Your Microsoft Teams Adoption Strategy will not be complete without having a clear idea of what makes it successful. How do you recognize whether your project is running efficiently or there are still some areas that could be improved? This is what your Microsoft Teams KPIs, or success criteria, are for.

In the previous articles we discussed in detail the vision and sponsorship, use cases and types of governance as key elements of Teams Adoption. Today, let’s talk about how to measure your project success, or, in other words, determine your Microsoft Teams Adoption KPIs.

Determining Microsoft Teams KPIs

Any project undertaking requires determining success criteria in order to be able to demonstrate Return on Investment (ROI) or Risk on Non-Investment (RONI) to the executive board. This will ensure that your senior leadership are not only onboard with the project but are also interested in its success and are actively involved. As a result, this will help you win over the rest of the staff and successfully implement Teams Adoption.

In order to determine your Microsoft Teams KPIs you should, first of all, know where you’re going and where you want to go. Evaluate the current situation from your project’s perspective and identify the company’s needs in this regard. The pain point and challenges that the staff is facing will help you determine your objectives for the Teams Adoption.

For example, it can be reducing the number of internal emails, increasing customer satisfaction, lowering the time on processing customers’ orders, etc.

Make sure to follow the SMART rule when identifying your Microsoft Teams KPIs.

Specific – clear and concise, answering the questions “what, who, why, and where?”

Measurable – easy to track the progress

Achievable – feasible to get, not extreme

Realistic – aligned with the company’s goals and stakeholders’ expectation

Timely – linked to a specific time frame, answering the question “when?”.

The key to identifying KPIs for Microsoft Teams Adoption is to correlate them with your business scenarios that you will apply in your adoption strategy. Thus you will be able to track their progress after Teams Adoption.

Examples of Microsoft Teams success criteria, measuring methods and goal setting 

Here are a few examples of success criteria that you could use for your Microsoft Teams Adoption Strategy. Make sure you regularly measure them using different methods (below you can find some examples) and compare with the initial figures.

In order to evaluate how efficiently your implementation runs, define the goals that you want to achieve with Teams adoption.

Success criteria	Method	Goal example
Operational costs reduction Lower spending on travel, phone bills and third-party conferencing apps subscription (Skype, Zoom, etc.)	Quantitative Account reports, travel and phone expense reports	Reduce phone and travel expenses by 15%
Better employee engagement Regular and transparent communication between employees, active participation of employees in company’s life	Quantitative Number of posts, comments and likes on Teams and Yammer, meetings reports	Employee engagement increased by 20%
Increased productivity Shorter meetings preparation time, live-streaming presentation, online brainstorming session, faster follow-up, live collaboration	Quantitative Average meeting time Qualitative End-user survey, Teams feedback	Time to process customer’s order reduced by 10%
Improved collaboration between departments Real-life feedback sharing, discussion of product development and collaboration	Quantitative Number of posts in Teams/Yammer Qualitative End-user survey	Increased usage of Teams and Yammer
Enhanced security Security and compliance	Quantitative Number of requests to the support team Number of virus infections of PCs	Lower the end-user support workload of the IT team by 10%

Examples of Microsoft Teams KPIs by scenarios

We have presented you some quick examples of different success criteria. Now let’s apply them to a few business scenarios that you can implement directly in your organization.

Project Management

Timeliness KPIs:

• Percentage of on-time completed projects – evaluate how many of the projects and/or their deliverables were completed on time.
• Time spent on project (collective/individual) – see how much time your team and/or its members individually spent on completing a project before and after Teams adoption.
• Number of adjustments to the schedule – count how many times you and your team have to adjust the project’s schedule and observe how it will change with Teams.

Quality Microsoft Teams KPIs:

• Customer satisfaction – rate the level of customer satisfaction with the course of the project and its results
• Number of errors in the project – calculate the number of mistakes that were made during the project implementation
• Employee turnover rate – take account of the project staff turnover and compare the results after Teams implementation

Budget KPIs:

• Number of budget iterations – estimate how many times your project team had to alter the budget planning to complete the project
• Planned value – examine how the cost of the project is aligned with the initial budget planning
• Cost reduction – see if your team spends less/the same/more on projects after Teams implementation

Effectiveness KPIs:

• Training needed for project – estimate how prepared your team is for the project and the number of hours required for additional training. See how Teams impacts the number of hours necessary for the training.
• Number of cancelled projects – calculate how many projects were postponed or withdrawn. Since this can be caused by lack of planning and goal alignment, compare the results before and after Teams rollout and estimate the progress.

Recruitment

• Recruitment time – analyze how much time it takes to hire a new candidate (from applying/contacting till signing the contract).
• Time to fill the position – evaluate how long it takes to fill a new opening.
• Recruitment cost – estimate average costs per hire, which include salaries for employees involved in the recruitment process, administrative costs for onboarding and training, and others.
• Onboarding time and efficiency – consider how long it takes to onboard new hires and how well they are performing in the initial stage. The latter can be estimated by the level of manager’s satisfaction with the new hire.

Account Management

• Resolution time – establish how much time it takes to resolve customers’ requests in Customer Support.
• Churn rate – take account of the percentage of expired contracts that were not renewed.
• Revenues – evaluate how your revenues grow due to contract extensions, upselling and cross-selling.

Sales

• Customer satisfaction – take account of the level of your clients’ satisfaction with the selling experience with your organization.
• Average conversion time – compare how the conversion time changes before and after the use of Teams in your sales department.
• Reaction time – see how long it takes before you receive customer’s feedback and making according adjustments to your product or service
• Processing time – evaluate how long it takes to process the order.

