We are excited to share our successful completion of a two-year engagement migrating one of the largest managed care organizations in the US to SharePoint Online.  Together as partners, we migrated over 45,000 SharePoint webs and more than 70 TB of data to the cloud — making it one of the largest migrations of SharePoint to Office 365 ever undertaken.

The planning for this endeavor began in 2016, starting with our assessment of the current on-premises footprint. Initially, we spent months setting up Office 365 governance and putting together a data-driven approach to modernization. These steps gave us confidence when budgeting and planning.

We did not account for a global pandemic, but we weren’t the only ones! Forced to adapt and overcome, this project encountered challenges in a time of dramatic turmoil in the healthcare industry. We are proud of the hurdles we overcame and delivered results despite them. Our client shared the comment below when reflecting on our sucess.

“… if you look at over the last two years there is no reason at all that this team and this project should be as close to finishing today as we are. It’s incredible. It’s amazing. Everybody says it. Everybody acknowledges it. Yeah, we still got some things to do, but there was no way we were supposed to be here.” 

 

Building a global team

Our team delivered results from all over the world. The Microsoft leaders for the project are based across the US, with two teams of people in Perficient’s Chennai, India office who made this initiative successful.

Migrations happened around the clock. Microsoft Teams enabled open and continuous communication. The transparency that Teams provided was crucial to success. Utilizing the capabilities of Team’s channels and Microsoft Stream enabled 50 people to have the latest information at their fingertips at all times, but not get bogged down in notifications and email chains.

We built strong relationships with our distributed team around the world by visiting our Chennai office multiple times over the project’s lifespan. Investing in our team was key to the growth and success of the global delivery model.

Over the course of the migration, our continued automation resulted in over $1M of savings in a reduced manual effort. This is on top of the realized savings our client will receive by avoiding infrastructure and support costs. They now have access to the many benefits Office 365 offers – mobile offerings, disaster recovery, and continuous updates.

The accomplishments and the partnerships formed make Perficient proud. We have expansive multi-shore capabilities, a great potential option to consider when planning a timeline and budget. We have invested in our relationships with our global delivery team knowing our clients will too. This global mindset is propelling many other projects forward just as it did this engagement.

Our worldwide pandemic has hit everyone differently. Even within the same circles, people are handling and responding to these changes in different ways. I have found such strength and inspiration from the IT industry and our clients. Everyone has approached this challenge head-on. My professional community has provided such a grounding force by facing this challenge together. My favorite example of this is how the SharePoint community has responded to the SharePoint conference cancelation. We’re not the only one to have events and training canceled this year due to COVID19. The difference is how we’ve responded. I am so excited to be a part of a community that is responding in a positive way: to come together and strengthen our Microsoft community. The Microsoft 365 Virtual Conference to me says “I see you COVID19, and I’ll raise you one”.

Why the Microsoft 365 Conference is Different

Never before has a conference gone 36 hours continuous. Never before has a conference been able to include people from all over the world on this scale. Being a speaker for this event is such a privilege. It is incredible to be a part of a conference that has sessions in 7 different languages! The conference is packed with great sessions from leaders within Microsoft and the whole industry, and I’d love for you to attend mine. Below are my sessions and what you’ll gain from them.

Our Challenge: Women’s Representation, Inclusion, and What You Can Do About It

5/27/20 at 6 PM Eastern

We have a significant representation difference between genders, and I am confronting that head-on with what women’s challenge is in the workplace today, and what we can actually change about our day to day in order to help our businesses. At the end of the day, more diverse leadership leads to more diverse ideas, which leads to better results. We are all after better results – and confronting the issues that are holding back half of our population will help all bottom lines in the end. These tactical actions apply to men and women in the workplace. There are changes everyone can make to make their business more diverse, and therefore more successful.

