Creating an Office 365 Training and Adoption Plan

1. QUICK GUIDE
Creating an Office 365 Training
and Adoption Plan
Designing an Office 365 training and adoption
plan needs to be very specific to your
business and, importantly, your users. In this
short guide we hope to give you some key tips
on how to create a training plan that will work
for both your users and your business. The
main aim of the plan is going to be ensuring
your users feel enabled and are actively
encouraged to use Office 365 to help them
with their daily tasks.
What does success look like?
Before starting with your plan you need to decide and document what success looks like for your
business. By implementing Office 365 are you hoping to increase productivity, security, collaboration, all
the above or something else? Only when you have documented this, can you then work backwards and
create a training and adoption plan working towards these goals.
Who should be involved?
There will be many people involved to ensure the success of your Office 365 training. We find the task of
creating the training plan often comes to either the IT team or the HR team depending on who is owning
the project inside the company. We do find that the most successful outcome comes when both parties
get together, uniting the technical knowledge with the knowledge of the individuals involved.
Champions
Champions are individual users from within your teams and they may be managers or end users. Their
role is to be involved in the planning stages of the training plan creation, to be the first users to review
the training plan and the course contents, and ultimately be the champions for the adoption of Office
365 across the business. We have found that, where end users are involved in any project, by recruiting
the right champions you will have a much higher chance of success.
Partners
Whilst most businesses will have the ability to offer some form of training internally, it is highly
recommended to work with a training provider who helps you to create a plan that is specific to your
needs. Look for a partner who can be flexible to your needs and offers a mixed training approach
covering elements such as e-learning, instructor-led training, content creation and floor walking.
Discuss your needs today!
Call us on 01454 338 338
www.computerworld.co.uk

2. What should be included?
A successful Office 365 adoption strategy will need to be supported by a training plan covering several
different elements depending on how you plan to implement Office 365 for your business.
Office 365 Familiarisation Training
As there are so many components to consider within Office 365, a good place to start for all users would
be some form of Office 365 familiarisation training, which will show the users how to access the Office 365
dashboard, give a high-level overview of the applications that are available and ideally give some relevant
use cases to highlight how the company suggests the applications may be used to help users’ productivity.
Look to use this overview training as a launch event, launching your use of Office 365 to the users. We would
recommend that this training was delivered in such a way that it doesn’t become a short training session
and never discussed again. Consider handout cheat-sheets, offering drop-in sessions for more information,
publish videos on the intranet, and more. Look to drive this training over a period of several weeks via these
various means to ensure adoption.
Suggested elements
• Have a launch event and discuss the company’s vision for Office 365
• Ensure the users are aware of personal benefits to them, such as the ability to use Office applications
on their tablets
• Have short instructor-led familiarisation training
• Offer handouts with key elements to be remembered
• Offer some form of e-learning to dive deeper. For example, you could have some short videos available
on your intranet showing how to make the most out of OneDrive and OneNote
• Involve your champions; get them to discuss their thoughts and findings
E-Mail Migration and Training
The first stage for most is to migrate users’ emails to Office 365, and in most cases this should largely be a
transparent process to the end users. However, make sure you consider any elements that may change for
the end user, such as how the user accesses email via a web browser when they are working from home or
consideration of any changes regarding how they will access email spam filtering services.
Application Specific Training
There are so many applications available as part of Office 365 that we would recommend concentrating
on driving the adoption of only a couple at a time. Beyond the basics of email, personal files (OneDrive)
and notes (OneNote), we recommend understanding where your users will see the biggest benefit and
concentrating on these applications first. We have included two examples below.
• Internal communication – Yammer and Microsoft Video
• Personal and Team Task Management – Planner
It can be important when moving onto application specific training that you create content that is relevant to
your users and their use cases, or work closely with your training partner to ensure they are aware of your
use cases and workflows.
Review and Assess
A critical element is going to be constantly reviewing and assessing your plan. Speak to your users and
understand how they are finding the training and, importantly, how are they getting on using Office 365.
Understand what they would like to learn more about or maybe where they feel they need further clarification.
Discuss your needs today!
Call us on 01454 338 338
www.computerworld.co.uk