A year of transitions
Even during the best of times, moving to Microsoft 365 is no mean feat. But with change fatigue from a recent electronic medical record (EMR) software transition, plus huge workloads and short-staffing issues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—well, the deck was stacked against this large healthcare system from the start. Fortunately, they were up for the challenge.
Overview
In terms of expectations around Microsoft 365 adoption, the entire organization felt some pressure.
As Denver*, the IT program manager in charge, puts it, “I'm one individual on a very small team with the task of supporting 43,000 end users. It’s unrealistic to believe that we could personally train those individuals on a one-on-one basis.”
For Katie*, the police dispatch supervisor, the pandemic had exacerbated communication difficulties within teams. Users relied mainly on email, but senders couldn’t ensure that everyone saw—and read—the messages
As primary care admin director, Vanessa* faced similar communication challenges with her team. Even though users had already been introduced to Microsoft Teams, they had a hard time understanding how it would help them and why they should use it.
Suffice it to say that when the company partnered with BrainStorm to navigate the transition to Microsoft 365, Vanessa, Katie, and Denver were all relieved to have change experts in their corner.
“I knew I wasn't using Microsoft 365 to its maximum capacity. And I knew that there was a lot that I didn't know. And I was hoping that BrainStorm QuickHelp™ could fill in some gaps for me.”
Primary Care Admin Director
Plan
Working closely with a BrainStorm customer success manager, Denver launched communications in BrainStorm QuickHelp™ and began hosting vision workshops, where users could learn best practices for using their Microsoft toolset. He also utilized QuickHelp’s integration with Microsoft Graph to license users and offered targeted learning content to specific employee groups—which paid off quickly.
Meanwhile, Katie found the self-service aspect of QuickHelp invaluable in her busy dispatch center. Her team works around the clock with frequent interruptions, so it’s critical that users be able to take software training at their own pace, track their progress, and pick up where they left off.
"Saying that I like BrainStorm is an understatement. . . . I absolutely love BrainStorm QuickHelp."
Police Dispatch Supervisor
By engaging with the QuickHelp platform, Vanessa’s primary care division came to see the value of Teams. In addition to speeding up communication, Teams also helped employees see user availability, hold more efficient meetings, share files (without versioning issues), and streamline collaboration.
But Vanessa saw more than just team benefits. “When I first started using QuickHelp,” she reported, “I could tell that I was learning a lot . . . I was also becoming braver and trying new things. And I was able to connect a lot of dots to make my job easier and a bit more fun.”
Scale
Getting 43,000 users to adopt Microsoft 365 might sound like a recipe for IT burnout, but that wasn’t Denver’s experience.
“Since rolling out QuickHelp, my daily requests for end user training [are] significantly reduced,” he explained. “Now, when I do receive a request from an individual, I'm able to point them back to the BrainStorm platform . . . rather than having to go on site to facilitate a training in person.”
“I knew very early on into the relationship with [BrainStorm] that we had made the right choice.”
IT Program Manager
In fact, many users have flocked to QuickHelp. The gamification aspect attracted many employees—beyond the tech-savvy IT crowd—who just wanted to make their challenging jobs a little easier.
Microsoft Teams training in QuickHelp has also eased Katie’s workload. She reported, “I can switch my function away from making sure everybody got emails, that everybody is doing the same job equally among all shifts. [Now] they have all the information there at their fingertips [and] can easily search for something.”
QuickHelp also transformed Vanessa’s perspective of Microsoft 365—and turned her into a technology advocate. “I would be in a meeting, and I would hear about a problem that they were having. And I would say, ‘Oh, well, I just learned about this new thing in QuickHelp. I think it can help you solve this problem.’ So, it's really helped me become a connector for a lot of other people.”
With BrainStorm by its side, this healthcare system has come through a mountain of difficulties—and made employees’ jobs easier in the process.
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