Office 365 roll-out strategy

I believe the question from Nandita is more strategic than technical .

If you are the Project Manager on the project, you are ultimately responsible for the successful delivery of the project .

Therefore you are responsible for driving the overall strategy of the rollout. Without doubt the technical resources and technical leads are keys to delivering the technical component but Project Management as we all know , encompasses things way beyond writing a few technical documents.

Would you run it as waterfall or agile? which components and best practices will you use? You may look at some case studies of other organisations which have successfully implemented an office 365 rollout.

You will need a procurement strategy. Are you going to outsource or in-source the delivery teams?

Kiron's suggestions are excellent from a Strategic perspective and definitely are points that must be the key focus of a PM.

Change Management and Risk are big ticket items.

Understanding your stakeholders and the impacts your project is likely to have on them is another big ticket item.

Big bang approach may not be suitable . A Pilot approach with few users or groups of users representative of all parts of the company may be advisable.

Nandita,

One of the key factors to keep in mind in planning an O365 deployment is user adoption. The technical part is "almost" straightforward, but if you don't get the users on board, it will fail.

The best approach is to define adoption groups, for example, by department. Each department will have different needs and pain points, and thus, possibly, different priorities. Get champions engaged from each department to help understand a unit.

Technically, you can turn on a number of things at once, but others, you should do in a more structured fashion.

In my last organization, we did turn on licenses for everyone early on, to encourage grass-roots adoption, while running deployment streams in parallel. We also ensured we, as a project team, used as many of the features of Office 365 as possible. For example, we provided updates through Yammer, collected feedback using Forms, and automated ad-hoc requests through Flow. We also created a knowledge portal using SharePoint Online.

Technically, you have a couple of main migration items to look at:
- Mailbox migration: this can be phased, however, while Microsoft has been improving the technical capabilities, shared mailboxes can prove to be a complication. It is best to migrate users as a group, including their shared mailboxes and shared calendars.
- OneDrive: the best is to try to get users to migrate their data
- SPO: beware of trying as-is migrations of network data or existing SharePoint sites. Many organisations, in my experience, are not good at housekeeping, and you could be migrating a lot of old data that could be archived instead.

In terms of getting users engaged, focus on the products that are differentiators:
- Teams for collaboration
- Flow for workflow processing
- Forms for surveys and feedback
- PowerApps for your customized application needs

For me, the bigger mailbox, the big "network drive" and plenty of SPO space are now background items, not the selling points of O365

Ivo