Letās just preface this with the fact that Microsoft is exceptional.
Whether youāre a Microsoft house, a competitor, or an onlooker who hates the UI compared to other apps, the job Microsoft has done bringing virtual meetings, asynchronous collaboration, control rooms, broadcast setup, etc. (and the list really does go on) is remarkable.
Since its inception as a Skype for Business replacement and the Microsoft alternative to Slack, the numbers coming out of Microsoft (for Teams) are ridiculous.
Boosted, somewhat, thanks to the rapid digital transformation (or you might say digital reaction) during the coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft Teams has over 280 million monthly users and we even see Microsoft Teams Rooms inside 70% of the Fortune 500.
Yes, you read that right. Thatās just room systems. Itās not reported how many of the Fortune 500 are using Teams but we do know that 91 of the Fortune 100 use Teams in some capacity.
So, what’s the worst thing about Microsoft Teams?
Yes, enough of the niceties. Whatās really up with Teams?
Well, itās actually not even a Teams feature. Itās more of a process.
And if youāre a Teams admin, youāre going to roll your eyes and wince in pain.
Let me ask you a question…
How much time and energy do you spend on constant provisioning changes?
You know. The new user requests that donāt have all the information. The simple task that should be a quick set and forget.
Only, itās never like that, is it?
- HR sends a request for a new user. They need a laptop, email, Teams, the works.
- You get them up to speed inside your SLA for a new user request and close the ticket.
What happens the next day?
Another ticket.
Turns out that new user needs special policies. After all, theyāve joined the sales team and need their calls recorded. Oh, and theyāre in the New York office so all their calls should be recorded.
But nobody told you that.
At this stage, youāre getting the ball rolling on a tick box exercise (literally) that should have been done in the original ticket.
Sure, this might only take a moment. But the admin surrounding the physical task is an unnecessary waste of time.
And, by the way, when this happens for the third time in a week, youāre not alone in tearing your hair out.
The worst thing here is that this is a very mild synopsis of what happens inside the life of a Teams admin.
Sometimes, youāre doing this at scale.
And thatās where it gets interesting. Okay, interesting is a mediocre word to use here. Thatās where it gets horrible.
But before we document that, did you forget about all the moves, adds, and changes you get asked to action?
Of course, that new user has changed departments after only a few weeks. They now need different policies to facilitate their move.
Look. This is a good thing. Theyāve done a good job and probably got promoted. But itās just so manual and time-consuming.
And you know that, when you do these all day every day, you leave yourself open to making a small error.
Itās human.
We are not perfect.
When you combine the countless new user requests and moves, adds, and changes, they add up.
If you make one small error in every 100 changes, it doesnāt seem like a big thing. In fact, thatās probably a great strike rate. You should give yourself a pat on the back.
When I was a provisioner, letās just say I may have made 1.5 mistakes in every 100.
This is where it gets muddy.
For every manual mistake, thereās a user or team of users suffering on the other end.
Instead of spending a few minutes per change, it adds up to a few hours of remedial work and lost time.
The most complicated errors come in at nearly four hours.
We did the math for you…
Cost of error (IT Cost ā 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 |
And letās not talk about that time I knocked a whole business offline for three days at the click of a button.
Although, I did write my provisioning confessions if youāre nosey like that.
The cost of manual provisioning errors
The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted the cost column in the table above.
Weāve worked out that it costs around $78.83 per provisioning ticket when things go wrong.
Thatās not budgeted for in any report, meeting, or mind. So, you can bet the CFOs and FDs gritted their teeth when they saw that.
This is a light-hearted view of one of the worst things about Microsoft Teams. But we should get serious for a moment.
In large enterprises, thereās a lot of change.
Those changes, albeit with the help of scripts, are manual. The very script youāre using was made with manual input and is exposed to manual error.
Letās look at the figures.
Number of Monthly Changes | Cost of Change Per Month | Cost of Change Per Year (ongoing) |
50 | $1,969.42 | $23,633.04 |
100 | $4,088.76 | $49,065.12 |
350 | $16,037.14 | $192,445.68 |
500 | $26,325.15 | $315,901.80 |
1000 | $54,869.11 | $658,429.32 |
These are the average costs, factoring in some things going wrong but the majority going right.
It’s a lot.
And this table didnāt appear in the procurement summary when you bought your Microsoft licenses.
But thatās enough throwing shade on fellow provisioners and enough scaring the living daylights out of all the finance folks.
We fixed the worst thing about Microsoft Teams
We (Callroute) have created an auto-provisioning solution that minimizes the risk of manual error when adding new users and making changes further down the line.
Instead of relying on memory and maybe a documented process, you create user personas with everything that type of user will need.
Then, the next time you have a user who falls into that category, they get automatically provisioned with all their Teams policies and access, based on the user you assign.
All you need to do is configure an AzureAD attribute and Callroute does the rest for you.
See it for yourself:
That means every time you have a new starter, or need to make a move, add, or change, you assign them a persona and we assign all the relevant policies.
Say, for example, marketing hires 10 interns on the same day as you have a new sales academy of 40 starters. And it just so happens that your operations team has doubled from 25 to 50 to meet the new demand of all your marketing and sales staff.
Thatās 100 new users to provision.
Itās one thing coping with the tedium of doing the same task over and over again. But think about the time you could be spending on tasks where you add real value. Think of the time you get back in your day.
And what happens if you make a mistake (we are all human, after all)?
One small mistake, caused by manual data entry, could lead to marketing having access to private documents your accounts team wouldnāt dream of sharing with anyone.
Letās make a conscious decision to not do that.
Callrouteās automated provisioning does all the heavy lifting, so you can get on with your job.
Ready to start automating your provisioning?
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