MS TEAMS TRANSITION PROJECT - (for the technology organization of a large multinational health insurance corporation)
PROJECT DEFINITION: The MS Teams Transition Research project aimed to support the organization-wide (350,000 employees worldwide, as of July 2022) effort underway to identify and transition employees performing diverse functions, in corporate and satellite sites and working from home, from their existing external calling systems to MS Teams external calling.
To that end, stakeholders asked Teams Transition Research to identify likely candidates for transition to MS Teams’ external calling capability, based on participants’ existing telecommunications systems’ structures and technologies, through a series of in-depth interviews with a diverse group of employees.
Stakeholders also wanted loose “personas” and detailed pain points with user journeys (see below for samples, for Groups 2 and 3). I and another researcher conducted 66 in-context in-depth interviews (45 min-1 hour) to get those data. The corporate stakeholders wanted to know how employees across many unrelated functions in many different locations, were communicating externally using a number of different telecommunications modalities.
THE RESEARCH: As one of two researchers, in addition to conducting in-depth remote video interviews of 34 out of 68 participants, I performed text analysis on daily interview data and wrote all summaries, and all text for the final 85-page deliverable “report.” After working with my senior manager to group our participants more finely via affinity mapping, I created the seven PainPoints-Journey Maps used in the final deliverable (see examples above.).
Individuals interviewed included: Pharmacists working in satellite clinics, operations managers, infusion nurses, clinical billing managers and agents, executive assistants, on-site and roving emergency personnel, receptionists, psychiatric support personnel, remote infusion personnel, remote benefits managers and agents.
OUTCOME/POTENTIAL FUTURE: MS Teams internal calling and messaging capabilities were used by all we interviewed, but existing external calling relied on a patchwork of systems and telecommunications methods that encompassed hunt groups, call forwarding groups, multiline desk phones, personal cellphones as well as complex legacy systems. Although many of the participants we interviewed turned out not to be viable candidates for MS Teams external calling capabilities (due to their existing underlying systems), in addition to identifying viable candidates for transitioning, and challenges inherent to their transitioning, many of our research findings also uncovered inefficiencies and issues within existing systems which could be escalated to higher-level leadership for consideration and possible resolution.
Goals Methods Findings
