DHHS and Office 365 - collaboration accelerated by isolation

I posted around 3 months ago on DHHS’s journey into Office 365. At the time we were justifiably proud of our leading approach in Victorian government, the underlying collaboration strategy that drove the work, the excellent 365 implementation project and the ongoing Connected Working team we have established to support our users and grow adoption of new ways of technologically enabled working.

Since then, we’ve had a little thing called Coronavirus. Our Department has played a leading role in Victoria’s response to the virus, while at the same time needing to transform rapidly into remote working, radically new service models and profound uncertainty.

How are we working as a department

As expected, we are making far more use of the technology to communicate, collaborate and stay engaged. We've been able to make 365 much more mainstream, it's not just for email and calendar, it's for communicating, staying in touch, collaborating, working.

• Emails - we're receiving and reading way more emails (1100 in March vs 700 in January) but sending about the same as normal
• Teams - up to 10,000 active users, 7000 people have joined meetings, 6000 have messaged, 3000 posted in a channel. Many of these metrics are up over 300%.
• Document collaboration - 12 months ago we had 42k active files in onedrive and 1465 files shared internally. That's grown to 195k active files and 6k internal shares in March.

Issues our staff are experiencing

This rapid transformation was never going to be easy. Our staff, like most workers have been challenged by:

• Changing work practices
• Isolation
• Lack of training
• Cybersecurity – how to stay safe and secure while taking up multiple new digital services. Some of these are popular but have less than ideal cybersecurity records.
• The ‘basics’ – having devices, connectivity, software they need

What are we doing to support our users?

DHHS has a lot of the basics in place - a strong culture of innovation, access to industry strength digital platforms (like Office 365) and strong internal capability using agile ways of working. New Ways of Working service – focussing on change management, process redesign, remote working patterns and etiquette.

In the first week of the coronavirus outbreak, we quickly realised we needed to do more to focus our efforts. In response, we've instituted:

• New Ways of Working service – focussing on change management, process redesign, remote working patterns and etiquette
• Increased training – formal and adhoc, making use of Teams and Linkedin Learning as well as custom materials delivered thorugh our Sharepoint Online site(s)
• Cybersecurity – we continue to do a lot of work securing and monitoring our systems. We’re also providing policies and guidance on the use of new tools.
• Hardware - rolling out many new devices and working with our partners to strengthen resilience of our networking infrastructure
• New applications – 26 active projects being tracked (among hundreds of requests), dozens of new applications developed to support remote working as well as the public health command.

What’s next?

A quote from our recent All Staff Forum (live streamed via Teams):

The sheer level of flexibility that we can bring to the workplace has just been a revelation to me and something that I hope we can take forward

The task ahead of us as technologists is to build on this momentum and embed the best of the changes we’ve seen in the last 2 months.