Dan Gregory and team share their MS Teams Premium journey as pilot users from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Introduction
Daniel Gregory is system manager for the M365 application suites and initially signed up to the pilot with around 20 users from Sheffield Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
Dan is now one of 61 users from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals to join the MS Teams Premium pilot.
“I’m very keen on collaboration tools and doing things intelligently to minimise wasting time.”
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What is MS Teams Premium?
MS Teams Premium is an enhanced set of features for MS Teams that allow users to personalise the meeting experience and enable advanced meeting protection. Some users have additional features to facilitate advanced virtual appointments, host high-quality webinars and deliver large scale Town Halls.
Within this pilot, users have been primarily focused on the benefits of the intelligent meeting recap features, with AI generated meeting notes and tasks, timeline speaker and subject markers as well as live translated meeting captions.
How did you get involved in the pilot?
Dan heard about the pilot through the regular Local Admin Webinars.
“It was me that reached out to Gemma (Centre of Excellence) in the first instance to enquire about the pilot and try to acquire Premium licences.
We then approached staff at the trust who we thought would be suitable for the pilot. We looked to include a range of staff across the Trust and they very kindly agreed to take part”
What job roles were included in the pilot?
“We chose about half a dozen or so PA’s and Secretaries, through to department managers who organise and potentially attend a lot of meetings and then might minute those meetings afterwards. So that was our purposeful choice of staff – those who are technically proficient, but they’ll perhaps use Teams Premium in a way that was envisaged by NHS England with the intelligent recap.
We also looked at a few more technical users who might use the other features of Teams Premium. For example, our audio-visual team who would be using the premium features with Town Hall.”
How easy was it to get started?
“There was no big flashing banner saying ‘congratulations, you have premium’, the change was subtle and the overall experience was just slightly different. For example, when you start a meeting, you do get a different interface with the NHS logo. So that’s how I first realised the licence had been upgraded.”
What guidance did users need to get started?
“We had a couple of guides ready to go, mostly produced by Microsoft. In our welcome and introductory emails to new Premium users, we included those guides; and from what I can gather, everyone hit the ground running. It was intuitive enough.”
Another user agreed: “I’ve gradually learnt a bit more, so yeah, dived in at the start gradually learning a bit more.”
“Easy to use straight out-of-the-box.”
How has it helped with day-to-day tasks for users at Sheffield?
Additional benefits uncovered for Neurodivergent users:
“I have dyslexia. I saw this technology as being exceedingly useful for folks in my position who can’t quickly write down notes and then make sense of them afterwards.”
“I have a short working memory and there’s the subtle art of communication and being able to review and understand what exactly has been said. To know that I don’t have to work quite as hard to remember fine details of a conversation whilst writing everything down. I can go back and follow the conversation logic through again in my own time and at my own pace.”
“It will help me with my clarity of understanding, as well as in the instructions I’m passing on.”
“My neurodivergence, I think it was on the back of that I thought, actually I may well benefit from access to Teams Premium”
More efficient minute taking:
“So what I found really amazing in Teams Premium is, sometimes I’m not there live for the note taking. I come back to the recording a day or two after if I’ve been away or having to do something else. It’s the way the artificial intelligence summarises it all. Again, takes half of that work away. It subcategorises things and summarises who said what. And so that’s even without having to go in and look at the agenda fully. I can see that brief discussion was held around [a topic] and that just speeds up my life for so much. It’s incredible.”
“More than 50% of it is done. And then obviously you go back and proofread it and tidy it. But in the old days it was all your shorthand book, your pencil. Then you’d have to go back and start again from scratch.”
“The AI transcription and Intelligent meeting recap are really helpful when minuting a meeting where you are not familiar with the content.”
“Even if it just words things a different way and saves you time rather than he said, she said. It’s just so much quicker. More succinct than I speak sometimes, so for that it helps.”
More efficient scheduling:
“I can still organise meetings even if someone isn’t available to take minutes live that day.”
Easier reviewing of meetings:
“I was trying to find out what was said and what was agreed, and I did it really very quickly. Going through the text and the summary points and everything and then I was able to click it and go straight to the right point in the recording. That would probably take me quite a long time. You know, even if it’s 1/2 an hour or an hour or whatever, at double speed, but it was just so quick.
“The AI summary of the meeting has been really useful as I no longer have to look through the transcript or the recording as much as I used to.”
“The ability to go to ‘who was talking at which time?’”
Improving workflow:
“The way it shows who’s assigned to which actions.”
“We should circulate minutes in good time, and we end up circulating them sometimes in the morning of the of the same day (next meeting). So, it’s not as useful as it as it could be. Processing what’s been said and summarising it (with TP) I think could be really useful. I think it means that our admin colleagues can be doing something a bit more rewarding for themselves and useful in general for the organisation and for the teams that they’re working. As opposed to you know just spending lots of time listening to recordings and trying to type out the best they can.
What are your top tips to help other users getting started?
Like other organisations participating in the pilot, Sheffield users felt that some improvements, additional features, or control of the AI would further improve their workflow and look forward to how it progresses. However, they found that from this starting position, there are many benefits that can be gained.
They have shared a few thoughts on how to help navigate some pain points and get the best out of its features:
ü Check the meeting is being recorded – “I was merrily there enjoying the meeting, learning shed loads. Thinking great, I’ll be able to go back and pick all this out and the transcription wasn’t there (someone had turned it off after 5 mins).
ü Experiment – “Maybe to just keep testing with trial meetings.” “Definitely pair with a colleague that will do fake meetings so that you can test it all out. Because there’s nothing worse than going into a higher-level exec meeting and you didn’t quite understand how it worked and everyone’s staring at you and you’re expected to know”
ü Plan to get the most out of trials – “It would be good for a whole team (vs one in a team) could have a play with it to see how they could implement.”
ü It is an aid not a replacement – “I wouldn’t 100% rely on it”. “It’s the way forward and it’s only going to get better. I mean, there are problems, you can’t trust it completely, but there are many benefits. It’s really easy to use.”
Additional Information
If you would like to find out more about MS Teams Premium, you can visit our NHSmail support pages Microsoft Teams Premium – NHSmail Support
| Last Reviewed Date | 18/07/2024 |
