15000
Employees
A leading network service provider in Europe and Northern Africa, Circet brings in more than 2 billion euros in annual revenue. Employing more than 15,000 people, the company has grown 45 percent in the last year. This trend began well before COVID-19 and was further catalyzed by the increase in the need for domestic bandwidth associated with the move to remote work in the spring of 2020.
Because of this growth, Circet began looking for ways to better connect its field and frontline workers with leadership and subject matter experts located at its central offices. The idea behind creating these new connections was to support frontline workers and expedite the centralized collection of firsthand knowledge and feedback from the field. Everyone at Circet stood to benefit.
A pilot program completed just before the onset of COVID-19 showed that Microsoft Teams was well suited for the complex task. However, a comprehensive Teams implementation still needed to be in place as remote work rapidly became necessary in the spring of 2020. Now more than ever, the company needed a digital solution to draw its people together. With the added pressure of remote work mandates, the company knew that its rollout of Teams would have to be both quick and professionally managed.
To that end, Circet employed the expertise of Powell Software, part of the Microsoft Partner Network. “If you give people access to any new productivity software without providing them a framework, you may run into adoption hurdles,” says Matthieu Kermorvant, Subject Matter Expert at Circet. “We didn’t want that for our Teams deployment, so we opted to layer Powell Teams on top of the solution to ensure enhanced governance and a simple user experience.”
Challenges
- Connecting field workers with central offices due to growth.
- Urgency for a digital solution with the shift to remote work.
- Potential user adoption issues with new software.
- Standardizing processes across international locations.
“We’ve used Teams and its integration with the rest of Microsoft 365 to create a semblance of the structure that employees, new and old, used to get from their office environment. We wouldn’t have made the most of it without Powell Teams created with Microsoft Graph.”
Matthieu Kermorvant
Subject Matter Expert
Circet
Objectives
Improve field/office connectivity
Implement Teams quickly and professionally
Ensure easy and governed Teams use
Standardize the digital workplace
Powell Governance
Powell Governance is a solution focused on expanding the governance, teamwork, and control options available in Teams. For instance, it uses the Microsoft Graph API to enable the quick and simple creation of user templates in Teams. These templates can correspond to multiple factors, including an employee’s position, department, and region. After the solution’s deployment, these templates became a top priority at Circet. Working with its advisors, Circet initially defined four custom templates for its employees: accountants, frontline workers, project and program managers, and back-office workers. These templates were also localized, creating unique employee channels for each country Circet operates.
“Though the Teams templates offered by Powell are ready to use, they can also be further tailored to our needs,” says Matthieu Kermorvant. “That’s where we found the solution’s greatest utility. The flexibility and space for our own creative thought within Powell Governance really gave us the control we needed to deploy Teams broadly and quickly.” Powell relies greatly on Microsoft Graph, which provides a gateway to data and intelligence from across the Microsoft ecosystem, to create these benefits for its customers. With Microsoft Graph, Powell has created role-specific dashboards and intranet pages for Circet employees.
Powell Governance performs each service using multiple Microsoft Graph APIs for Teams endpoints. These include collecting user information like what teams they belong to and provisioning Teams channels based on templates defined by IT administrators and other stakeholders. The solution also uses Azure Active Directory APIs to manage identities and the unique rights granted to individual users. Outlook Calendar APIs are also used to read the availability of employees and book social meetings for them as part of a Virtual Coffee Machine program designed to foster casual conversation between remote workers. Powell Governance also uses the People & Insights API to suggest relevant documents and news to a given employee’s connections.
Results & impact
Since the company’s mid-2020 implementation, approximately half of the people working at Circet have joined between 20 and 30 Teams channels. Many of these channels are set up at the onset of new projects and help coordinate project performance through to completion. As the projects on an employee’s plate fluctuate, organization becomes more and more critical. This is why the dashboards Powell Teams created with Microsoft Graph have become such important productivity tools.
“Our employees can check in with their overall Teams landscape simply from their dashboards,” says Matthieu Kermorvant. “If a new channel has been established that they are a part of, it will appear there as well, creating a visual reminder of their new responsibilities.” Circet has even automated the process of creating these new teams, using the Powell Teams Connector for Power Automate to create new channels and send notice of their creation to stakeholders.
The same functionalities will soon become standard for new hires as well. Circet will automatically enroll new employees in a dedicated Teams channel built from a Powell Teams template, granting access to onboarding documentation in OneNote, the organization’s SharePoint intranet, and a Microsoft Planner account that outlines their next steps. “We’ve used Teams and its integration with the rest of Microsoft 365 to create a semblance of the structure that employees, new and old, used to get from their office environment,” says Matthieu Kermorvant. “It has also been an important tool in our pursuit of standardization across our multiple international centers of operation.”
Standardization and optimization are at the core of Circet’s growth strategy. While the company’s more established locations adjust to remote work, other, newer service areas are dealing with the dual challenge of getting operations up to speed while adjusting to their home offices.
“With Teams, we gain closer relationships with our peers in different countries and offices,” says Matthieu Kermorvant. “We can create a tighter-knit community and develop our best practices together, which I think could help optimize operations across the whole of Circet.”
Matthieu Kermorvant
Subject Matter Expert
Circet
What’s next?
Circet credits its swift adjustment to remote work to adopting Powell Teams and the broader Microsoft 365 suite. “Yes, our people had to move to remote work, but in the process, they received a new digital workplace,” says Matthieu Kermorvant. “We hit full deployment very rapidly partly because of the structure and camaraderie that Teams offers, especially in its role at the core of our new digital working landscape.”
As employees begin to filter back into the traditional workplace, Circet hopes to continue working with Powell Teams to create new solutions for hybrid work. “We’re looking into a desk booking solution that presents a map of which desks are booked for the day and which are available,” explains Matthieu Kermorvant. “That way, you can book your space ahead of time on the days you’re in the office and see how full the office will be on that day.” This feature leverages Microsoft Graph, which searches a deskbooking database stored in SharePoint.
Whether the future of working at Circet is a return to the office or a hybrid workspace, Matthieu Kermorvant is confident that the new digital tools and their interoperability through Microsoft Graph will be an important part of its tech landscape. “We’ve got a solution now that can accelerate and better homogenize the conversations between our once-disparate work groups,” says Matthieu Kermorvant. “On top of facilitating those conversations, we’re also safe in the knowledge that all of our processes and data remain within the highly secure tenant that is Microsoft 365.”
Conclusion
By leveraging Microsoft Teams, enhanced by Powell Teams built with Microsoft Graph, Circet successfully addressed the challenges posed by rapid growth and the sudden shift to remote work. The solution facilitated closer working relationships across different locations and roles, enabled the collection and utilization of data insights through features like role-specific dashboards, and fostered a more unified and standardized digital workplace. This strategic adoption of Microsoft’s ecosystem not only supported their immediate need for remote collaboration but also laid the groundwork for future hybrid work models and continued operational optimization.
