Tom Arbuthnot: 0:00

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Microsoft Teams Insider podcast. Really excited for this one. One of the things I wanted to do on the podcast was get more views from enterprise and what's really going on in the real world of Microsoft teams and collaboration. And kindly Chul-Young, who is collaboration platforms and service product manager at Paraxel has agreed to come on. Hey, Chul-Young, how are you doing?

Chul-Young: 0:22

Hi, Tom. I'm fine. Thanks for having me.

Tom Arbuthnot: 0:24

No, great to have you on. I appreciate you taking the time. We've had a lot of good conversations offline, so I've been looking forward to this one. It's good to get the view from outside the kind of consulting in Microsoft bubble as well. So give us a little bit of introduction who you are and what your role is, and maybe a little bit about Paraxel as well.

Chul-Young: 0:42

Yeah, sure, sure. I'm working for Paraxel. Paraxel is a CRO a clinical research organization, and what they do is offering expertise and services for managing clinical studies. Clients are the big farmers and biotech companies. And I'm working in the internal IT department at Paraxel and I joined Paraxel in 2005. Oh my gosh, times twice. I started as a IT project manager and then about 10 years later, I switched gears and went over to the iT product manager. Now, the big shift I noted is, When you're an IT project manager, it's okay like a trail arrow. If you do something wrong, you can do it quickly, redo it again and then it works. In the product management world you should take time before you make a decision because the decision you're going to make should be the right one because this is more long-term implications. My first area was their work and resource management systems, but then, Summer 2019, I was asked whether I want to switch over to the collaboration space. And I was asking her, okay, so what would be the area, do you know Microsoft 365? And it was like, nah, not really. And but I'm an end user at Paraexcel of the office product and so forth. Yeah. But it would be, go beyond that. Are you interested? And I said, oh, of course I am. So I switched gears and then I became the IT product manager for Microsoft 365. And this is how I came into this role. And then we had a great journey so far, rolling our Teams and so forth. And I think this is what. We are going to talk about.

Tom Arbuthnot: 2:17

Yeah, I love that. I love that story that you came in and in cloud timeframe of Microsoft 365, just kicking off, and I guess for people's context, Paraxel is something like 17, 18,000 users. It's quite a big organization. So suddenly you were responsible for a very big platform.

Chul-Young: 2:31

Oh yeah. I missed it. 20,000 plus over 20,000 users. Yeah. Yeah. Right now.

Tom Arbuthnot: 2:37

So you came from not really being like a Microsoft 365 product owner or a service owner straight in, and you came in around the time that teams was beginning to, to take off, so talk us through that kind of teams' journey for Paraxel.

Chul-Young: 2:50

Yep, sure. Let me go a little one step back. When I started to, learn more about the collaboration space, I stumbled upon a report Analysis on collaboration systems. And in this report, which was resonating with me, is that there were they were segmenting the collaboration space in 12 areas. And in each of the area I saw several players. But the interesting part was that in each of them, or most each of them, Microsoft was there and, in, in the top area. So what I saw is that okay with synergy across the segments. They try, to come and I was pushing it for Paraxel when I saw about this. Now at that time, We were already using Exchange, so that worked already. There were thoughts about starting to use OneDrive, but from the collaboration space there were also thoughts about, hey, how about Teams? So in Autum 2019 we start with the planning. How will we do it? The good thing for and this is the nice position or nice situation I had, we had already the licensing. Yeah. So this was more a matter about how can, roll out teams with all its features and collaboration benefits to a company with 20,000 people. And we were at zero with teams at that time. What typically happens, and this happens also through Parexel we contracted a large consulting company who was recommending us. Okay, here's the. This is our 12 months plan, how you can roll out Teams with the technical items, with the change management portion. And to be honest, the first time I saw this, I was like, 12 months really so long. Why And I was also in the luxury position that it was suggested, hey, maybe you would like to have also a more independent consultant for this journey. And this was and I was. Hungerford because I just wanted to have several perspectives on it. Yeah. And not from the same direction. And with this comes out, I resonate. We discussed it and we came to the conclusion, hey, it could be faster. So, It's acknowledged we need to consider Paraexcel culture, how to roll out new things into the company, especially global Route 20,000 people. So we could negotiate it down from 12 to 8 months so that was beginning 2020. Yeah. And then in, in, in February we had this plan. Everything was blessed we brought it up to our senior stakeholders and they blessed it all and said go for it. Eight months plan. And then two, three weeks later, as the whole world Covid was hitting us, and it was like, okay, Chun you have your eight months planned. Can you do it in four weeks? I was like, Yes. There was only one answer at that point. Really? Wasn't there It was exactly. I had also a a great Microsoft system admin team. So actually team is good. It's two people responsible for many things. M365 one was just one aspect. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: 5:44

And that's really interesting. Two people. So 20,000 user org and two people in that admin team that's a small team, such a big org.

