Sector
Charity
Users
1,500
Solutions
Microsoft Teams
The Royal British Legion is a charity providing financial, social and emotional support to members and veterans of the British Armed Forces, their families and dependents, as well as all others in need
Silversands, now part of the Chess Group, has been delivering Microsoft consultancy & support to the British Legion since 2018.
The Challenge
In 2020, The Royal British Legion was already working with Silversands and on track to deliver a full Office 365 implementation over a period of 18 months. However, when the Covid-19 crisis began, a decision was made to quickly deploy Teams within just three weeks.
Our challenge working with The Royal British Legion team was to have all 1,500 users up and running with Chat, Meetings and a Directorate Level Team to support working from home.
To exacerbate the challenge we were faced with a mixed device estate; some staff were on managed devices, others had versions of BYOD and a great number were using their personal laptops, computers and tablets.
The Solution
We worked in close partnership alongside a team of Legion colleagues to deliver a 10-day pilot to five teams and then help them implement the full Teams roll-out to 1,500 staff.
Working with the Legion’s IT team, our consultants:
- Deployed Microsoft Teams using the People Manager Framework.
- Enabled basic governance, including preventing download of apps to personal devices, setting a basic retention policy, turning off Groups creation, restricting the IP range to the UK and blocking guest access to Teams.
Working with the Legion’s Project and Internal Comms teams, our change management and adoption consultants:
- Provided a full communications and engagement programme that included implementing and customising Learning Pathways with a lot of contextual content that highlighted Legion specific requirements.
- Developed training and development sessions for Teams Owners and Yammer Admins.
- Delivered a series of webinars to end-users on Chat, Meetings, OneDrive, Yammer, Co-authoring and Channels.
- Implemented Yammer for internal comms to support the rollout and address concerns about social isolation.
- Crafted a daily update message for the CIO that gave users core information in more easily digestible chunks.
“Our existing close relationship with Silversands enabled us to get them to act as a trusted partner, working alongside our team to deliver rapid change. We were able to take advantage of their expertise, and their capacity to deliver in a short period of time. Silversands had a good breadth of capability and were able to get us the right staff with the right knowledge, which really helped us do something which normally wouldn’t have been possible”
Stuart McSkimming, CIO, The Royal British Legion
The Outcome
As a result of the hard work of our technical and adoption consultants together with the Legion’s IT, comms and project teams, Microsoft Teams was configured for appropriate governance, a full adoption programme was developed and 1,500 staff members were fully enabled to use Microsoft Teams.
This project demonstrated what can be achieved working together as a team, rather than partner and client.
