Service remains unaffected and productivity is enhanced as people embrace flexible working
Cost Reduction, Workforce flexibility & Business Agility
The entire programme of rolling out Microsoft Teams to 16,000 users was successfully delivered inside 4 weeks. Furthermore, 90% of those users were enabled for remote working, exceeding the target by 20%, and therefore ensuring that service to Computacenter’s customers remained entirely unaffected.

With the global outbreak of COVID-19, we had to rapidly adapt and accelerate our deployment of Microsoft Teams, to support homeworking of at least 70% of our staff, including all Service Desk personnel.
Stephen Pitt, Workplace Director, Computacenter
Objective
In early 2020, Computacenter was already committed to moving away from their existing platforms for unified communications and telephony, and fully leveraging their Office 365 subscription with Microsoft to provide a better user experience. They needed to fully embrace the capabilities of Microsoft Teams, but to do so in a way which encapsulated an appropriate adoption approach for the company’s 16,000 users. Alongside this, a reduction in cost and an increase in reliability and performance was also sought.Feedback from users has exceeded expectations, with hundreds reporting a significant improvement on quality and functionality compared to the predecessor tools.
Solution
Computacenter’s Adoption and Change team was assigned as an integral part of the migration programme, and the company’s User Adoption Framework was deployed to ensure focus remained on the user throughout. When the global pandemic began to unfold in early 2020, the launch of Teams (originally planned for May) was brought forward by 9 weeks to March, in order to facilitate effective home-working for Computacenter’s staff. This was successfully achieved by quadrupling the VPN capacity in Computacenter’s main UK and German data centers.
Outcomes
- A richer, more integrated set of cloud-based tools with more functionality & capability
- Effective adoption of Office 365 enables users to work in exciting & innovative new ways
- Improved collaboration between Computacenter’s users, teams, customers & partners
- Improved end-user experience, user productivity, and business productivity
- Avoidance of duplicate costs through consolidation on to a single collaboration platform
- Reduced costs thanks to the optimisation of the Office 365 suite of tools