Call for change
Accelerate the art of collaboration
In a constantly changing landscape, teamwork has never been more important. Accenture is empowering its more than 620,000+ digital workforce by not only bringing the data, insights and services to where our people work, but also putting the tools in their hands to live a truly cloud-native life.
To make this happen, we have undertaken a digital worker journey that involves foundational technology, productivity and collaboration. In particular, we have improved collaboration and productivity company-wide, using tools such as Microsoft Office 365, Windows 10 and OneDrive for Business. Now, we are making the best use of Microsoft Teams’ versatility to bring together technology and human ingenuity and make our business more agile.
Using Microsoft Teams, Accenture people can communicate, collaborate and interact effectively wherever and whenever and take advantage of a secure, next-generation approach that helps them to enjoy an elastic, digital workplace.
Accenture investments in digital technologies, infrastructure and a collaborative culture have positioned us well to manage the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, our earlier move to scalable public cloud has meant that we could move swiftly to remote working and take advantage of the versatile Teams capabilities.
"Teams was the critical piece of our response to COVID-19. It was by far the most important way to maintain continuity with our clients and with our people, period."
— STUART BROWN, Managing Director – Microsoft Business Group, Accenture
When tech meets human ingenuity
Redefining how we work together
Microsoft Teams is a chat-centered collaboration platform that brings together collections of people, content and tools to get things done. While Microsoft Teams was still in the concept stage, Accenture collaborated with Microsoft on the early technical preview, providing input on the types of use cases relevant in a large, multinational organization and what was needed for resilient scale and security. Accenture also participated in the product pilot, along with other customers and partners, to keep pace with changing demands and push the envelope with Microsoft on Teams’ capabilities.
As a company highly tuned to change, Accenture’s approach was to use Teams while continuing to work with Microsoft to adapt the product and prepare migration steps. Accenture people were being empowered—and encouraged—to use Teams if they desired, with caution expressed around the newness of the tool and a clear indication that our company-wide adoption was still pending.
When Accenture deployed Teams, we did so in stages to transition from organic growth to large-scale access and adoption. Yet, the adoption of Teams was made easier given that Teams is woven into the Microsoft Office 365 fabric and brought a familiar platform into Accenture’s workplace. Today, all Accenture employees have transitioned to Teams and, accelerated by the move to remote working due to COVID-19, we have seen a massive increase in its usage—a 257% increase in audio usage and a 642% increase in video usage immediately following the pandemic.
Alongside a rigorous change and adoption program that uses multiple mediums and channels, we engaged leadership ambassadors, Teams champions and key stakeholder groups from the outset.
A 24/7 Operations team helps to meet Accenture’s needs when it comes to Teams support, along with monitoring of key network devices and local office capacity using standard tools. Reporting consists of a combination of Microsoft-provided data with Accenture organization data, which enables us to custom slice the data. New reporting enables us to support Teams from the Accenture office perspective to the end-user device level. An emphasis on the Accenture office quality helps us to focus on sites and devices that are at the root of any issues.
During the testing times of the global pandemic, Teams has positioned our organization to achieve the kind of frictionless collaboration that elevates our productivity and efficiency to new levels. As one Accenture professional said in a recent survey: "It's my favorite tool, brings everything I need to be productive in one place... I have transformed the way my team works now."
A valuable difference
To modernity—and beyond
Our progress with Teams has been accelerated by our strong relationship with Microsoft. Today, Accenture is the largest enterprise user of Teams. And we’ve worked together with Microsoft to create a Teams Resource Center to share leading practices. Our rapid transition to Teams is reflected in the scale of use:
680K
active users in Teams
413K
active teams
515M
chat messages per month
1.6B
minutes of audio per month
118M
minutes of video conferences each month
79M
mobile minutes per month
Teams as-a-platform
Using Teams as-a-platform brings together all of the tools, content, and processes into a single location to enable a new way of working. Teams provides an app store with a variety of available Microsoft and third-party solutions, as well as an extensible framework to support custom app development and new low- and no-code solutions through Microsoft’s Power Platform.
We can introduce new capabilities, automation and business processes to suit our business needs—all without having to leave Teams. We’re also introducing extra services, such as using bots to answer people’s queries more quickly, and integrating apps to bring the content, tools, and processes into a digital cockpit where work gets done. So far, we have enabled more than 60 Teams-based apps, such as CALM (CAL + Machine), a custom app embedded in Teams that is specifically targeted at delivering in-context insights, such as financial filings or Twitter news, to our Client Account Leads (CALs).
Teams is also bringing value in a broader context, transforming and enhancing the relationships with our clients and between our own people, partners and vendors:
Drives inclusivity: Facilitating deep connections and engaging partnerships demands a collaboration tool that’s woven into the productivity fabric. Unlike the social dynamics of face-to-face meetings, online meetings are a level playing field in terms of people weighing in on a big idea and can bring better solutions to our clients.
Frictionless collaboration: Teams makes it easier for everyone at Accenture to collaborate. Teams enables clients to join meetings, chat, share and co-author files, dissolving the barriers between them and Accenture teams to enjoy the “holy grail” of collaboration. Video enables people to be themselves, humanizing client conversations and introducing expertise from anywhere in the world at the click of a button.
Consistent meeting experiences: The Teams Rooms functionality gives Accenture offices video conferencing and collaboration devices in meeting spaces with a familiar Teams user experience. We also implemented a solution to use Teams to schedule all video device meetings, no matter the device type. More than 700 Microsoft Surface Hubs are being used as a favorite device for brainstorming in the company’s innovation hubs. A proximity join feature that enables people to start a meeting without having to touch any Teams devices in the room can help the transition back to the office and further enable the digital worker with a greater sense of safety.
By modernizing our way of working using Teams, we can not only bring the data, insights and services to where our people work, but also put the tools in their hands to live a truly cloud native life.
Teams provides a new generation of technology for communicating, chatting, file sharing and conferencing that adds value to our day-to-day:
Listen to podcasts
Hear conversations with our IT leaders about how our use of Microsoft Teams at Accenture is enhancing our employee experience.
Blogs about Microsoft Teams at Accenture
Read more about how the versatile scope and scale of Microsoft Teams can help people better handle dynamic change.
Meet the team