Chul-Young: 5:51

Yes. And and we connected very fast together because we had the same philosophy of whatever we roll out it needs to scale. Yeah. And when I say scale means it needs to be effective, but also efficient and efficient in terms of whatever we put in place. We should not one year later be bombarded with a lot of maintenance efforts because certain customization or special configurations. So we were in line with, when we roll out teams, we do it as generic as possible with as least as possible special.

Tom Arbuthnot: 6:25

Yeah, that's a really good takeaway for people cuz quite often in enterprise enterprises like to tweak everything just this way, just that way. This country likes it this way, this team likes it that way, and you end up with so much bespoke complexity. As you say, it adds an operational overhead as well as a project overhead.

Chul-Young: 6:42

Yes. At that time we, so we were operating in about 50 plus countries or more. Paraexcel is based from the US so we speak all English. I'm located in Germany, so you might have thought, okay, you might want to have a a German version, an English version. The French version. Yeah. No it was English and anyhow, this was just an example to make it as generic as possible and, as I started, Hey, can you do it within four weeks? This was about end of February, beginning of March and beginning of April we rolled it out to 20,000 people. Now the preparation discussion was, and we can discuss it more here about who can, who should be able to create a team in teams who, how do we manage guest accounts because this concept would be also new for us. Yeah. And how about the content? To what extent should it be involved in in, with the content and with the handling of it? What about the team's applications? I learned so much about how this is managed in the background and when I learned how this is managed in the background, I. I thought that's complicated. We need to do it in a more efficient way that scales. So for example, what I've learned is if you have a user and would like to have a new teams app, then for each permutation of Teams app to a user, we need to create a teams app policy. So we have many policies and I was feeling very pitty M365 admin who needed to come up with this. So we changed, for example, our approach for that as well and simplified it, which was more on how we do it conceptually rather than technically.

Tom Arbuthnot: 8:09

Where did you land on creation of teams? Did you restrict that or did you let the users create their own teams? Good question. And let me cite something, which I was also citing all the time within Paraxel Uncle Ben from the Spider-Man movie. With great power comes great responsibility. So with this mindset, and this is really the mindset, I'm applying to everything because I'm a huge fan of democratizing features. So you can then imagine that I was proposing, hey, we should allow anyone to create team by themselves. They should not go through, an IT managed process because if people are starting to request a team and teams. Then we will be bombarded with creating them and then we will be, need to think about automating it. And then we need to think about how to configure, how to customize it in order to make it a good life experience for the end users. So I brought this in. There was a discussion and the back and forth discussion with the pros and cons, but. I think maybe also a little bit due to the covid situation people gave in and said, okay, Chul-Young roll this out with everyone allowing, creating team teams. I think at that time people could not think and including me what the implications are. No. It was very, it one or two years later, it was the time where we could. get a lot done through necessity, wasn't it? So there wasn't the two months to debate about the pros and cons, but that's quite progressive for a 20,000 user Org and kind of biopharma as well to put power in the user's hands. And I'd love to see that. Cause I agree with you. It stifles that the users, if you don't let them have that responsibility. Did you find that you then had a job to do to tidy up the number of teams? Did that cause and people always worry about sprawl. Was that a reality?

Chul-Young: 9:51

So what we noticed is that the number of team and teams increased a lot. Yeah. And in the beginning, exponentially by now the growth rate of team and teams slowed down. So I think we reached a certain level even until then. And You can imagine there are thousands of team and teams. Yeah. And from a, from an overall governance perspective, me as the product manager for M365 including teams I have the oversight over them and I was um, di uh, now transferring from the beginning. I am, I will not look into particular team of teams. I'm handling them all together. So what we have implemented with the M365 admin we looked into the exploration policy, so we said, okay, if no one, if there's no activity, it will get expired and then it will get deleted. Yeah. I love when Microsoft was more and more bringing in features, which was taken care of age data. In, we have not started at this point, or we are not using at this point. Uh, labelling So this is something which is a big topic and which will come on, which will make our lives much more easier. Yeah. But I said until then, if I don't have that, we just need to say, if you don't touch your data, if you don't own the data anymore, It needs to go away.

