Co-operative Bank of Kenya smooths Microsoft 365 transition with effective change management

Vision

Moving collaboration to the next level

As one of the leading banks in East Africa, Co-operative Bank of Kenya prides themselves on delivering an exceptional customer experience. To provide this they needed to ensure that their 4,500 employees, across the country, can effectively collaborate and communicate with each other.

With collaboration forming a critical component in the modern organization, they were looking for a solution to enable teamwork irrespective of where their employees were. To support their digital transformation journey they were looking to move from an on- premises email solution to one that would resolve their storage challenges and support their vision of greater collaboration across the organization.

At the same time, they were looking to ensure that they could maintain consistent document versioning, ensuring that all their teams were working on the same documents, eliminating the potential for confusion and duplication of work. With these requirements front of mind, they decided to move to Microsoft 365 and partnered with us to enable a smooth transition and efficient change management.

Transformation

Delivering a comprehensive change-management process

The move from a fragmented collaboration and document sharing environment enabled Co-operative Bank not only to modernize their environment, but was instrumental in enabling them to rapidly move their employees to remote working when this became a necessity as a result of COVID-19.

At the start of the process, they identified effective change management as a critical component of the success of the project. Working together we leveraged a change management process focused on three key areas: awareness, desire and knowledge.

Building awareness required a combined effort from both teams ensuring that all employees were aware of the migration and the impact it would have on their day-to-day operations. At this stage the endorsement of Co-operative Bank’s executive team was critical, establishing the importance of the initiative to the future of the organization.

Once the awareness stage had kicked off, we worked closely together to showcase the capabilities of the new platforms, to build a desire among teams to embrace the solution and incorporate it into their routines. The executive team immediately embraced the platform moving all briefings to Microsoft Teams, with the human resources team leveraging its capabilities as a key communication tool around COVID-19. We also created different scenarios for each department to further showcase the benefits that the migration would deliver.

The final step in the process was ensuring effective knowledge transfer to the Co-operative Bank’s teams. Working closely with their change and project management teams we held several sessions to enable all the employees to take full advantage of the tools they now had at their disposal.

In addition, they deployed Microsoft Teams Direct routing to enable the customer care team to handle customer queries while their team members worked remotely.

Results

Rapid and widespread adoption

With access to a full suite of collaboration and communication tools, Co-operative Bank are now able to accelerate their digital transformation journey, exploring the opportunities that the cloud presents.

Effective collaboration, anywhere
With the move to a cloud-based collaboration solution, their employees are now able
to securely connect to their colleagues and information, whether they’re in the office, at home or on the road. 94% of employees are already using Microsoft 365 to collaborate, opening up the doors for greater teamwork and innovation.

Greater IT efficiency
Leveraging the power of the Microsoft 365 has enabled Co-operative Bank’s IT teams to focus on core IT systems, reducing the need to maintain and support their collaboration environment and the infrastructure that was previously required.

A new standard for meetings
Microsoft Teams has already seen significant adoption with 80% of employees using it as their primary meeting tool. This has allowed them to expand the reach of their teams, including colleagues from across the country in the decision-making process.