With over 10 years’ experience in the unified communications space, I’ve seen both first and second hand how organizations manage number and user provisioning across many platforms.
Starting with 25,000 people using enterprise voice in Lync 2010 all the way up working as a cloud solution architect at Microsoft, working across different organizations and industries.
The cost when something goes wrong with Teams provisioning
Using an Excel spreadsheet to manage numbers can be challenging, to say the least. Especially when you have multiple people making changes.
When you rely on different teams to keep the data up to date through joiners, movers and leavers processes, you need to take time to validate the data. The invalidity of the data can cause organizations to buy more numbers than they actually need.
I remember having to take control of an Excel spreadsheet to stop changes being made while I spent a week to keep the data up to date. I worked out that would cost around 10% of an FTE to tidy up the mess over a 12-month period.
Another pitfall I’ve experienced is taking information from a project manager at face value without validating it.
Imagine this, you’re implementing a UC migration for 1,500 people in Bristol.
- You ask the project manager for a list of users to assign numbers to.
- It’s Friday afternoon, the communications manager is eagerly waiting to send notifications to the users of their new numbers.
- You receive the list of users, assign them all a number.
- Give the list to the communications manager and complete the migration successfully
… Or so you thought?
Monday morning comes along, and your phone is being lit up by a call from the Operations Director, asking why 800 people in Leicester now have a Bristol telephone number.
Hang about!
That was information from the project manager. I didn’t verify it!
My colleagues in the office didn’t speak to me for a few days. It took two of them nearly a week to fix and undo the “work” I had done.
Table stakes costs you can’t avoid
While you can avoid provisioning errors, it comes at a cost.
Firstly, there’s the cost of an IT ticket when you need to escalate it.
| Cost of error (IT Cost – with escalation) | ||||
| Item | Resource | Number | Hours | Cost |
| Service desk ticket logged | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.10 | $1.53 |
| Ticket triaged & assigned | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.20 | $2.97 |
| Ticket actioned by engineer | 2nd Line Engineer | 1.00 | 1.50 | $40.10 |
| Escalation engineer | Specialist Engineer | 1.00 | 1.00 | $19.35 |
| Ticket management | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 1.00 | $14.88 |
| Ticket Cost | $78.83 | |||
Then there’s the cost of time more than anything.
- The time it takes to keep a list of DDIs up to date.
- The time it takes to do due diligence before a migration.
- The migration itself that must be done out of hours.
Mark Vale, Chief Product Officer at Callroute, knows all about the pain of making changes on a Friday lunch time 😉
Related Reading: When I was provisioning a coordinator, I made lots of mistakes.
Why isn’t there a better option for Microsoft Teams provisioning?
By using a tool to provision users for Teams Phone, you’d mitigate the need for someone to manually keep a DID list up to date.
Not only this but it would also be more efficient. You’d reduce project resource costs and the costs of unnecessarily ordering more numbers from your SIP Provider.
Admins would have a mostly hands off involvement in the day-to-day operations of number management. Apart from configuring new sites and number ranges, you’d no longer need to rely on a service desk team as all moves, adds, and changes would be processed automatically. The service desk can then dedicate time to battling the constant onslaught of tickets for other tools.
You’d also avoid the embarrassment of giving users numbers for the wrong city (like me).
Teams Phone provisioning tools are a much-needed addition to the IT admin’s toolset. It would be beneficial if, with the advancement of AI, they could forecast influxes in joiners, requiring a need to purchase new numbers. Even further, if it could order the numbers for you!
Related Reading: Get Notified When Your Number Ranges Reach Usage Alert Thresholds
For some organizations, they would prefer for end users to have the ability to request provisioning, rather than it being pushed from IT.
Say you’ve rolled out Shared Calling to 50,000 people. But you want users to have the ability to request a DID number. It would be nice to see end user on-demand provisioning in the future.
It’s the perfect time to try Orto for Teams
Callroute launched Orto for Teams in 2023. It’s the new way to provision users on Microsoft Teams.
From new user creation to mass moves, adds, and changes, Orto takes care of the heavy lifting using its automation technology and your input on Entra (Azure AD).
Once you’ve created a user persona, like a sales team in New York, all you need to do is add that user in Entra and mention they work in the New York sales team.
As if by magic, they get all the policies, team assignments, and call queues they need. There are no more hours in the TAC and there’s no more spreadsheets and scripts to battle.
Sounds pretty good, right?
