Case Study – BP M365 and Digital Transformation
Overview
In the summer of 2018, BP engaged Prosource to provide program leadership for a strategic initiative: converting a technically-deployed Microsoft 365 platform into something employees actually used. The engagement spanned six months and covered a global workforce of approximately 100,000 users across corporate employees and contractors.
The core objective was specific and measurable: move Teams adoption from 25% of users engaging weekly to 65% of users engaging daily. That is not a modest target. It is a 2.5x expansion of the user base and a 5x increase in the frequency standard – applied simultaneously, across one of the largest corporate digital footprints in the energy sector.
The program was delivered on objective.
Context
The Situation
BP had completed a technically successful migration of their mail and productivity infrastructure into Microsoft 36536. The licenses were active, the infrastructure was running, and from an IT perspective the project was closed. Employees opened Outlook and saw Outlook. Nothing had visibly changed.
That was the problem.
M365's value is not in its email client, it is in the connective tissue – Teams for communication and collaboration, Planner for task management, Forms, To Do, Yammer, and for specific populations, Project Online and Visio. BP had purchased E5 licensing across the enterprise, which included all of it. Almost none of it was being used.
Teams was the strategic priority. Microsoft had announced the deprecation roadmap for Skype for Business, and BP needed their workforce on Teams before that deadline arrived. The adoption numbers at engagement start were clear and concerning: roughly 25% of the 100,000-user population was opening Teams at least once per week. The target was 65% daily – a threshold that represented genuine behavioral change at scale, not surface-level awareness.
Organizational Complexity
The program's organizational structure was itself a constraint worth documenting. BP maintained two internal groups with relevant ownership: the Collaboration team, responsible for M365 engineering, support, and day-to-day platform operations; and the Digital Workplace team, running a broader enterprise transformation program from London headquarters. These two groups had overlapping mandates and a documented tension between them – the Head of Collaboration had made clear from the outset that she believed this program belonged to her team, while Digital Workplace held nominal authority over the initiative.
The role Prosource was hired to fill sat directly between them. Operationally reporting to Digital Workplace, doing most of the hands-on work in partnership with Collaboration, and navigating the friction between them without the organizational authority to resolve it. This was not incidental to the job. It was the job.
Approach
The before state was straightforward to diagnose. The platform had been deployed with baseline training documentation that employees largely ignored, minimal internal marketing, and no behavioral change strategy. The technical implementation was complete. The adoption work had not begun.
The program required building that work from scratch – design, execution, and measurement – across a global, culturally diverse, time-zone-distributed workforce.
Adoption Strategy Design
The first task was to replace the existing partial draft of a strategy – described by a Digital Workplace colleague as "rather dry" – with something that could actually drive behavior at scale. The revised strategy organized around several parallel tracks, running simultaneously rather than sequentially.
The diagnosis underneath the strategy was that this was not a technology problem. The platform worked. The challenge was behavioral: employees had existing habits, existing tools, and no compelling reason to change. Any adoption program that led with features rather than workflows was going to fail the same way the original documentation had failed. The approach had to lead with people.
Internal Marketing and Communications
Working directly with BP's Corporate Communications function, a sustained communications campaign was developed and executed across company-wide channels – email newsletters, internal announcements, and targeted messaging to specific populations. The goal was not to announce the product. It was to make the product visible as something relevant to how people actually worked, which required translating platform capabilities into recognizable workflow language.
Workflow Workshops
A series of targeted workshops was designed and run with cross-functional teams drawn from across the enterprise. The design was deliberate: each workshop began not with a product demonstration but with a workflow problem. Teams would surface their actual coordination and communication pain points, and the workshop would work through how M365 tools addressed them specifically.
The recurring diagnosis was consistent across teams: internal communication and coordination were harder than they needed to be, and employees weren't sure how their tools were supposed to help. The workshops produced small case studies – real teams, real problems, real solutions – that could then be redistributed across the enterprise as proof points. Adoption at scale is easier when employees can see peers from recognizable teams describing recognizable problems being solved.
