The Royal British Legion enables Microsoft Teams in three weeks

The Royal British Legion is a charity providing financial, social and emotional support to members and veterans of the British Armed Forces, their families and dependants, as well as all others in need

Technology used :

Microsoft Teams

What were the challenges?

The Covid pandemic forced TRBL to implement flexible working arrangements
1,500 users needed the ability to work remotely within three weeks
Staff were using many and varied organisation and personal devices

What was the solution?

Working closely with small groups to implement the rollout of Teams to 1,500 staff

What were the results?

1,500 staff were enabled on Microsoft Teams in just three weeks

The Background

The Royal British Legion was already working with us and on track to deliver a full Office 365 implementation over a period of 18 months. When the Covid-19 crisis began a decision was made to deploy Teams within just three weeks.

Our challenge working with The Royal British Legion team was to have all 1,500 users up and running with Chat, Meetings and a Directorate Level Team to support working from home.

To exacerbate the challenge we were faced with a mixed device estate; some staff were on managed devices, others had versions of BYOD and a great number were using their personal laptops, computers and tablets.

Background

1,500 members of staff required the ability to work from home when COVID-19 struck
Solutions needed to be implemented within three weeks
Many different device types, including personal, need to be supported

The Solution

We worked in close partnership alongside a team of Legion colleagues to deliver a 10-day pilot to five teams and then help them implement the full Teams roll-out to 1,500 staff.

Working with the Legion’s IT team, our consultants:

Deployed Microsoft Teams using the People Manager Framework.
Enabled basic governance, including preventing download of apps to personal devices, setting a basic retention policy, turning off Groups creation, restricting the IP range to the UK and blocking guest access to Teams.

Working with the Legion’s Project and Internal Comms teams, our change management and adoption consultants:

Provided a full communications and engagement programme that included implementing and customising Learning Pathways with a lot of contextual content that highlighted Legion specific requirements.
Developed training and development sessions for Teams Owners and Yammer Admins.
Delivered a series of webinars to end-users on Chat, Meetings, OneDrive, Yammer, Co-authoring and Channels.
Implemented Yammer for internal comms to support the rollout and address concerns about social isolation.
Crafted a daily update message for the CIO that gave users core information in more easily digestible chunks.

Solution

Basic Teams governance enabled
Full user adoption programme developed
Learning Pathways customisation
User training sessions created for Teams, OneDrive & Yammer
User comms and engagement plan developed

What did the client say?

“Our existing close relationship with Silversands enabled us to get them to act as a trusted partner, working alongside our team to deliver rapid change. We were able to take advantage of their expertise, and their capacity to deliver in a short period of time. Silversands had a good breadth of capability and were able to get us the right staff with the right knowledge, which really helped us do something which normally wouldn’t have been possible”

Stuart McSkimming, CIO, The Royal British Legion

The Results

As a result of the hard work of our technical and adoption consultants together with the Legion’s IT, comms and project teams, Microsoft Teams was configured for appropriate governance, a full adoption programme was developed and 1,500 staff members were fully enabled to use Microsoft Teams.

This project demonstrated what can be achieved working together as a team, rather than partner and client.

Results

1,500 staff were able to continue working safely from home during the pandemic
Governance policies ensured that user actions were managed and appropriate
Adoption process ensured that the users understood the various solutions including when and how to use them

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