Enterprises lose over $100 million due to underused tech each year. Discover how NRI can help maximize the value of your Microsoft 365 investment.
Most organizations declare victory the day Microsoft 365 goes live. But months later, IT leaders are left wondering why productivity hasn’t improved, shadow IT is growing, and licensing costs keep climbing.
The reality is that Migrating to Microsoft 365 is not the finish line. It’s just the foundation. Real value comes from governance, adoption, and automation over time. If your organization hasn’t intentionally optimized Microsoft 365, you’re likely underutilizing the tools you already pay for. That can be really costly.
For context, a recent WalkMe survey of 3,700 senior executives and employees reveals that the average large enterprise loses $104 million annually to inefficiencies in its existing IT setup. Meanwhile, their employees lose more than a month’s worth of work each year.
These IT frustrations often led to workarounds. Now it is estimated that 600 unsanctioned apps are used in the average enterprise, significantly elevating its risk exposure.
Optimizing your Microsoft 365 post-migration can help you reclaim lost productivity and wasted spend, as well as improve your security posture. Here’s what you need to know.
Why Post-Migration Optimization Is Where Value Is Won or Lost
As highlighted, a successful migration to Microsoft 365 is just the start. Your organization is bound to face challenges unless you’ve optimized for post-go-live. One result is that it could end up with inconsistent Teams and SharePoint sprawl.
Another potential challenge is that you may not be able to manage the information lifecycle efficiently, resulting in mounting storage costs and increased discovery burdens. Security and compliance configurations may also lag behind actual usage patterns, creating gaps between policy and practice.
Low adoption of advanced capabilities like Power Automate, Viva Insights, and emerging AI tools could also leave substantial productivity gains unrealized. Perhaps most critically, you may have no clear way to measure ROI or the impact on productivity, making it difficult to justify continued investment in the Microsoft platform.
To truly optimize Microsoft 365, IT leaders must move from deployment thinking to platform stewardship. NRI’s framework helps you do exactly that.
NRI’s Framework for Optimizing Microsoft 365 at Scale
NRI built its approach on five pillars that align technology with organizational processes:
Pillar #1: Governance That Enables (Not Restricts) Productivity
Governance is often misunderstood as a constraint. However, the right model enables controlled freedom, aligning Teams, SharePoint, and Groups with enterprise policy.
At NRI, we help you properly:
- Define who can create workspaces and how they should be structured.
- Establish information architecture standards, retention labels, and access controls that secure without impeding agility.
- Embed compliance checks and lifecycle policies into daily workflows so that content doesn’t age into risk or waste.
Learn more about how NRI can help you build an effective IT modernization roadmap.
Pillar #2: Automation & Intelligent Workflows
Once governance is in place, we zero in on streamlining work using Microsoft’s Power Platform. NRI helps you leverage Power Automate, Power Apps, and other tools to design and automate manual processes (such as approvals, onboarding, document routing, and reporting) across your applications, systems, and data sources.
Automation can be hugely beneficial. For instance, Forester estimates that optimizing your use of the Power Platform can save employees 250 labour hours per year, slash app development time by 50%, and reduce dependency on third-party tools that have already been replaced by M365, thereby minimizing Shadow IT risks.
Pillar #3: Collaboration Optimization (Beyond “Use Teams More”)
Next, we rationalize how people collaborate. Too often, organizations simply ask employees to “use Teams more,” which can backfire if channels and file spaces become a jumbled mess.
Instead, NRI designs collaboration patterns by role and process. For instance, a product team might have a single dedicated Team with structured channels (planning, execution, QA) rather than dozens of ad-hoc groups.
Cross-department initiatives might rely on shared project sites instead of informal chats. This approach helps you improve productivity without increasing noise.
Pillar #4: Adoption Driven by Design, Not Training Alone
Even with the right governance and tools in place, none of it matters if people don’t use what you just rolled out.
And in our experience, when adoption fails, it’s usually the new systems and processes, not the users, at fault. NRIs’ change management approach bridges the gap by aligning your Microsoft 365 with how work actually gets done in your organization, leveraging role-based enablement strategies and embedding guidance into the very design of your solution.
This ensures your team uses Microsoft 365 to its full potential.
Pillar #5: Analytics, Insights & ROI Measurement
Finally, we turn on the data to prove value. Microsoft 365 includes analytics that, if used correctly, give IT leaders a dashboard on adoption and productivity trends.
For example, Viva Insights surfaces collaboration metrics, time spent in meetings vs. focused work, and email traffic.
These tools help answer questions like “Are Teams calls replacing emails?” “How much after-hours work is happening?”, and “Which departments are underutilizing the new tools?” Management can get data-driven answers rather than anecdotes.
We also help link your Microsoft 365 usage data to business outcomes, for instance, by correlating usage of Planner or To Do with on-time project delivery, or by measuring how automating a workflow reduces approval cycle time.
This helps you quantify productivity into concrete KPIs and gives you real visibility into what’s working and what’s not.
Turn Microsoft 365 Into a Strategic Asset
Migrating to Microsoft 365 is just step one. To truly move the needle on productivity, IT leaders must go further and proactively shape governance, automation, and adoption to fit their goals.
The good news is that many of the necessary pieces are already in place: you own the licenses and tools, you just need a framework to activate them.
NRI helps IT leaders do exactly that. If your organization is ready to go beyond the migration and unlock Microsoft 365’s full potential, our team is ready to help. Schedule a discovery call to discover how we can maximize the value of your Microsoft 365 investment.
