The ROI Of Microsoft Teams Auto Provisioning

When you’re trying to save money on your telecoms infrastructure, there are usually two areas that shed the most weight:

1. Losing functionality: downgrading from premium to standard licenses
2. Reducing headcount: fewer employees means lower costs

The result of telecoms expense audits and the like focus on what you’ve got, what you can reduce, and where you can make savings.

But what if there was a way to keep all your functionality and people yet still save money?

The growth of Microsoft Teams has seen businesses using more and more of its services. But that doesn’t mean your bill needs to spiral out of control.

The alternative is every procurement manager’s dream. And it marries with every IT manager’s dream.

No users get upset. There’s no time-consuming and expensive migration plan. Everyone is happy.

Sounds too good to be true, right?

It’s not.

If you’re using Microsoft Teams, you can now automate your entire user provisioning process and save a ton of money.

How much can an enterprise save with Microsoft Teams auto-provisioning?

Upon crunching the numbers, we’ve discovered you can save up to $500,000 when you move from manual process to auto-provisioning.

Mind-blowing.

So, how did we calculate this?

First, there’s the cost of a provisioning ticket. According to Cayosoft, the cost of an account creation ticket can be as high as $60. This is just for a new starter who needs access to basic Teams access.

On paper, you’re tasked with provisioning an AzureAD asset and creating a Teams user account with the relevant policies and access assigned.

Simple, right?

But what happens when something goes wrong?

Manual error is something we can’t eradicate as humans. We all make mistakes. Especially when under pressure to get lots of new users configured, while in the middle of a major project, and juggling urgent support tickets.

So now we must factor in the loss of time, drain on productivity, and lost revenue as a direct result.

Using information available on Glassdoor, the job search and company review site, we can calculate the salaries of relevant job roles (support engineers and escalation managers) who have input into provisioning errors and correlate their time with their cost to a business.

Here’s the average cost to remedy a provisioning error:

Cost of error (IT Cost – no escalation)
Item	Resource	Number	Hours	Cost
Service desk ticket logged	Office Worker	1.00	0.10	$1.53
Ticket triaged & assigned	1st Line Engineer	1.00	0.20	$2.97
Ticket actioned by engineer	2nd Line Engineer	1.00	1.50	$29.01
Ticket management	1st Line Engineer	1.00	0.75	$11.06
			Ticket Cost	$44.57

This is on top of the original provisioning ticket, which probably got closed off as soon as the engineer hit Save in the Teams Admin Center.

When that error requires further escalation, the cost jumps even further.

Cost of error (IT Cost – with escalation)
Item	Resource	Number	Hours	Cost
Service desk ticket logged	Office Worker	1.00	0.10	$1.53
Ticket triaged & assigned	1st Line Engineer	1.00	0.20	$2.97
Ticket actioned by engineer	2nd Line Engineer	1.00	1.50	$40.10
Escalation engineer	Specialist Engineer	1.00	1.00	$19.35
Ticket management	1st Line Engineer	1.00	1.00	$14.88
			Ticket Cost	$78.83

We’re now at the point where the cost of onboarding a new user is spiraling out of control.

Next, just to make the headache even worse, we must factor in the cost of that new user not being able to do any work during this time. According to HR Drive, the average time lost during this period is four hours.

To put this into perspective, we’ve made a running total and assigned a real-life scenario:

An organization affected by 120 provisioning errors in one month could end up losing more than $25,000 in lost employee productivity. This is on top of the cost to IT.

120 new staff a month? That’s crazy!

Well, not so much in enterprises and industries with high turnover (think hospitality, construction, call centers).

Even so, we must factor in moves, adds, and changes into the equation. Provisioning doesn’t stop when a user joins a company. What happens when they change roles or need new access or leave the company?

Each provisioning ticket has the potential to go wrong. It could be bad or missing information from HR when someone starts. It could be a bad day for that particular provisioning engineer.

When it comes to reducing costs in Microsoft Teams, there is nothing that moves the needle more than auto-provisioning.

By automating the tasks that we choose to leave open to human error, we can reduce the cost of Microsoft Teams by a staggering amount.

Number of Monthly Changes	Cost of Change Per Month	Cost of Change Per Year (ongoing)
50	$1,969.42	$23,633.04
100	$4,088.76	$49,065.12
350	$16,037.14	$192,445.68
500	$26,325.15	$315,901.80
1000	$54,869.11	$658,429.32

If these figures don’t make a case for the ROI of Microsoft Teams auto-provisioning, nothing will.

Is there still more money to be saved?

Absolutely.

You’ve saved $500,000 so why stop there?

You can still carry out the “usual” tasks when trying to save money.

Try these out for size:

1. Educate staff on Teams best practices: remove @ mentioning everyone for non-urgent messages and let people focus on deep work.
2. Know when to have meetings: why disrupt productive employees if they can contribute asynchronously?
3. Optimize real estate: which meeting rooms need the high-spec tech and which are only used for meetings on laptops?
4. Reduce real estate: audit how many meeting rooms/offices are still in use since embracing remote and hybrid work.
5. Audit license usage: do users really need premium licenses or are they just desirable?
6. Audit call plan usage: do any of those bundled minutes actually get used?

All these contribute to significant cost savings alongside auto-provisioning. There’s no reason why you can’t implement both alongside each other.

If reducing your Teams costs is high on your agenda, it’s now extremely possible to do so without causing major disruption in your business.

If it’s not high on your agenda, the figures demonstrated in this blog post should change your mind.