Power Up Your Resume with Power Query

5/27/20 at 9 PM Eastern

Ask what Power Query can do for you! Power Query saves me and my clients from the world of manual tracking and effort spent on data refresh. I want to share with anyone who works with data and has not worked with Power Query the joys that this tool can bring you. Plus, this is a portion of the power platform which is across many Microsoft technologies. Spoiler alert: master Power Query and you’ll be able to make a significant impact in Excel and Power BI.

I hope you’ll be able to join us. Registration is here: https://bit.ly/M365VMReg

Spend less time communicating, but be better informed by utilizing all the features available on Microsoft Teams. We started by planning a strong foundation for our communication in Part 1. Now we are working within those channels to gain four key Teams benefits.

Why make these changes?

Before we get into what, let’s remember the why.

The Teams benefits we are adding are:

1. Time saved for all members of the team
2. A place of reference for decisions made
3. Visibility for members on different workstreams or those accountable for the project by not involved day-to-day
4. Ability to have continuous conversations with people in all timezones

And for all of those reasons, we are going to…

Get Information Out of Chat & Post Everything

Creating posts in Teams channels will change communication for your group. Chats cannot be the default for communication within a formal group or initiative. Instead, have a dialogue going within your channels. This change is the basis for these added benefits. Let’s dive into the opportunities to do this & why.

Start conversations in Teams

Always start conversations with a post in a channel where team members can be made aware and start to collaborate on the topic. When creating the post, utilize the governance established in Part 1. Use a heading, and tag appropriately. Do you need a response from a specific individual, or is the topic informative?

In my example below, I tag the “General” channel because I don’t need a response from a specific individual, and my group doesn’t have a channel specified for this topic (yet!). Always add a heading so people can know what the topic is right away.

Ask Questions

Ask your questions in Teams posts! This is a hard task because our human nature makes us hesitant to reveal we don’t know all the answers. Get away from that by creating a space team members want to ask questions because they’ll save time. We can do that by posting questions to start, even if you know they may not get resolved on Teams. For the issues which can, meetings can be avoided by handling the whole discussion via Teams comments on that post. If it is not, the nature of the post will determine how to escalate to the appropriate communication level.

Connecting 1:1

If only one or two people have gone back and forth on the topic, creating the post revealed only two people are needed to create a proposed solution to bring to the group. Connecting two people 1:1 for a phone call saves everyone else’s time upfront by removing a meeting for which two individuals can resolve and post their outcome.

Give the Meeting a Head Start

If the group is not able to make headway in Teams comments or with 1:1 collaboration, then escalate to meeting with those which have commented. The benefits of escalating in this way include the ability to identify the must-haves for the conversation so that when the time is blocked off on the calendar, it only has to happen once. It is an easy transition because the purpose of the meeting is right there on Teams, and the participants of the meeting are already aware of the topic.

Post All Outcomes and Decisions

Post the outcome of all calls. This is a critical piece of saving time! Skipping this step would result is a breakdown in communication and will take you twice as long to resolve in a couple weeks. This enables other team members to be informed without everyone investing the time to create the solution.

Continuing to post outcomes over time creates a source of truth for all past decisions. Then, members can utilize search to refer back to any decisions made, depending on your tenant’s retention policies. Consider creating a wiki for major decisions or outcomes if unsure of the retention policy on your own Team’s posts.

Create visibility

Posting becomes increasingly important if your group does not have the same working hours or is not co-located. No team members would duplicate work or not be aware of a decision made, even if they miss a call, because everything is in the channel. Adding sponsors (which are accountable but not involved within the team can be even more helpful because they’re able to find the information they need without a team member having to communicate it to them, taking away time from the initiative.

Try it out!

The way to create the best fit for the team is to talk through this with everyone. First, have the whole team read through this blog. Then, reserve time to work through these expectations together. After that, your team will be on the way to having more impactful communication, being a more productive team overall, and increasing Microsoft Teams benefits for your company. 

View Microsoft’s commentary on Teams adoption here, and hear them echo these key points. Read more of our blogs on Microsoft here!

