On episode 27 of the All About 365 podcast, Jason and I are joined by Levente Nagy, PMM for Microsoft 365 Customer Success at Microsoft. It’s Lev’s job to help Microsoft customers who buy Office 365 drive usage of the products.

So on this show we wanted to get advice from Lev for IT professionals who have bought the Microsoft 365 suite, or Office 365, and are tasked with rolling it out to the businesses they manage IT for. With so much advice around, what is the proven way to do this? Should you just give the products to the business and hope for the best, and let them discover the tools and how best to use them, or should you take a more active role in understanding what the business needs and driving adoption? Find out in this week’s show.

Topics discussed during the show included:

• Why care about adoption? – adoption vs. turning on technology, digital transformation, empowering employees, accessibility
• How have IT managed software rollouts in the past?
• What has worked with those processes?
  • Line of business systems with Business Analysts
  • Standard systems replacing like-for-like, such as an email replacement of a desk phone system
• What doesn’t work
  • “Throwing it over the fence”
  • “just giving it to people”
  • What about “viral adoption”, seen with Shadow IT?
• How to approach adoption? – Stakeholders, Scenarios, Awareness and Training (SSAT), Why are they important and how to plan for them? (Read more in the adoption guide, in PDF form)
  • • Stakeholders: how you can win your stakeholders with the Value Discovery Workshop and the Customer Immersion Experience (http://transform.microsoft.com)
    • Scenarios: the Productivity Library – http://aka.ms/productivitylibrary
    • Awareness: all the resources available through FastTrack (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/fasttrack/resources), how to do live events through Yammer and Teams
    • Training: resources, tips like champions programs etc. (http://support.office.com, https://www.linkedin.com/learning/topics/office-365, Cheat sheets, Infographics)
• What’s different about an Office 365 rollout with Teams vs moving email to the cloud?
• What is change management, and how is business change management different from IT change management?
• Who needs to be involved with change management in the business and where does IT fit in?
• How does this fit into management of Office 365, such as product owners, service owners, IT security teams, IT architects and service desk/operations staff?
• Is change management for Teams a one-off thing?
• How do we discovery use cases for Teams in the business?
• How do we scale success from experimenting and supporting pilots to full roll out across the business?

A massive thanks to Lev for joining us this week, and for the Microsoft team behind the IT Implementer site for putting us in touch and helping organize.

You’ll find Episode 27 above, and at our podcast site, on iTunes,Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, Google podcasts and you can subscribe with your favourite podcast app using the feed. If you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to hear on the next shows, let us know. You’ll find us on Twitter as @SteveGoodman & @jaywynn and Lev on LinkedIn.