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Start with a pilot deployment of Microsoft 365 for frontline workers

  • Article
  • Applies to:
    Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 for frontline workers

Before you commit to a full rollout of Microsoft 365 for frontline workers across your organization, it's a good idea to try it out first with a small set of people in your organization. Starting with a pilot program first can help:

  • Validate user readiness.
  • Identify and mitigate issues.
  • Ensure a successful, organization-wide rollout.

For example, a pilot can help you determine:

  • Whether the scenarios you identified match the business needs of your organization.
  • What elements need to be modified or further customized for your organization.
  • What training and orientation information you need to provide to users before, during, and after they start working with these new tools.

Running a pilot program is part of the overall adoption process. For more information about adopting Microsoft 365 in your organization, see:

Steps to run a pilot program

Get your people together

Assemble a group of individuals from your business, IT, and frontline communities to act as the stakeholder and decision-making group for your Microsoft 365 pilot for frontline workers. Be sure to include individuals from all three communities to give yourself the best chance for success.

Next, identify your phase 1 pilot community and make sure it includes actual frontline workers in the smallest logical grouping for your organization. For example, one restaurant, one division of a department store, one store, one clinical ward, one precinct, one plant, one distribution center, etc. The key is to optimize around the average frontline worker being part of one team only. Managers or specialists might be in more than one team.

Best practice

It's important to include all roles within that smallest logical grouping, from managers to part time or seasonal workers, to uncover valuable insights and enable modern communication scenarios.

Decision points

At the end of this phase, you should be able to answer these questions:

  • Who will participate in your pilot?
  • What's the smallest logical grouping for your organization?

Plan your pilot

Here's some tips for a successful pilot.

  • Set start and end dates and define clear goals for measuring success. These goals can help you plan your rollout after the pilot is completed.
  • Create a test plan, a process for gathering feedback, and a communication plan.
  • Allow enough time to run the pilot and assess its impact. A minimum of 30 days is recommended.
  • Include the right stakeholders and participants, knowing you can add more users throughout the pilot, if necessary. For Microsoft 365 for frontline workers, make sure your stakeholders and participants include not only the business leaders and IT staff, but your frontline managers and workers, so you can:
    • Ensure you understand their challenges while planning the implementation.
    • Check to make sure your implementation is having a positive effect on those challenges.
  • Start small and take time to pause, assess results, and adjust the pilot.

For a successful pilot for frontline workers, simplicity is key! For most organizations, this community typically isn’t provided any company-supported communication or collaboration technology, but are likely already using unsupported consumer tools to accomplish some basic needs.

A recommended best practice is to begin where your users are and mimic the capabilities they’re using in consumer tools today. As your pilot progresses and the iteration process begins, you can grow the experience.

Decision points

  • Which capabilities will you include in Phase 1 of your pilot?
  • Do your frontline workers need Shifts for schedule management?
  • Do your frontline workers need Walkie Talkie for push-to-talk (PTT) communications?

Not sure what consumer tools these users are currently using?

Use a survey to take inventory of the tools, capabilities, and scenarios your users rely on today.

Set up Microsoft 365 and Teams

Determine what devices to support. For example, you can use the Teams mobile clients on Android and iOS for on-the-go access to Teams and frontline worker apps. See Get Teams clients and Manage devices for frontline workers.

See Set up Microsoft 365 for frontline workers and Teams deployment overview for guidance on how to set up Microsoft 365, Teams, and the other services you need for your pilot.

Decision points

  • What chat and channel messaging features will you include in your pilot?
  • Will you create teams from scratch or from a team template?

Best practice

Keep the channels simple. We recommend resisting the urge to create a channel for every possible area of conversation and instead keep things simple. It’s okay if channels are created over time as needed.

After you set up your teams and channels, configure frontline apps that you want to use in the pilot, including:

Communicate

Inform your frontline workers of their participation in the pilot, the pilot goals, and provide training, if necessary, on the basics.

For example, this can be an instruction to go to the Google Play or Apple Store on their mobile devices, download the Teams app, and sign in with their company credentials. Share resources from Microsoft Teams help & learning, as needed. We designed Teams with an easy-to-use interface that most frontline workers should find intuitive.

Best practice

Don’t forget to train your managers on Shifts! If you’re going to include Shifts in your pilot, consider holding a training session with your managers on how to create, manage, and publish schedules to their team.

Measure

Measure usage and assess user feedback. Usage reports help you understand usage and activity patterns, and along with user feedback, provide valuable insight.

See Microsoft 365 reports in the admin center, Microsoft 365 usage analytics, and Teams analytics and reporting.

Empowering your frontline workers is more about people than technology. To understand the impact of Teams, stay focused on your frontline workers’ experience. Survey them before, during and after the pilot in order to understand their needs, pain points, and reactions. You might want to set up a Feedback channel in Teams to collect feedback about their experiences.

If you're iterating your pilot and adding new features over time, this feedback can help guide the order, pace, or even whether additional features are needed.

Best practice

Nurture your champions and highlight your wins. Reward your frontline workers for embracing these new tools and using them in innovative ways that relate to business outcomes for your company. This helps ensure continued adoption of Teams and value to your company.

Iterate and expand

Now that you successfully completed your first pilot with an initial group of frontline workers, it’s time to expand! Consider one of the following expansion options:

  • Expand the number of teams.
    • Instead of one location, can you do one region?
  • Expand features and capabilities.
    • Was there a key feature that your frontline workers suggested that wasn't included in the initial feature set?

We recommend working through this process as many times as needed to arrive at a solution, set of best practices, and training documentation for your frontline workers.