Tom Arbuthnot: 11:04

Yeah. Cause that's always a problem. I see again in customers is the business thinks IT own the data because it's on an IT platform. They're like that's your responsibility, it is in teams. Oh no, it's the, it's business data. It's not, it's data. So getting those demarks set correctly to help them understand though it's your responsibility and you need to tell us about, do you want to keep it, do you want to delete it? Here's the policies.

Chul-Young: 11:27

Yes. And I know, I try to avoid, to make comparisons, but like we are like a car manufacture we are building cars, we are handing it over to you, but we don't tell you how to obey the rules for driving a car or what you put into the car and what you're transporting. We are building the car. So again, signing the Spider-Man movie with great power comes great responsibility. Here's your car. And I try to keep this mindset now with Covid, you know, coming down again and reaching the new normal. I can see certain habits, which were pre covid time and I try to say, Hey, we took our lessons from the past two three years. Let's continue with that.

Tom Arbuthnot: 12:08

That's really interesting. And did you roll out, you rolled out for all workloads during that time, so you were doing collaboration and meetings. Did did or has phone come into that yet? Or where are you with on that journey?

Chul-Young: 12:20

Oh, So we just completed transitioning to Microsoft team's voice. That was great. Yeah. For team's voice, what happened is we had a, another solution, but we were giving everyone a telephone number. So I think and again, I'm not the technical specialist, so I'm more the linkage between the business and it, yeah. So I'm used to say telephone numb34 not PSTN and what I've learned by now is the word So what but what I've learned what also. The independent consultant was seeing from the outside and sharing with me is that the the usage or the necessity that everyone needs, a telephone number goes down. So what we successfully did, and this was the positive business case, when we said, Hey, let's switch over to teams voice, and by the way, can we reduce the telephone numbers for our 20,000 people down? 3000. And this was obviously attractive as well for just from a business case, and so we went that route. Yeah. And

Tom Arbuthnot: 13:19

That's a huge reduction. And I'm, you're not alone on that. I'm hearing that in other customers as well. Was there pushback from the users on that or were they okay with I don't necessarily need a business phone number,

Chul-Young: 13:29

There wasn't a lot of pushback, so on. higher stakeholder level, they immediately said, oh, I'm not using my phone for the past one or two years, so you can have I'm opted out. But this is not representative because you have the user base of 20,000 people. So when we started to communicate this Okay. I was aggressive. I thought, hey, we can do it with 1,500. Okay. We ended up with 3000. So there was some, there were some people coming back and saying, for this legitimate reason, we need the number. Yeah, I'm using it maybe once a year, but I need that for our business. And that made sense. And but I was thinking, oh, it shouldn't go over 3000. So

Tom Arbuthnot: 14:04

I imagine that was, I dunno if you got involved in the ROI of that, but I imagine that was a substantial saving compared to playing. The legacy PBX costs?

Chul-Young: 14:13

Yes it is. But the higher cost savings, because you mentioned that as well. We rolled out teams, but also teams meeting. So we had also another solution in place for, meeting with external meetings. Yeah. And that ROI was even better than voice. This was really a big one. And we went along by rolling our team teams in April, 2020, and three months later already. We were able to decommission our old meeting system and because everyone was then fully adopting into teams meetings.

Tom Arbuthnot: 14:47

That's awesome. And what did you do around meeting rooms? Did you refresh the rooms at that time? Very good question. We started about one year ago. The team's voice and video project and the voice portion has been by now more or less completed. And the. We're also then replaced. I think we are still replacing them. This takes a little bit more time because we need the devices and I'm hearing it's not so easy to get the devices. Yeah. stock Obviously an issue with starting to come back a bit back to normal now, but chips are still hard to come by, so it's yeah, it's interesting.

Chul-Young: 15:21

Yep. And we are on a good way for that as well, so yes. Nice.

Tom Arbuthnot: 15:25

How does it work in your organization in terms, it's really interesting to see how the project and the operations work for things like end user devices, so webcams and headsets obviously moving to teams, people need devices. Is that part of your remit? Is there a parallel team? Is that the desktop team who would be responsible for headsets and webcam hardware?