Microsoft is going all-in on Teams, and it’s time your company reaps the benefits! So much is being left on the table, and more potential is waiting to be released. This blog series lays out the secrets to upgrade your team’s usage of MSFT Teams. Taking these steps will transform the tool from “just another chat avenue” to the foundation of work at your company.  

The first step is creating the Teams instance! Create Teams around an organization structure, project, or initiative. All three of those are appropriate and can apply to the rest of the blog series. Choose one that applies to you and use that for the rest of the steps. The remainder of our first discussion is how to set up that Teams instance for success.  

Create a structure 

We want to mirror the structure of how work is done in our Teams instance. This allows us to best plan how communication will happen within. A great way to conceptualize a team is by identifying who is responsible, accountable, informed and consulted (RACI) for all requirements the group has to the business. The goal is to identify high-level buckets the work falls into in order to create the most intuitive structure. 

Identify the Workstreams

Start by reflecting upon the different buckets of work for the group. We want to organize our communications, files, and meetings around those groups – they will become our channels. The forethought of how to organize communication is critical. This process is the equivalent of laying a strong foundation of a house. Investing the time in how to manage your communication upfront will save pain and more time later when working to catch teammates up, communicate decisions, or sending emails.  

 Example: Creating Channels 

This is not each person has their own channel. The goal is #collaboration. Try to organize by the main efforts or aspects of the team or project. If you have trouble identifying what these groups should be, think about how your team talks about the work. For example, let’s say you’re on a development project. Do you usually start with technical architecture? Then transition to communicating those technical aspects? And, lastly how to report on the progress toward the overall goal? In that case, we would start with the following channel structure. Rest assured, the structure should adjust as time goes on and your organization changes. See the following examples of what would go into those channels. 

1. Technical – “I ran into this error when trying to implement what we talked about on our standup. I’ve tried one thing and then another. Any other ideas?”
2. OCM – “Can the team review this write up of the changes end users can expect in our next release?”
3. Project Management – “Our status report is due end of the week. Could everyone add updates by end of day?”

The default General channel cannot be deleted. Use this channel if none of the topics doesn’t fit any others. If there is an active topic in the General channel, consider promoting to a dedicated channel.

Decide who needs to follow what & how to tag 

Once you have identified the channels the team is going to utilize, delete the others which may have been created. The goal of this planning is to take all randomness out of communication and plan how the team members will communicate. This will save people’s time when choosing how to communicate something and who need to receive it. If communications are always put in a certain spot, the benefit of using Microsoft Teams increases substantially because communications can be referenced and relied upon. In order to completely take out the randomness, talk through and set the following for your team.

An owner for each channel 

These people (ideally 2) are responsible for regulating the posts in their channel and making sure everything that gets posted there is resolved. The benefits of having channel owners are preventing ideas or questions from falling through the cracks, and having the guidelines set up reinforced so communication is planned. 

How to use tagging 

Let the team decide how they want to use tagging. The method my team found works best is if a response or specific action is needed, the specific teammate must be tagged. Otherwise, use channel tagging for informational posts that don’t require specific action.  The benefit of this is all teammates understand how to ask for what they need. 

Which channels members need to follow 

Have a conversation on who needs to follow which channels. This combats the pain point for Teams creating too many notifications & creating a lot of noise. Go through and determine specific channels members need to follow. This prevents teammates from missing important questions. The benefit is channel tags can be utilized, but are not limiting. That is because teammates should use direct tagging in channels to ask pointed questions. When going through this exercise, think about the “FYI” messages. In other words, decide which members need to stay informed on specific workstreams. If you are a smaller team, you may decide to skip this step for the time being.  

Try it out!

The way to create the best fit for the team is to work through this exercise with everyone. First, have the whole team go through this blog beforehand. Then, reserve some time to work through these exercises together. After that, your team will be on the way to having the foundations for more impactful communication, being a more productive team overall, and increasing Microsoft Teams’ benefits for your company. In part 2, we discuss best practices within channels to unlock even more benefits. 

Read more of our blogs on Microsoft here!