After establishing your KPIs, make according comparisons before – during – after Teams roll-out to measure the success of your Microsoft Teams Adoption Strategy.

Tools for measuring Microsoft Teams KPIs

There are different way to measure your KPIs. Besides using the quantitative and qualitative methods available in your organization such as customer and end-user surveys, account reports and company’s performance among other, you can use digital tools.

Microsoft tools

For instance, Microsoft offers an Microsoft 365 Reports in the admin center  that allows you to link your KPIs to the system and get instant reports that represent your organization’s Teams usage and adoption.

Office 365 Adoption Content pack in Power BI

You can use this tool to get information about how your firm is adopting Microsoft 365 communication and collaboration tools, including Teams.

The platform allows you to view and analyze Teams usage data, create reports on different KPIs, and share them with you staff. As a result, you will get access to all the information regarding how different branches and departments of your organization are using Microsoft Teams.

Here’s a list of reports that you can build:

• Adoption status: track the number of users and their activity.
• Storage: see how much information is stored in Teams compared to tenant quota.
• Communication report: identify which channel of communications your staff prefers most (Teams, Yammer, Skype, emails, etc.).
• Collaboration report: define the number of OneDrive accounts, SharePoint sites and how documents are shared in your organization.
• Connection Location Report: separate the data on Teams usage according to geographical distribution.

Microsoft Teams analytics and reporting

Another great tool to use for measuring your KPIs which is available in the Microsoft Teams admin center. It allows you to view how your employees are using Teams. For instance, you can see how many users communicate through chats and channels and the devices that they use for messaging. This will help you evaluate usage patterns in your organization and make better business decisions regarding your Microsoft Teams Adoption Strategy.

Microsoft Teams

Teams itself allows you to view analytics for teams and channels where you are a member. With this capability users can see the number of active users, posts and replies.

You can see user analytics on three levels:

1. Cross-team (broad overview of usage data across all the teams that a user is a member of)

2. Per-team (data on a specific team)

3. Per-channel (data on a specific channel)

Downloading data

Another possibility is downloading data from different sources whether its your organization’s reports or Microsoft tool. Then you can make your own analysis corresponding to the needs of your organization and your Adoption Plan.

For instance, it can be analyzing the number of internal emails vs. number of posts and messages, or the number of video calls made through Skype or a third-party software vs. number of Teams video calls. There are many criteria that you can gauge, and the choice you make depends on how you measure success of Teams Adoption in your organization.

Workplace Analytics

Another Microsoft app that analyses data from everyday user activity of Office 365. The app provides information regarding collaboration patterns that will help you keep track of employee engagement, productivity and effectiveness.

Third-party apps

Last but not least, there’s a number of apps that can help you analyze your Microsoft Teams user information.

Here’s the list:

Swoop Analytics – a great tool to gather insights regarding the use of Microsoft Teams and Yammer, among other software. It provides deep collaboration and behavioral analysis of your users’ usage patterns and help you adapt behaviors to make better and well-informed decision about your Microsoft Teams rollout.

Lecko analytics – an application for extracting and analyzing all the activity data (secondary data) from Microsoft 365. Ready-to-use indicators updated daily are proposed: detailed analysis of team activities to better manage the adoption towards the reduction of mails within teams, the control of meeting times or the use of kanban flows in Planner.  
The “security by design” approach adopted with the hybrid architecture allows the customer to extract and host data on its own infrastructure. The Lecko Analytics APIs allow to feed PowerBI.

Tryane Analytics – a software that help you identify the most active and least engaged teams, which can be very helpful for defining best practices. Among other capabilities, Tryane analyses third-party apps usage in Teams and creates customized analysis depending on your success criteria.

Qualitative tools

End-user survey

End-user survey is an excellent method to evaluate how well your employees are adopting Teams, how their level of productivity and collaboration changes with the new program and their overall experience of using the app.

We suggest that you conduct satisfaction surveys at every stage of your Adoption process. The feedback that you’ll get will help you improve your strategy, add necessary changes and recognize the best ways your organization can use Teams.

Here are some recommendations for your end-user surveys at the pilot and rolling-out stages of Teams adoption.

Pilot phase	Full-scale implementation phase
Ask champions about their knowledge of the new way of working and new solutions	Before the rollout conduct a survey asking your employees about their knowledge of Teams
In the middle of the pilot phase survey your champions and use the results to develop your full-scale strategy	In the mid-term create a satisfaction survey to understand your end-users’ experience with Teams and add necessary adjustments to your strategy
At the end of the pilot survey conduct your final survey and adjust your Adoption Plan if necessary	After the official rollout, conduct regular survey to evaluate end-user satisfaction with the deployment process and with the adoption itself.

Line of business application

You can also pull together data from different sources, such as organizational charts, reports, email activity and surveys to make a deep analysis of all the spectrums of your Microsoft Teams Adoption. For example, your user activity in Teams parallel to other apps, employees’ attitude towards the adoption and their level of satisfaction with the new tool and the management.

Combining all this different data will give you a clearer understanding of how successful your Teams Adoption Strategy. You will also be able to estimate whether or not you need to adjust your planning.

You will need to consider different use cases for line of business application.

For example, if you want to improve the way your sales team works around closing deals, you will want to analyze how your CRM software works with Teams. In this case, your KPI will be the time it takes to close a deal.

Now you are ready to identify success criteria that apply your organization’s business scenarios, know how you can measure your Microsoft Teams KPIs as well as how to set the right goals.

Don’t miss our following articles on other key elements of a successful Microsoft Teams Adoption Strategy.