Chul-Young: 15:45

Yeah, so this is a, another team. Gladly I'm not involved with headsets and all these devices, so I'm benefiting from the good work of

Tom Arbuthnot: 15:52

my, to understand how to deploy them, get them to users, manage them, update them, et cetera.

Chul-Young: 15:57

Yes. So I'm glad of the good desktop engineering team also pre covid, we had a high emphasis working with decentralized workers as well. So we had already infrastructure of the mindset to provide equipment. And when we were starting to come into this covid time as any other company, we have the same challenges to get those devices and get them out. Yeah. But based on what we had already it. Not a big issue. So we could provide them obviously if you, because this is the only good thing during this covid time, we had the possibility, the environment where we could roll our teams and focus on, Hey, use your headsets because if you work remote, you had already your headset, be it a private one or from the company one, the people had already seen the proof. Remote working works also in at large scale. Therefore the only thing we needed to do is, hey your headset is not working. We sent you a new one. And that's basically it. And while the people were not coming into the office, we could take the advantage of taking the phones away, and saying, Hey, if you want now to have a team voice and this was only affecting the 3000 people, you need to use your laptop, your headset. in order to make calls. And the other ones were already, adopting, using teams for making their internal calls and so forth. And with the headset or whatever

Tom Arbuthnot: 17:14

they, yeah, that's it. You, once you start using teams for meetings and internal calling, then phone is no different. It's just another type of call, isn't it?

Chul-Young: 17:22

Yes. So when I saw the metrics pre-team, time the number of chat calls and meetings. Tripled or nearly quadruple. Yeah. So I was like, oh my gosh, how did we do this before? Only via the phone, only via emails. So I think it is really game changer when we rolled out teams in the company. And I think across the board vertically and horizontally, it was seen as a as great success to have this.

Tom Arbuthnot: 17:51

That's awesome. And obviously the covid accelerated the project, so you cut it out very fast. Yes, it's been a few years now. What have you done in terms of a adoption and training and change management? Does that come under your remit? Is that a parallel team? Has that been the users discovering for themselves? Have you had a formal process around that?

Chul-Young: 18:10

So let me start with, we don't have a change management team, so it goes. Me as the one product manager person. Yeah. And obviously I commit only to things. What I can also manage as one person, that means because I'm a fan of the democratizing features and I needed to count on how intuitive teams is so, Ways it is and certain ways, oh, that's, sorry. You can improve it For one example was, should I create a large, wiki or site and SharePoint Online where people can see it? Now I started to say, First of all, I'm not a good writer. Secondly I don't want to update it all the time because Microsoft is continuously evolving. So my approach was I created a side putting in some Paraexcel specific information, but then try to point as much as possible to the Microsoft documentation, and that is a good step and then we have within the business people who are taking care of their users, right? They obviously came to me and say how can we do that? And I showed them a little bit here on things, and then they created their own materials at their own, risk to maintain it and keep it maintained moving forward. So I basically divide and conquer and this is how over the past three years we worked. So it's not only teams, but also Stream. For example the Stream transition is now coming out. Yes. And Planner or tasks by planner and all of these Microsoft apps to do this is something which I highlight.

Tom Arbuthnot: 19:42

That's awesome. And how, like talking about the wider M365, cause I you've got all of it under your remit. How do you keep up with all the pace of change and new news? Teams has been the most changing product over the last couple of years, but how do you keep up with all the change in terms of operations?

Chul-Young: 19:58

So when we rolled out teams I think we rolled out also few applications. So from the beginning we said we are not giving them the world of all. I don't know at that time, 300, but now 3, 400, 500, I don't know, teams application there exists. So we started with, we we kept the focus teams. than to do and tasks by planner and so forth. Yeah. And for example, when people were asking, Hey, here's an app I would like to use in team and teams, at that point I said we cannot democratize this way because IT security is a great stakeholder as well in this game. And they said, Hey. Chul-Young cannot open up ways for people to work with software, which has not been approved by Paraxel. So the good thing is I could point those people to IT security or to our third party software process because only when this came through, then it came to my plate. And the only thing I need to decide is to say, am I going to roll this out now to the people who have the license for this third party teams app or to the whole company? And now, I said if I roll out something in teams and teams, it will be for the whole company. For the people who have the license, they can benefit it for the one who doesn't go to the business, who is managing the licenses, or funding the licenses. So this kind of framework. Yeah. Otherwise whenever there's a change and if it becomes relevant for the people to share, then I put it onto our digital workplace side our SharePoint side. Otherwise I'm counting on. uh, Intuitive enough. Yeah. Coming from Microsoft, how they design it.

