While Jay and I were speaking at 365 EduCon D.C., we were able to sit down with Jeremy Wood and talk about Teams in Government and how the US Government uses Teams.
Jeremy Wood is a Federal IT implementer, strategist, and enthusiast specializing in complex business systems. His expertise and career spans infrastructure, service desk, software development, budget, policy, and architecture. He continues to focus on providing value to business through technology solutions to reduce cost and increase efficiency. He is currently in a pivotal role at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) that will help transform both the business and IT roles and systems through planning, alternative analysis, developing business cases, and facilitating the investment review process.
Jeremy told us about how his organization was a Skype organization, but with Covid and the challenges his organization faced, they turned to Teams to meet there collaboration needs. They began a process to rolling it out and now his users are constantly asking how can they leverage teams even more.
One of the biggest challenges was governance and what controls did they want to put in place. They created user personas and scenarios on how their users would want to use Teams. We discussed how important using the Teams Adoption guides can be to organizations trying to roll out Teams and change the culture to being a Teams first mentality. We also talked about the challenges that government users face because not all features are rolled out to the government tenants as quickly as they are to enterprises tenants.
Jay talked about card sorting and using Teams and Whiteboard to do card sorting to help with information architecture and Jeremy added his own experiences with Whiteboard. I then told a story about how a customer of mine has created a Center of Excellence in SharePoint for training materials and posting tutorials when new features roll out.
Jeremy talked about the importance about having a business analysts to help understand and build business solutions for his users. He said one of the best tools they use are Learning Pathways and have built out a support solution of Teams and training to help your users including monthly “Ask Me Anything” sessions.
We asked Jeremy what things interested him that are coming up. He talked about Power Bi pro and Analytics are of a lot of interest to him and his organizations. Jeremy is really looking forward to building things out on the Teams platform like adaptive cards and SharePoint pages like Viva Connections.
Podcast: The Geek Within
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