Get started driving adoption of Microsoft Teams

• Applies to:

  Microsoft Teams

By driving adoption of Microsoft Teams, you can deliver an excellent user experience and increased business value inside your company. Our goal is to get you up and running quickly so that you can begin your journey with Teams. This guide focuses on user adoption of Teams and has dependencies on your environment's technical readiness, which is addressed in other sections of our documentation.

Adoption prerequisites

Before getting started, make sure that:

• Teams is installed and licenses are assigned in your environment. At a minimum licenses should be assigned to your core team and to the early adopters who will participate in this initial project phase.

• You've downloaded the desktop and mobile applications.

Adoption framework

Microsoft 365 and Office 365 have an adoption framework that applies to major workloads in the service. This framework addresses the core steps that any organization should take to support cloud services. To learn more about the overall adoption framework, see Microsoft Enterprise documentation and resources.

In this Teams adoption plan, we've organized the steps in phases and provided specific Teams guidance as outlined in Adoption phases, next.

Adoption phases

Every adoption project varies in size and complexity based on your environment, but the initial steps are identical across the board. We believe that breaking the process down into three distinct phases—startup, experiment, and enable—will streamline adoption for everyone.

• Start - In this first phase, you'll gather your team together, set up your initial teams, and use Teams to begin planning Teams adoption. This approach will increase your technical familiarity with the product and help you to build the skills necessary to successfully complete subsequent phases.

• Experiment - In this phase of controlled growth, you'll bring your internal champions and early adopters onboard. You'll speak with your business users to identify scenarios that would immediately benefit from the collaboration and communications capabilities that Teams provides. You'll gather feedback that will inform your broad-scale adoption phase, and you'll make service decisions about governance and lifecycle management that will ensure a successful deployment.

• Scale - This is the broad-scale deployment phase in which you'll turn on Teams capabilities for all your employees. In this phase, the size of your organization will determine whether this is a "go big" project that will turn on Teams for all employees simultaneously or if you'll approach this by region, business unit, or other method of segmenting your employee population. In this phase you'll move to a continuous delivery model. Employees, leaders, and business units will want to expand their use of Teams and will require training and your engagement to understand how to best use Teams and other features of Microsoft 365 or Office 365.

Each of these adoption phases depends on your technical and environmental readiness for Teams. Let's get started!

Next: Microsoft Teams adoption phase 1: Start|