DXC creates agile working environment for 60,000 employees with Microsoft Teams

When Richard Wilkinson, DXC Technology’s solutioning and onboarding director for South Europe, was putting together a proposal for a large European carmaker, he assembled a virtual team of experts from Japan, Spain, France, Germany and the United States who worked in a unified, agile, collaborative manner in Microsoft Teams to help win the business.

Teams are so ingrained in the operation of Wilkinson’s far-flung 250-employee department that at any one time there can be as many as 200 ad hoc groups using the tool to communicate with potential customers and develop technology solutions. Before using Teams, employees would have to flip back and forth between Skype, Excel, SharePoint, Microsoft Project and long email threads at the cost of collaboration efficiency.

Teams aggregates all those communication and collaboration tools into one seamless, integrated platform that “has allowed us to organize work in a virtual environment,” says Wilkinson, who describes Teams as a “game changer.”

In Teams, employees can all work on a single document at the same time and share progress in real time. Nobody gets left behind because the persistent chat function enables everyone to see what has gone on before. “Teams has been a catalyst for a new way of working,” Wilkinson says.

Since DXC began offering Teams to other groups in the company, more than 60,000 employees have signed on, making DXC one of the top 15 largest Teams implementations in the world. And that’s just the beginning. DXC hopes to get that number up to 100,000 employees in 2020.

Why Microsoft Teams?

Ever since DXC was formed in the 2017 merger between Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) enterprise services, there has been an effort to consolidate systems and modernize the user experience for DXC’s 130,000 employees. Since DXC was already on the Microsoft Enterprise 365 platform, activating Teams enabled DXC to integrate productivity tools that were already deployed and were familiar to employees, says Jorge Pimentel, Collaboration Services Portfolio leader for the Office of the CIO.

“One of the big drivers behind choosing Teams is the deep native integration to services we already use on a daily basis, such as SharePoint, Calendar and OneDrive,” Pimentel says. “This means we don’t have to reengineer or migrate existing content. Now we consume it through Teams. Teams also offers a flexible model to scale and customize each group to meet its business needs. All of this means we have a solid foundation natively connected to the Office 365 services already containing our data.”

In addition, Teams offers advanced security and compliance capabilities. Access is controlled by multifactor authentication, and all data, whether at rest or in transit, is encrypted. Teams piggybacks on Office 365 groups to manage access permissions to the content of each group. Teams provides a number of incremental improvements to the ways employees work, all of which add up to increased employee satisfaction, improved productivity and significant business benefit. Here are some examples of how Teams makes a difference:

• Teams eliminates the time-wasting and inefficient “context switching” that occurs when employees need to flip back and forth between browser, chat and productivity apps. Teams also optimizes document editing and sharing, doing away with the need to consolidate multiple file versions.
• Email was never intended to be a collaboration tool. With Teams, employees are reducing their dependence on email for sharing documents and sending attachments. They are collaborating more freely and in a more organized and secure manner.
• Staff meetings are more organized and more effective because documents and files are consolidated in a single place. A Teams group session can integrate a variety of collaboration modes, including real-time document sharing, videoconferencing and persistent chat.
• Project management is improved because Teams creates a common workplace where project team members can share documents, action items, milestones, calendars, etc.
• Permission management is automated and secure, so groups can be easily spun up and then dissolved when that project has been completed.

Soft rollout gains momentum

Instead of making a big splash or imposing the system on employees, DXC decided to use a low-key, soft rollout in which employees were informed about the availability of Teams and then given the option of whether to use it or not.

The soft rollout was designed to allow the IT teams to gather feedback from early adopters and collect success stories to drive additional adoption toward that 100,000 goal. “We’ve received a lot of positive feedback,” says Debbie Ermiger, executive director of IT end user services in the DXC Office of the CIO.

Ermiger also notes that at any one time, more than half of DXC’s employees might be working outside of a DXC office, either at a client site, hotel or other remote location. That’s why it’s important to provide employees with a platform that enables teams scattered across different time zones to work together toward a business objective.

Pimentel acknowledges there is a learning curve associated with Teams, as with any major system change. To help encourage adoption, his office has put together a variety of self-help articles and video guides to specific activities. Teams is being promoted in internal newsletters and is being championed by DXC executives and power users.

In Wilkinson’s case, he made the decision to deploy Teams on a Friday, made the announcement to his group on a Monday and had Teams up and running the following Monday. “There is no way we could have done that with another tool,” says Wilkinson. He is especially pleased with the mobile app, which he describes as “brilliant.”

He is also looking forward to extending Teams’ usage to external clients so he can invite customers — like that European carmaker, for instance — to workshops or planning sessions in Teams.