Champion Network
A network of internal advocates – named Digital Pioneers – was established across the enterprise. Candidates were identified through a combination of existing intelligence from a prior Prosource program and warm introductions from a colleague. The selection criteria prioritized employees who were already technically engaged and organizationally influential: people whose adoption would be visible to their teams and whose enthusiasm would be credible.
The Champions served as a distributed change agent network – receiving direct communication and support, then carrying the program's message into their own organizations. This model extended the program's reach far beyond what a central team could achieve through direct contact alone.
Flagship Events
Two flagship adoption events were designed and executed – one at BP's US headquarters in Houston, one at London HQ. The format was intentionally more substantive than a standard lunch-and-learn: a half-day structure with a keynote and breakout sessions, designed to give employees a meaningful engagement with the platform rather than a surface-level awareness exercise. The Houston event was run directly. The London event was led by a Digital Workplace colleague.
Outcomes
The program delivered against its primary objective. Teams adoption moved from approximately 25% of users engaging weekly to 65% of users engaging daily – a change in both the population reached and the behavioral standard measured. Across a 100,000-user footprint, that represents roughly 40,000 additional people integrating a daily-use collaboration platform into their working lives.
Secondary platform tools – Planner, Forms, Yammer, and others – saw corresponding lift as the adoption program created awareness across the broader M365 suite.
At the six-month mark, the Collaboration team assessed that they had sufficient internal capability to continue the program independently. The handoff was clean. The work continued under their ownership.
A senior member of the Digital Workplace leadership offered the following assessment:
"He is very strong on change management, its challenges and its key concepts, and he was full of enthusiasm for the tasks set. He quickly grasped the scope and scale of the task at hand during our early meetings, and identified many areas that hadn't yet been fully thought through. He took a rather 'dry' existing partial draft of the strategy, and really brought it to life in both its written form and in how he articulated it in presentations. He gets on well with his fellow team members and with stakeholders. He is a solid and technically savvy change manager."
What This Engagement Demonstrated
Ambiguity Resolution at Scale
The program arrived with a clear metric and an unclear path. No playbook existed for this specific combination of platform, organization, and behavioral target. The work required rapidly synthesizing an understanding of the organization's structure, its political landscape, and its employees' actual working habits – then designing an approach that could operate across all of it simultaneously.
The ability to move from ambiguity to clarity to plan to execution, without waiting for the ambiguity to resolve itself, was the core competency the engagement demanded.
Behavior Change Is a People Problem
The framing that shaped everything else: this was not a technology program. The technology was already deployed. The program's actual subject matter was human behavior – specifically, the gap between what a tool can do and what people will choose to do with it.
Closing that gap required understanding employees not as users to be trained but as people with existing habits, legitimate workflow concerns, and limited patience for solutions that did not visibly address their problems. The workshop model worked because it started there. The champion network worked because it leveraged existing social trust rather than trying to manufacture it from outside. The communications worked because they spoke in workflow language rather than product language.
Technology adoption at enterprise scale is a product problem wearing a change management costume. The costume matters less than the underlying diagnosis.
Navigation Without Authority
The organizational structure placed this role in a position of significant influence with limited formal authority – caught between two internally competing teams, neither of which fully owned the space the program needed to operate in. Navigating that required an ongoing calibration: enough alignment with each team to maintain cooperation, enough independence to keep the program moving when the teams' priorities diverged.
This is not an unusual position for a senior program manager. It is, in fact, the standard one. The ability to operate effectively inside organizational friction – without requiring it to be resolved before the work can proceed – is a prerequisite for any complex program environment.
Scale Changes the Work
One thing this engagement made clear that smaller programs could not: scale is not simply more of the same. At 100,000 users, every decision about communications, targeting, and sequencing has downstream effects that a 5,000-user program would never surface. The same approach that works in a mid-sized organization fails at enterprise scale – not because it is wrong in principle, but because the system it is operating in behaves differently.
Understanding how scale changes a program's dynamics – and designing for it explicitly rather than discovering it reactively – is a capability this engagement developed in ways that no smaller program could have.
Engagement period: Summer–Winter 2018. Client: BP (via Prosource).