Circet builds closer working relationships, culls deeper data insights with Powell Software’s Microsoft Teams solution and Microsoft Graph

Spurred on by this growth in demand for its services, the company began looking for ways to better connect its field and frontline workers with leadership and subject matter experts at its central offices. The idea behind creating these new connections was to not only support frontline workers, but also to 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, no comprehensive Teams implementation was in place as remote work rapidly became necessary in 2020, when Circet urgently needed a digital solution capable of drawing its people together. With the added pressure of remote work mandates, the company knew that it required a quick, professionally managed Teams rollout.

To assist with its Teams rollout, Circet employed the expertise of Powell Software and Claranet, both members of the Microsoft Partner Network. “If you give people access to new productivity software without providing them with a framework, you might 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.”

Bringing people together—digitally

Powell Teams is a Powell Software solution that focuses on expanding the governance, teamwork, and control options available in Teams. To help deliver this functionality, Powell Software uses the Microsoft Graph API to enable the quick and simple creation of user templates in Teams. These templates are designed to capture multiple aspects of an employee’s role, such as their title, department, and region. After the solution’s deployment, these templates became a top priority at Circet, and the company 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 in which Circet operates.

“Although the Teams templates that Powell Software offers are ready to use, they can also be further tailored to our needs,” says Kermorvant. “That’s where we found the solution’s greatest utility. The flexibility and space for our own creative thought within Powell Teams really gave us the control we needed to deploy Teams broadly and quickly.” Powell Software relies heavily on Microsoft Graph, which provides a gateway to data and intelligence for its customers’ Microsoft 365 deployments, to create these benefits. With the help of Microsoft Graph, Powell Software created role-specific dashboards and intranet pages for Circet employees. Powell Teams takes advantage of a wide variety of Microsoft Graph APIs for Teams to perform its services. For example, Microsoft Graph helps Powell Teams:

• Collect information about its customers’ end users, such as the teams and channels they’ve joined.
• Provision new teams and channels based on templates that its customers’ IT administrators and other business stakeholders defined.
• Manage Azure Active Directory identities and user rights.
• Interpret users’ Outlook calendars to determine employees’ availability and invite them to meetings as part of the “Virtual Coffee Machine” that was added to the social templates.
• Propose relevant documents and news according to employees’ connections, using people and insights APIs.
  
  

“We have a number of very knowledgeable developers at Circet,” says Kermorvant. “But with our own plates full with the move to remote work, it was wonderful to have a technology advisor take the lead on our Teams deployment and allow us to make that switch without needing to write new code ourselves.” 

A unified view of the digital workplace

Since Circet’s implementation of Powell Teams in mid-2020, approximately half of the people working at Circet have joined from 20 to 30 Teams channels. Many of these channels were set up at the onset of new projects, and they help employees organize and coordinate critical projects’ deliveries all the way through completion. As the projects on an employee’s plate fluctuate, organization becomes increasingly critical, which is why the dashboards that Powell Teams created with Microsoft Graph have become such important productivity tools.

“Our employees can easily check in with their overall Teams landscape from their dashboards,” says Kermorvant. “If a new channel has been established that they’re part of, it will also appear there and create 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 notices of their creation to stakeholders.

Circet plans to start using Powell Teams templates as it onboards new employees. This will automatically enroll them 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 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 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.”

Looking ahead to the hybrid workplace

Circet credits its swift adjustment to remote work to the adoption of both Powell Teams and the broader suite of Microsoft 365 intelligent business applications. “Yes, our people had to move to remote work, but they received a new digital workplace in the process,” says Kermorvant. “We hit full deployment very rapidly in part 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 returning to 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 Kermorvant. “That way, you can book your space ahead of time for the days you’re in the office and see how full the office will be on those days.” Here again, Powell Teams uses Microsoft Graph in searching a desk-booking database that’s in SharePoint.

Whether the future of working at Circet is a return to the office or a hybrid workspace, Kermorvant is certain that the new digital tools provided by Powell Teams, underpinned with Microsoft Graph, will play an important part in its technology landscape. “We’ve got a solution now that can accelerate and better homogenize the conversations between our formerly disparate work groups,” says 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.”

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