There are three primary objectives when deploying Microsoft 365: from a business perspective, the expectations are based on productivity; from an IT perspective, the expectations are based on IT efficiencies, security, and compliance; and from an organizational perspective, they are based on a digital employee experience and collaborative functionality.

Of course, all these expectations are based on one primary objective, and that is user adoption of Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint Online. A mass adoption, along with a high usage rate and a change in the way users work, is required for your investment in M365 to be considered successful.

So, adoption is your first step, and that can be tracked and analyzed through analytics in M365 or other tools. But what else needs to be considered once you have released M365 on your organization? What about backup? What about security? What about sharing data outside your business? What about self-service? What about ongoing training? M365 is a powerful suite of tools, and taking advantage of all that it entails should be IT’s primary goal. How to accomplish that, efficiently and securely, is up to you!

John Donovan
Principal Research Director, I&O
Info-Tech Research Group

Collaboration, efficiencies, and cost savings need to be earned

Migrating to M365 is a disruptive move for most organizations. Additionally, it poses risk to untrained IT staff, including admins, help desk, and security teams. The aim for organizations, especially in this new hybrid workspace, is to maintain efficiencies through collaboration, share information in a secure environment, and work from anywhere, any time. However, organizations need to manage their licensing and storage costs and build this new way of working through post-deployment planning. By reducing their hardware and software footprint they can ensure they have earned these savings and efficiencies.

Understand any shortcomings in M365 or pay the price

Failing to understand any shortcomings M365 poses for your organization can ruin your chances at a successful implementation. Commonly overlooked expenses include backup and archiving, especially for regulated organizations; spending on risk mitigation through third-party tools for security; and paying a premium to Microsoft to use its Azure offerings with Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender, or any security add-on that comes at a price above your E5 license, which is expensive in itself.

Spend time with users to understand how they will use M365

Understanding business processes is key to anticipating how your end users will adopt M365. By spending time with the staff and understanding their day-to-day activities and interactions, you can build better training scenarios to suit their needs and help them understand how the apps in M365 can help them do their job. On top of this you need to meet the business KPIs and IT’s drive for adoption and usage. Encourage early adopters to become trainers and champions. Success will soon follow.

M365 is a full suite of tools for collaboration, communication, and productivity, but organizations find the platform is not used to its full advantage and fail to get full value from their license subscription.

Many users are unsure which tool to use when: Do you use Teams or Viva Engage, MS Project or Planner? When do you use SharePoint versus OneDrive?

From an IT perspective, finding time to help users at the outset is difficult – it’s quite the task to set up governance, security, and backup. Yet training staff must be a priority if the implementation is to succeed.

M365 projects are fraught with obstacles. Common mistakes organizations make include:

• No post-migration plan in place.
• User training is an afterthought.
• Lack of communication to end users.
• No C-suite promotion and sponsorship.
• Absence of a vision and KPIs to meet that vision.

To define your post-migration tasks and projects:

• List all projects in a spreadsheet and rank them according to difficulty and impact.
• Look for quick wins with easy tasks that have high impact and low difficulty.
• Build a timeline to execute your plans and communicate clearly how these plans will impact the business and meet that vision.

Failure to take meaningful action will not bode well for your M365 journey.

Define your vision and what your priorities are for M365. Understand how to reach your vision.

Ensure you have an executive sponsor, develop champions, and build a team of SMEs.

List all projects in a to-be scenario. Rank and prioritize projects to understand impact and difficulty.

Build your roadmap, create timelines, and ensure you have enough resources and time to execute and deliver to the business.