Succeeding by Managing the Everyday

The cake may be sweet, but it doesn’t taste as good as ROI

There are extra special days: birthdays, anniversaries, cutover days.

And there are extra special periods: vacation, holidays, new technology implementations.

Many organizations focus almost exclusively on these special days and special periods while ignoring the importance of managing the everyday.

Parties and Projects are Fun

Who doesn’t like cake, food, friends, music, and drink?

Parties are awesome. Projects are fulfilling.

And yet, often the cake, and the music, distract organizations, and prevent them from considering the importance of on-going UCaaS management. You can’t eat cake every day!

Choosing a new communication and collaboration platform is an important exercise. It is a key strategy decision. I know firsthand because I have often been enlisted to help organizations evaluate the various viable options. It is exciting.

And then migrating from the current state to the “shiny new” future state is also invigorating. You have a clear goal and objective: move users from point A to point B.

Migration is an event, organizations spin up a project, assemble a project team and exert more effort than usual over a short period of time.?Ta da! We’ve now migrated. For many you will have migrated to Microsoft Teams. Project complete. Almost immediately after, the project managers and engineers transition to the next project, focusing on solving the next technical challenge.

Let Them Eat Cake

Let them eat cake. Indeed, celebrate migration success.

However, on-going management needs to be a sustained effort over a number of years. With this important sustained focus, the total effort associated with on-going management soon exceeds the short-term, more intense, effort associated with the design, and migration.

Cake is great but it is not a sustainable diet.

Everyday is Where You Find Success (and ROI)

The balloons pop, the cake gets stale, the music stops.

To deliver on the business outcomes and return on investment (ROI) promised in a UCaaS migration project plan, you need to deliver a consistent and responsive daily experience. How you monitor and manage user satisfaction and adoption will ultimately determine the overall success of your project.

Return on the investment you made purchasing and deploying a UCaaS solution such as Microsoft Teams is delivered over the years that the solution is serving the needs of your users.

A high-level of user satisfaction is key to driving adoption and sustaining usage. User satisfaction depends on quality, reliability, and responsiveness.

Joiners, Movers, and Leavers

In large organizations thousands of people may join, change roles, or leave each year. Some organizations on-board and then off-board hundreds of co-op students every semester, or there are companies that recruit scores of temporary staff during a holiday period . This adds up to tens of thousands and perhaps even hundreds of thousands of configuration changes per year.

Being responsive to these organizational changes is critical to delivering a positive digital employee?experience. Further, correctly configuring the UCaaS application and associated hardware devices is an important aspect of security and compliance.

While you can manually execute the required changes using the Teams Admin Center (TAC), this is time-consuming and potentially error prone. Access control to TAC is also very coarse – typically using the Teams Administrator Role – with very limited ability to delegate local changes.

Using PowerShell scripting allows you to batch updates, but does not eliminate errors, requires a high-level of coding experience, and does not provide a complete audit trail of changes.

To provide a user with the correct abilities within Teams and Teams Phone System (and more broadly within Office 365), policies are assigned to a user, or group of users, when they are set up. There are LOTS of policies to understand and correctly assign.

Acquisitions

It is not uncommon for larger organizations to acquire smaller organizations. In this case, for a period, you are likely managing two separate communication and collaboration platforms.

In some cases, there may be specific use cases that warrant keeping both platforms. This means you need the people, processes, and tools to manage both platforms effectively.

Automation for Effective Management

Given the importance of effective on-going management, it is useful that there are multi-platform management tools such as those from VOSS Solutions.

VOSS Automate provides several capabilities that assist with on-going management:

1. The ability to template joins, moves, and leaves

Configuration settings can be created based on multiple personas and then easily assigned to one or a group of users across multiple platforms in a consistent, secure manner.

?2. Simplification and delegation

Instead of relying on scarce admin resources and complex PowerShell scripting (see example below), helpdesk, or local support personnel can be safely and securely delegated access to simple screens and workflows that simplify otherwise complex configuration changes.

More advanced personnel can be granted additional configuration options while less experienced support staff can be restricted to more common operations.

For some changes, VOSS Automate can support self-service so that end users can easily make changes to their settings and services.

3. Auditing and rollback

VOSS Automate ensures all changes are logged and can be reversed if they yield an unintended consequence.

Effective Monitoring

Beyond automating changes, monitoring usage, adoption, quality, reliability, user satisfaction, and licensing is key to effective management and cost optimization.

While the built-in Teams reports are useful, they don’t address the typical situation where more than one tool is used within an organization and fail to provide effective proactive alerting.

VOSS Insights is an example of a tool that addresses the very real need to both monitor and alert across multiple platforms. Highly customizable dashboards can display information from multiple platforms so that you can quickly get a picture of your overall communication and collaboration estate.

And the ability to track usage and adoption across platforms can drive significant cost efficiencies.

Planning for Long-term Success

If you are planning your migration to a new UCaaS platform, now is the time to ensure you have the people, processes, and tools necessary to support effective on-going management of the platform (or platforms). Consider piloting management tools during your initial user and technology pilots.

If you have already migrated, consider whether you have a consistent, responsive, auditable change management process. Does the process put an unnecessary burden on senior resources? Are you getting the necessary alerts and analytics?

While technology implementation projects are exciting, it is only through effective on-going management that the expected and promised return on investment can be achieved.