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

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 close on 6,000 employees, across the country, can communicate effectively.

With collaboration being critical to the bank’s performance, they were looking for a solution to enable teamwork irrespective of where their employees were.

The bank was also 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.

They also needed to 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.

The move from a fragmented collaboration and document-sharing environment to Microsoft 365 was instrumental in enabling the bank to support remote working when this became a necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the start of the process, they identified effective change management as being critical to success of the project.

Working together, we developed a change-management process focused on three key areas: awareness, desire and knowledge.

Building awareness required a combined effort from both teams to make all employees aware of the migration and the impact it would have on their day-to-day work.

The endorsement of Co-operative Bank’s executive team was critical to 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 so that teams would be enthusiastic about using them and incorporating them into their workflows. The executive team immediately embraced the platform, moving all briefings to Microsoft Teams, and the human resources team used Teams 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 Co-operative Bank’s teams. Working closely with their change and project management teams, we held several sessions to enable all employees to take full advantage of the tools they now had at their disposal.

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

With access to a full suite of collaboration and communication tools, Co-operative Bank could accelerate their digital transformation journey and take advantage of the features and capabilities of cloud-based solutions.

Effective collaboration, anywhere

With the move to a cloud-based collaboration solution, employees are now able to securely connect to their colleagues and find information, whether they’re in the office, at home or on the road. The rapid update of Microsoft 365 across the organization opened the door to greater teamwork and innovation.

Greater IT efficiency

Leveraging the power of 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 saw significant adoption, with the majority of employees being quick to use 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.