and those which required further support we supported the internal project team to design a delivery plan that would see the prototype duplicated and scaled out to 80% of the business. Our readiness assessment outlined where the remaining 20% needed to focus their efforts in becoming ready to adopt the modern technology. We ensured our champion network had representation at all three levels within those teams.

With the support of our champion network to aid business adoption we developed a comprehensive library of business specific user scenarios. These scenarios set out day-to-day Interactions and how are user would go about completing these using the modern technology stack. These scenarios were specific to the business, the Department and the team and guided users through the key steps of completing the activity. To support the roll out we designed and delivered a process whereby users could send feedback directly to the internal project teams. In addition, 2 the performance monitoring offered through the Azure platform this feedback process supported the organisation in taking a far more proactive over reactive approach to problem identification and resolution.

What were the Outcomes?

• Complete Roll-out within 9 Months

The organisation delivered the Microsoft Office 365 technology stack to 80% of the 3000 employees within six months of project initiation. The remaining 20% were fully adopted within the next three months with provisions made to ensure the technology supported there tight today activities.

• Customer Satisfaction Improvement

Of the organisation, 500 employees were classified as working in the field. The technologies, optimised processes and enhanced communication channels allowed them to interact with desk-based staff in a more collaborative way. This helped to improve the flow of information between office staff and frontline workers and saw a customer satisfaction improvement of 26% within the 1st six months following roll out.

• Estate Optimisation

Having developed new document management policies, governance structures and controls we realised a 48% reduction in document storage following the migration of the SharePoint instance and personal drives to OneDrive. This reduction was further optimised by using the built-in governance procedures in Azure to help control the upload and management of documents to the revised SharePoint instance.

• Business Processes Optimised

As part of conducting our readiness assessment we approached all departments to ensure we understood their objectives, pinpoints, and operational requirements. By doing this we were able to identity where additional work was required to help ensure the technologies supported business activities. Where we identified potential measures, we worked with the strategic and operational teams to help plan and deliver the agreed changes.

• Knowledge Transfer

As outlined above during our engagement we supported from a technical and operational perspective. We always put a great onus on ensuring a high degree of knowledge transfer is reached. We worked across both arms to ensure internal staff were engaged with all aspects of the programme. Our approach is always, where possible, to work in conjunction with internal teams with coaching and guidance provided where desired.