With the new transparency available in digital products, there comes a new problem. What are the key important metrics that will tell you if people have adopted your product?
There are no shortage of things you can track. So every time a user interacts with a digital product, they leave a trail, also known as a “signal”. But some interactions are trivial, whereas others are actually significant.
For instance, “the total number of viewers” for a company intranet may sound illuminating, but if you make the route for someone to log into work systems the same mechanism which loads them into the intranet as their company landing page, then as a figure, it is pretty meaningless. “You mean every day, all of my staff look at the intranet? I’ve got 100% usage? That’s wonderful,” says your sponsor or senior stakeholder. Hmmn, no, you’ve implemented Single Sign On and all that the total number of unique users means is that your staff have logged in to start work.
What’s M365 and the key metrics for Adoption?
M365 is the collective name for Office 365 plus the security components. O365 is a range of apps such as Teams, SharePoint and the trusted age-old apps such as Word, Excel and Outlook.
Microsoft are really going for it in terms of tracking the signals or noise your users make when they interact with apps in M365. Consequently, there are so many things you could track and as a result, you could be there for weeks trying to work out what the data is actually telling you. So I’ve pulled together five key metrics for MS Teams adoption worth spending time on.
I’ve also given you their MS jargon names just in case you fancy digging deeper – I’ve used these adoption reports with a number of real clients so I know they are useful for adoption specialists and key senior stakeholders alike.
| MS jargon | What it means | Where you’ll find it |
|---|---|---|
| Shared workspaces using Microsoft Teams | Simple count, allows you to see trend and push adoption | Teams Admin Center |
| People messaging in Microsoft Teams, by message type | Compares use of chat and posts in channels – higher numbers in the latter one is what you’re after | Teams Admin Center |
| People collaborating, by number of shared files | Low = bad, high = evidence of high levels of multiple-author documents, collaboration in action | Teams Admin Center |
| People sharing files in email, by type | High= bad. Increases network traffic when people email “physical” files, increases the chance of versionitis | Teams Admin Center |
| Total number of emails sent in a month | High=bad. Email is a terrible way to work with others, but as a 50 year old technology, it will take a long time to drop out of usage! | M365 Admin Center |