Tom Arbuthnot: 21:31

Yeah. No, that's awesome. The scale you are hitting with the team is really impressive that, cuz there's you've rolled out a lot in a short period of time. You mentioned your two, two admins. Are they responsible for all of the M365 administration or does that break down into different business units?

Chul-Young: 21:47

They are responsible for all of M365. Now when I say Microsoft 365 I do not necessarily mean Azure. Yep. This Azure side. So this is a separate other thing. Within M365 we have also the security and compliance. This goes to the it security area. So M365 is more, admins are more about the platform, more about how to keep up with the user accounts and all of this. And then with me, how can we roll out in the most democratized way, but also in the most controlled fashion at the same time to our 20,000 user base? But again, yes, only these two people for. basically everything. Yeah. I need from it.

Tom Arbuthnot: 22:33

And Does that flow into, is phone and meeting rooms, are they treated as different? Different teams or just phone just tick along in that same administration team?

Chul-Young: 22:42

Very good question. I think you need always to ask just another to make me clarify on things. For the MTRs, for the team meeting rooms and the voice we have our unified communications group as well. Yeah. So yes, if they need something for a configuration so that they can run and maintain it from the M365 elements, they come. But then once this has been done, running is done by the unified communications.

Tom Arbuthnot: 23:06

Yeah. I find this really fascinating. It's interesting to see how Microsoft is certainly envisioning a world where these lines are all blurring of what's collaboration, what's video meetings? What's calling and who looks after them? And it's very interesting to see how in some organizations, those teams work really well together and get things done. And others, if it's too individual, often the uc team aren't talking to the collaboration team, aren't talking to the 365 admin who aren't talking to networks. It can be quite complicated.

Chul-Young: 23:34

And I to just resonate a little bit of what you said is when we started our teams journey, Microsoft 365 was a term no one knew by now because I was a lot emphasizing, Hey, when you talk about team and teams, this is what Microsoft 365, because then SharePoint online was also becoming, wider known and then people ask more questions and their hunger just for collaboration, for more things were increasing. And you can imagine that like the beast around the honey pot. I'm not sure whether I can't even use the picture, but I got many requests and far more than. one person or two admin person could manage. So I'm glad that we had the various segments within it, internal IT where we have security part, the unified communications part, because I could defer them to those Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: 24:23

Departments. That's awesome. So it sounds like you're pretty well there on your team's journey. Collab. You've got meetings, you've got voice. What's next? As you look at the year ahead what are you thinking about in terms of project? Is it other parts of M365? What have you got on your mind for the coming year?

Chul-Young: 24:39

Yes. So I think now, we are using teams and with this indirect SharePoint Online, but now more and more widely SharePoint online. We accumulated a lot of data residing in our M365 world. And even though the framework I set up is easy enough and everyone knows okay, exploration data there, and once it's soft deleted, it's hard deleted later on it security has a big emphasis on how can we improve. Experiences with data. How about people who are leaving or what kind of data is it and how can this be automated? Again, I'm not involved in this from M365 and then because I'm just one person and I could never manage it. So I'm glad that it security is doing it. So this is one big portion, but this will have implications that if they put something in place which has implication of the end user experience from the daily flow of work for uploading documents, managing, and, retaining it or deleting it this is something we need to have an emphasis on. The other big portion is, and I'm going along with m. The Viva platform. Interesting. What we had is we wrote our team in teams, but then people even were asking, and I like this, if the user base is coming to me asking for things now how about Yama, which is now called Viva Engage. So is this something I'm looking into it. Viva Personal Insights. This is something which as an step we want to reach Viva Learning. We have our training system, our learning system. If we could combine this with Viva Learning in the broader picture of Viva. Yeah that would be great. So this is my big. Emphasis for this year.

Tom Arbuthnot: 26:10

Awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to, to talk to us. I know you're super busy and thanks for giving such good insight and I think congrats to you and the wider team on that scale project and getting through it all. And yeah, it's, it is really nice to hear the behind the scenes. I appreciate it.

Chul-Young: 26:24

Yeah, thanks for the time as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: 26:26

Great. All right. And maybe we'll check in again with you in the future, see how you're going with with Viva or something like that. I'm very happy to come again, to you. All right. I appreciate it. Thanks everybody for listening. If you've got any questions or feedback, do leave it in the comments below. Thank you.