Further to our post on how to develop an effective Microsoft 365 strategy; having a strategy at all is important for several reasons:

Alignment with business goals: A well-defined strategy ensures that the implementation and use of Microsoft 365 aligns with your company’s broader business goals and objectives. It helps you leverage the capabilities of Microsoft 365 to drive business outcomes, such as clean data, improving productivity, enhancing collaboration, or enabling digital transformation.

Maximizing investment: Microsoft 365 is a comprehensive suite of tools and services with a wide range of features. A strategy helps you identify the specific components of Microsoft 365 that are most relevant and valuable to your organization, and how and when you will roll them out and manage them. This ensures that you make the most of your investment by focusing on the tools and capabilities that come with the license you bought that are essential for your business needs.

Clear roadmap for implementation: Developing a strategy for Microsoft 365 provides a roadmap for the implementation process. It helps you define the necessary steps, timelines, and resources required for a successful rollout. By having a clear plan, you can avoid ad-hoc decision-making and ensure a systematic, organized approach to implementation and better budget management.

Risk management and governance: Microsoft 365 involves the management of sensitive data, user access controls, and compliance with regulations. A strategy includes considerations for data governance, security measures, and compliance requirements. It helps you establish policies, procedures, and controls to mitigate risks, protect data, and ensure regulatory compliance.

User adoption and change management: Implementing Microsoft 365 involves a change in technology and workflows for your employees. A strategy enables you to plan for user adoption and change management. It allows you to identify potential challenges, develop training programs, and communicate the benefits and impact of Microsoft 365 to ensure a smooth transition and high user adoption rates with effective support in place.

Scalability and future readiness: A strategy takes into account the scalability and future growth of your organization. It considers factors such as business expansion, mergers and acquisitions, multiple legal entities in the group, geographical locations, workforce changes, and evolving technology. By designing a strategy that accommodates future needs, you can ensure that your Microsoft 365 implementation can scale and adapt to the changing requirements of your business.

Optimization and continuous improvement: A strategy provides a framework for ongoing optimization and continuous improvement of your Microsoft 365 environment. It allows you to monitor usage, gather feedback, and assess the effectiveness of the implemented solutions. With a strategy in place, you can identify areas for refinement; address user needs, and incorporate new features and updates to continuously enhance the value of the licensing, training and consulting spend of Microsoft 365 licenses in your organization.

In summary, having a strategy for Microsoft 365 is important because it aligns the technology with your business goals, maximizes your investment, provides a clear roadmap. It also ensures risk management and governance, supports user adoption and change management, enables scalability and future readiness, and facilitates process optimization and continuous business improvement. A documented strategy sets the foundation for a successful and impactful implementation of Microsoft 365 as part of your overall IT Strategy.