This blog series is written by Cyril Belikoff, Senior Director of Office Marketing

This is the third post from our blog series on the four success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption.

Check out the other posts part of this series:

Part 1: Enable your business stakeholders with a successful Microsoft 365 adoption
Part 2: Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption

In this blog post I will focus on the second success factor – Scenarios, and how to identify and prioritize them, while measuring their impact on your organization.

The true measure of success for your Microsoft 365 adoption, like any change or new technology, will be the value realized by your organization from its investment. Your opportunity with Microsoft 365 is to enable the different Lines of Business (LoBs) and departments in your organization to realize important business outcomes. This requires identifying and prioritizing scenarios – which are the different ways people and teams in your organization can use the capabilities of Microsoft 365 to achieve their goals.

Get started with early wins and build on that success

Our most successful customers typically start their journey with more basic scenarios that have universal appeal across the organization:

• Employee Engagement & Communication: Create a sustainable, consistent way for senior leaders to connect with employees, using Yammer as a community to share and engage, and Skype Meeting Broadcast for companywide meetings.
• Bring Campaigns to Market Faster: Enable marketers to collaborate with people inside and outside the organization using Microsoft Teams as their shared workspace for communicating and sharing with team members.
• Increase Sales Productivity and Grow Revenue: Provide sales teams with a centralized hub with Microsoft Teams for sales planning, real time collaboration on proposals and RFPs, and for managing their monthly, quarterly, and annual business reviews.
• Streamline Business Reviews: Help finance move beyond gathering and cleaning data to be able to analyze data with Power BI, and collaborate together on the data in one place with Microsoft Teams.

Once you’ve delivered value with these more basic scenarios, you have more credibility to engage your business stakeholders for custom scenarios that deliver unique value. Think of this value realization motion as a flywheel – score some early wins with cross organization scenarios, and then move on to more ambitious areas of impact for each LoB or department. As you provide more and more impact to the business, more stakeholders will get engaged and the momentum of the flywheel builds and builds.

So, how can you work with your business stakeholders to identify relevant scenarios for their teams to adopt? At it’s most basic level it’s about identifying what the team wants to accomplish, how they can use the technology to accomplish their goal, and what the expected impact of the Scenario is. To help you get started, check out the Microsoft 365 productivity library, where you can discover new scenarios based on your industry and different functional departments.

The IT team leading the Microsoft 365 adoption at Standard Bank – Africa’s largest banking group, has done a great job engaging with the business to identify scenarios that are helping different stakeholders accomplish their goals. Standard Bank dedicated an adoption team within IT to engage with each business unit and functional department to realize unique value with Microsoft 365 in a consistent manner – i) conduct an “art of the possible” session with the team so they can start to envision relevant Microsoft 365 scenarios, ii) workshop scenarios by mapping Microsoft 365 capabilities to the team’s challenges and goals, iii) prototyping and implementing prioritized scenarios, and iv) enabling the business unit to be self-sustainable in their adoption of scenarios and evolving the solutions to suit their needs.

“You don’t need a large team and budget to get going. Dedicate some resources who are passionate about improving the business, who can get in where the work is happening and can assist business users in making the bridge between their day to day challenges and friction points, and the enabling technology that comes with Microsoft 365.

A great resource to help with this is the Microsoft 365 Productivity Library, we’ve used it to help our business discover scenarios and use cases that are relevant to them. Once they see that they can bring different components of the suite together to respond to different needs, they get it.”

Ian Doyle
Standard Bank, IT Executive

To avoid overwhelming end users with too many scenarios at the same time it’s important to prioritize your scenarios based on expected impact and difficulty of implementing. This prioritized list will determine what scenarios get rolled out when.

Measure and share success

To measure the success of your Microsoft 365 rollout, it’s critical to develop a set of criteria to evaluate the different scenarios you and your team have implemented. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you expect will improve based on adopting your scenarios. Evaluate where you are before implementing Microsoft 365 and measure your ongoing progress post implementation. While it’s important to measure and showcase the business value you are providing the organization with your Microsoft 365 implementation, monitoring and reporting on usage helps demonstrate overall adoption levels and areas where improvement is required. The Office 365 adoption content pack is available to gain insights on how your organization is adopting the various services within Office 365.

Success stories are often just as valuable as quantitative measures when demonstrating Microsoft 365 success. Encourage your project team members and champions to identify examples of people and teams using Microsoft 365 to accomplish their goals and everyday tasks. Make sure you share these success stories through Yammer or other internal channels.

Now that you have identified and prioritized your scenarios, it’s time to create internal excitement about the scenarios and ready end users to successfully adopt them. Stay tuned for the next blog post where I will cover the final two success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption – Awareness and Training.