5 steps for boosting your digital transformation with Microsoft 365

Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many companies whose IT teams are focused on a path of “digital transformation.” The one thing I hear over and over is the challenges they have in getting users to adopt new software even though it will help them to be more productive in the long term.

This month, I’d like to share with you some great tools and resources that you can leverage to help drive adoption with your users. These tools provide users with the resources they need to build the skillsets needed to be successful while providing you with the insights you need to track adoption.

So how can we help bring your vision of the world’s productivity cloud—Microsoft 365—to life?

Step 1: Get industry-specific guidelines with the Productivity Library

Start with understanding how Microsoft 365 can improve productivity in your specific role or industry using scenarios and best practices with the Productivity Library. The Productivity Library is available for a wide range of industries including financial services, retail, and healthcare and gets granular for roles like operations, sales, and human resources.

Step 2: Develop a plan with the Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide

The Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide helps you to not just identify and prioritize key scenarios, but also helps you understand how to best build and launch your adoption plan with your stakeholders. The Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide will help you drive business value by showing you how to monitor and track adoption and usage.

Step 3: Create your advocates and champions

When you’re ready to start training your users, we recommend leveraging the power of the Office 365 Champions program. This program is designed to help you create a circle of influence for those early adopters or go-to people in your organization and empower them to become your Office 365 Champions. This program provides support and resources to help these users find more efficient way to tackle everyday tasks and then share those learnings with their peers.

Step 4: Build your own learning portal

Did you know you can build a custom training portal with just a few clicks? Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is a customizable, on-demand learning solution designed to increase usage and adoption of Microsoft 365 services in your organization. This includes on-demand custom training, SharePoint Online portal provisioning, and straightforward steps to provision, customize, and share your new portal with users.

Step 5: Track users progress

Once you implement some of these learning resources you’ll need some tools to help you to track your software adoption progress. The new Microsoft Productivity Score—currently in private preview—will provide you with visibility into how your organization works, insights that identify where you can enable improved experiences so people can reach their goals, and actions to update skills and systems so everyone can do their best work.

For companies who want to help their employees better understand how they spend their time and guide them to better work habits and team norms, we encourage you to turn on MyAnalytics. This tool helps users improve their focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration.

MyAnalytics is available to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Enterprise and Business suite users.

Finally, for a top-down view, we offer Workplace Analytics. Workplace Analytics provides more advanced tools to discover and analyze the business impact of the way people work and help drive change through MyAnalytics. It gives you a view into collaboration patterns that empowers organizations to act with agility, improve employee experience, and sharpen customer focus.

Workplace Analytics is available as a Microsoft 365 add-on service.

Check out the Microsoft 365 Knowledge podcast

To help you better understand why Microsoft 365 is the world’s productivity cloud, I encourage you to check out the Microsoft 365 Knowledge podcast. Hosted by veteran IT blogger Paul Thurrott and myself, this podcast series digs into the features and functionality across the products that make up Microsoft 365. We also share real-world tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the product. The first two episodes are available on demand.

Every company’s path to digital transformation is different. Over the next few months we’ll bring you more resources, as well as interviews with organizations who share their tips and secrets on their own successful transformations and their learnings from these projects on how they harnessed the transformative power of Microsoft 365—the world’s productivity cloud.