You can lead a workforce to Microsoft Teams, as the saying goes, but you can’t (easily) make them change the way they work overnight.
Creating accounts and introducing people to new platforms is not the same as weaning them off their familiar tools and devices, and any enterprise-scale migration must be regarded as a change-management process - with a clear objective and timeframe, and explicit means of encouraging and evaluating progress and success.
As Jamie Litherland, Solution Owner at VOSS Solutions, explained, managing this transition well requires detailed and relevant analytics, which reflect the requirements and actions of specific personas within the organisation.
Data-driven managed migration
For example, the data may reveal that specific sales teams are having difficulty with the migration, enabling managers to hone in directly on the real problem.
“If people are saying, I don’t like MS Teams, it never seems to work for me, we can analyse why, and it might be that they’re using their own AirPods - so we just need to get them each a nice compatible mobile headset to transform their user experience. But you can only identify this need, when you can visualise the data segmented by business unit, team, role, and country, etc”
In easing the migration progress this not only obviates the risks of shadow IT, it helps manage licencing costs as well, because operating two parallel systems during a transition has direct costs.
Guiding a migration at scale
It’s about a combination of gentle nudges and just-in-time information, rather than forcing change on the unwilling, Litherland continued.
“VOSS Solutions’ user analytics can trigger if a phone line that's allocated to a user licence, hasn't been used for a period of time, so they'll get an automated email from an ITSM ticket saying, are you still using your telephone number? And if they’ve migrated to the new service, the old one is automatically decommissioned, to help manage the licencing number caps.”
From fear of the unknown to simple mindset blocks, there can be many barriers to user adoption, even of intuitive and holistic UC tools. But when the analytics surface an issue common to a group, then a direct solution can be provided to tackle it.
As Litherland explained, “there is generally the assumption nowadays that people in offices just know how to use these things. But actually, if you're switching from a Cisco estate to a Microsoft one, a lot of things will be similar, but there are nuances to it as well. So, the enterprise may need to be educating people with specific documentation and training.
