Office 365 and digital workplace programme for business school

Comprehensive services to support the school’s Office 365 programme

Our customer, a leading business school based in London, required a partner to help support adoption of Office 365 and embed Office 365 capabilities into its operations and business processes.

The school was using the Office 365 Education SKU which was free to faculty and students, and included core Office 365 workloads as well as services covering compliance, rights management and DLP. Office 365 was partially deployed, including Office desktop apps, but key collaboration workloads were not in use with Teams and Office 365 Groups disabled and SharePoint Online not being used to any meaningful extent.

Office 365 hadn’t been actively promoted to users, however there were pockets of uptake and a healthy appetite from users and the business for new and better tools. The school’s IT team had also identified a number specific opportunities and focus areas for leveraging Office 365, including internal communication & collaboration, digital learning (including integration with Canvas LMS) and executive education.

Betterworking was engaged to provide advice and services to support the effective adoption and usage of Office 365, and to maximise the value and potential of Office 365. There was also a requirement to assess the existing Office 365 configuration and supporting infrastructure to ensure it was appropriately set up from a service, access and security perspective. Additionally, the requirement was to balance external services with leveraging internal resources – to build capacity, establish a sustainable model for managing and evolving Office 365, and to control costs.

From strategy to readiness to implementation

In response to our customer’s requirements we proposed an approach covering three high-level areas:

Technology: Ensure the Office 365 environment and the workloads and services running on it meet requirements of quality, performance, security, access, administration and governance

Change management: Scope, design and support the delivery of a comprehensive set of activities to drive adoption and usage of Office 365 services and capabilities

Resourcing: Develop a resourcing strategy (combining internal resources and external services) to support the delivery of the technology and change management activities, and the ongoing management and development of the Office 365 environment

Working with our customer over a multi-year engagement we provided advice, services and support across three phases:

Phase 1: Strategy and planning

This phase commenced with a discovery exercise delivered through stakeholder workshops and follow-up interviews, to understand current state and identify opportunities, issues and considerations across the above three areas. Activities included:

• Office 365 technical assessment
• Digital workplace assessment
• Workforce & business value assessment
• Scenario / use case scoping
• Resource capacity & capability assessment
• Requirements and considerations for Office 365 operating model

Assessment findings formed the basis of the subsequent envisioning, prioritisation and planning activities and outputs.

Envisioning

• Workshops with the customer IT and Office 365 programme teams to review assessment findings, define vision and objectives for the Office 365 programme, and agree a high-level implementation roadmap
• Findings included targeted outcomes (end-user, operational and IT), use cases identified through initial consultation, and considerations (enablers and constraints) for the programme
• Envisioning outputs included objectives and strategy, recommended focus areas (personas, use cases, Office 365 workloads) for first phase implementation, and resourcing strategy for Office 365 deployment and ongoing management.

Prioritisation & planning

This was a critical step to prioritise and plan what the programme would deliver in which order, working back from programme outcomes to define and prioritise use case, prerequisite technical activities and supporting change management activities.

Outputs from this process were taken into a set of planning activities to develop projects, workstreams and detailed work packages to be delivered using an agile delivery model.

Phase 2: Readiness activities

The purpose of this phase was to prepare the customer for the rollout of Office 365. Given that Office 365 was already partly deployed with some existing usage, ‘rollout’ was defined as:

• Active promotion of Office 365 as a set of tools and capabilities
• Proactive engagement with users to identify and support requirements and adoption
• Deployment of further Office 365 workloads

Readiness activities were delivered in two sequential steps:

Step 1 – Upskilling

This focused on upskilling and enabling the IT and delivery teams via a series of workshops and training sessions which we designed and delivered. These were structured and delivered as:

• Product / technology focused sessions: Covering the core services, products and features of Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite
• Process focused sessions: To introduce stakeholders to the methodologies, processes and activities that will be used to plan and deliver the Office 365 programme, to manage / administer the Office 365 service, and to support end-users

Step 2 – Design

This focused on considerations, decisions and documentation relating to the design and configuration of Office 365 backend / tenant-level services and Office 365 workloads, security & compliance services, and Office 365 operating model. This was delivered as a series of workshops, follow-up consultation and outputs, delivered by Betterworking in collaboration with our technical partner Comms-care.

Workshops and outputs were structured using the following topic areas:

• File storage and content collaboration (covering SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams)
• Office 365 governance & configuration (including admin centre configuration and sharing settings)
• Security and Compliance (including identity & access management and data classification)
• Enterprise Mobility (including MDM and MAM)
• Operating Model (including service management and end-user support model)

Phase 3: Implementation support

In this phase we provided support to our customer’s in-house IT and project delivery teams as they implemented the prioritised and planned workstreams. Our support was focused on a subset of the overall range of activities, with our customer’s in-house resources able to deliver a significant amount of work themselves by this stage of the programme.

Implementation support activities included:

• Support for Office 365 collaboration workstream, focusing on the use of Teams and SharePoint to support a range of departmental and business process focused use cases
• Support for departmental teams piloting Teams and SharePoint, including Learning Innovation, Internal Comms and Library departments
• Ad hoc support for technical workstreams, including relating to Office 365 governance, data security and enterprise mobility
• Support for Office 365 adoption activities, including strategy and messaging for a new Digital Workplace campaign to promote the Office 365 programme
• Support for specific Digital Workplace launch and support activities, including staff events and roadshows at the London campus

A strong foundation for long-term Office 365 success

Betterworking’s advice, services and support helped our business school customer to successfully deploy, promote and support adoption of a broad range of Office 365 services and workloads, providing the foundation for ongoing success.

Specific outcomes and successes included:

• Provided the Office 365 programme strategy and roadmap for our customer’s inhouse teams to deliver against
• Upskilled and enabled internal IT and project teams on both product / technology and process / delivery aspects of implementing Office 365
• Helped establish internal governance and processes to manage Office 365 services and workloads and to support user adoption of Office 365
• Supported the delivery of specific technical workstreams and pilot use cases
• Helped create a strategy and campaign to promote and encourage adoption of Office 365 and the school’s wider digital workplace capabilities.