How we’re helping our people collaborate to be more productive

Like any large global organization, our people need to collaborate. Typically, in any one month we share around 589M chat messages, 1.2B audio minutes and 141M video minutes using Microsoft Teams. It’s our go-to platform for unified workplace communications that has really proved itself to be invaluable in the last 18 months—for us and our clients.

But, as our recent case study highlights, with a tool that has as much built-in versatility as Teams, we’re always looking for ways go further. We want to make the best of Teams’ powerful features to evolve new ways of working. We’re seeking out real productivity improvements and value for our business. And we’re expecting to bring common business tools and services together to the place where our people work.

As you know, projects can be frustrating if you’re not able to collaborate with your team. It’s far easier to maintain momentum—and speed up a project’s progress—when you are all working in a cohesive, consistent way.

Grow and gain

We decided to migrate to Teams as early as 2017, but we knew that chat and meetings were only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how we could grow our people’s collaboration. When used as a platform, Teams has so many options that can help to build business applications and we can tailor the platform to meet people’s individual needs. So, you might want to adopt chatbots that provide text-based interactions to either individuals or within a Team or channel, or you could consider an embedded Web experience, personalized to an individual user.

Today in Teams, Accenture people have access to more than 60 apps and Teams manages 100,000 support chats and 150,000 support queries. In particular, we’ve seen a 25% increase in usage of an enterprise bot known as Ask @Accenture when compared to usage on our company portal. It’s no wonder—using this solution, our employees can get their questions answered up to 70% faster.

While we continue to employ change management to get the best use from Teams, we’re also evolving our use of the platform ongoing. We’re planning to introduce more third-party apps and services that bring common tools and services directly to the Teams interface. And we’ll introduce Power Apps—some built by citizen developers—and other custom productivity enablers, such as a unified, cross-enterprise approvals experience.

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Powerful productivity

With a 20% reduction in the time spent on response-based activities (such as surveys, e-mails and employee actions) and people spending 35% less time navigating across multiple destinations, we feel we know a thing or two about how to drive productivity with Teams, too.

Here’s some of the steps we took that can help you do the same:

• Use case prioritization: We’ve focused on strategic platforms, such as ServiceNow, Salesforce and Workday and prioritized unified experiences.
• IT operating model: We’ve used a DevSecOps model to enable strategic transformation and identified an implementation partner to scale up faster.
• Change and adoption: We’ve focused investment on transformation change efforts.
• Governance and environmental management: We’re enabling compliance at scale by creating a standard baseline. We’ve defined governance for app deployment.
• Talent development: We’ve enhanced talent by cross-skilling platform architects and developers and use Microsoft certifications to skill up quickly.

Read the full case study to find out more about how our people have access to the data, insights and apps they need to work on their best day, every day.