TEI of M365 Education - Final Updated
TEI of M365 Education - Final Updated
TEI of M365 Education - Final Updated
Key Findings
Benefits. The following risk-adjusted quantified present value (PV)
benefits are representative of those experienced by the schools
interviewed and applied to a composite organization of 60,000 students
and 5,500 teachers and projected forward for three years:
Reduced device setup time: › Improved student learning and outcomes. The primary reason the
84% interviewed school districts adopted Microsoft 365 was to provide better
educational experiences for their students. All interviewees stated that
the Microsoft 365 solution allows for students to be more engaged in
their studies. Additionally, the anytime/anywhere nature of the cloud-
based solution, means that students can access their coursework from
home or mobile phone as well as at school. Giving students a personal
device, whether it remains on campus or can be taken home, further
engages them in learning and developing the 21st century skills that will
be required upon graduation — either within higher education or the
workplace. This benefit was not quantified in the study.
CASE STUDY
Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling Microsoft 365
Education’s impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the
increasing sophistication that enterprises have regarding ROI analyses
related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology serves to provide a
complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions.
Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.
DISCLOSURES
Readers should be aware of the following:
Microsoft provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate
in the interviews.
Interviewed Organizations
For this study, Forrester conducted 10 interviews across five school
districts using Microsoft 365 Education. Interviewed organizations
include the following:
Key Challenges
The interviewed school districts had many challenges that they wanted to
address with Microsoft 365 Education.
› Existing solutions could not deliver the desired learning
experiences. The on-premises and other cloud-based solutions that
were replaced with Microsoft 365 Education did not fully meet the
schools’ needs in terms of providing collaborative learning experiences “Our past solution was not
and teaching 21st century skills, such as computer programming and collaborative. It was extremely
applied creativity. Additionally, providing each student with their own difficult to work on documents
device could not be achieved because of cost and manpower together in real time. It was
limitations. “We needed to figure out how to service our students very important for us to move
better. With Windows computers, we could do everything we needed. in this direction.”
As we uncovered more problems, we solved them with Microsoft 365.”
Executive director, IMS
› There was insufficient security and digital rights management.
Moving to a digitally-driven teaching model requires improved IT
security. Further, digital rights management needs to be solid to avoid
copyright and contract violations. “I inherited a dumpster fire of
infrastructure. There was not enough security and there was no digital
rights management. Digital rights management with file level
permissions needed to be added quickly.”
Composite Organization
Based on the interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a
composite organization, and an associated ROI analysis that illustrates
the areas financially affected. The composite organization is
representative of the five school districts that Forrester interviewed and is
used to present the aggregate financial analysis in the next section. The
composite organization that Forrester synthesized from the customer
interviews has the following characteristics:
› Description of composite. The composite organization is a K through
12 public school district. There are 60,000 students and 5,500
teachers, all of which use Microsoft 365. There are an additional 1,500
staff and administrators using Microsoft 365. The district operates
many different types of schools including traditional elementary,
middle, and high schools, as well as schools for special needs
Key assumptions
students and vocational training. The district is launching an online 60,000 students
only school built on Microsoft 365.
5,500 teachers
› Deployment characteristics. The composite school district rollout
was a big bang approach. (Interviewed school districts varied in how
1,500 additional users
they rolled out Microsoft 365, and Forrester used this approach for
model simplicity and clarity.) Microsoft 365 Education A3, which
includes InTune for Education, was deployed for teachers and staff,
and Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint were made available to
everyone very soon after. New devices were provided to all teachers
and students. There was ongoing work building more SharePoint and
Teams sites, which was part of business as usual operations. Students
had free use of Office 365 Education A1 plus student use benefits such
as InTune for Education, Minecraft: Education Edition, and a range of
other solutions. More details are in the Costs section of the study.
Total Benefits
PRESENT
REF. BENEFIT YEAR 1 YEAR 2 YEAR 3 TOTAL VALUE
Improved student outcomes (non-quantified)
Btr Improved IT and cost savings $3,863,700 $1,168,650 $1,202,400 $6,234,750 $5,381,662
Personalized Learning
› “Personalized learning has improved a lot. We started the first virtual
school last year. The students go completely at their own pace and
have face-to-face sessions one time per week. The rest is all virtual.
There is a pacing guide tailored specifically for each student. They can “This year, I am using Microsoft
complete an entire course early and progress on if they choose to. This Teams with each of my
is done with Teams and Office 365.” classes. I post assignments
› “Students with different learning needs have a couple of different within Teams such as
approaches to learning. We have a centralized team that helps the PowerPoint, forms (for
schools figure out how to use the software in different ways. For assessments), Word
example, we are using OneNote learning tools for students with documents, web links for
reading problems.” games or activities, video
links, etc. This has allowed my
Anytime/Anywhere Learning students to be self-motivated
› “Learning experiences have extended outside of the classroom when accessing and
because everything is in the cloud. Learning happens beyond the completing work on the
school borders more often than in the past.” computer. It also gives me the
› “We are using Skype for Business to teach languages in remote areas freedom to work with other
for the second language requirement.” students while some are on
Teams.”
› “Students are using Microsoft 365 from their phones off campus. It
Sixth grade math teacher
makes homework more efficient.”
Student Engagement
› “We’ve seen an increase in student engagement. We send a survey
each year, and 67% of students said this technology helps them be
better engaged.”
A1*5 minutes/60*2
A3 Time saved setting up classes (hours) semesters (25% realized 1,250 5,000 5,000
in Year 1)
A2*6 hours*36 weeks
A4 Time saved grading tests 297,000 1,188,000 1,188,000
(25% realized in Year 1)
Average teacher fully burdened cost ($45,000+30%)/(38
A5 $38.49 $38.49 $38.49
(hourly) weeks*40 hours)
› “Having the solution in the cloud makes it easier for us, and our IT
team is stretched thin. Microsoft 365 is also more user friendly and has
better self-service tools, so IT professionals don’t have to be the one to
do everything.”
› “We got rid of other systems for web conferencing and learning
management. That saves us $125,000 per year.”
› “It would have been $4 million to upgrade our on-premises systems.
Instead, we are spending $400,000 per year [for Microsoft 365
Education].”
› “It would have been cost prohibitive to build this out ourselves. We had
20MB mailboxes when on-premises and we’re looking at implementing
1GB or 2GB mailboxes. The storage piece alone was 4x to 5x the
money we would have gotten. I wasn’t going to take on a project we
couldn’t do right.”
› “We would have spent several million dollars up front on windows
licenses plus 6,000 user licenses had we stuck with our past, in-house
solutions.”
› “If we did everything on-premises, at least one more person would
have been needed just to maintain the exchange servers and keep up
with email accounts and security.”
› “To replace the Exchange server and licenses would have been
$50,000 that year. That is more than I wanted to pay when I could
move it to the cloud.”
› “With Microsoft 365 Education licenses, you buy it for employees, and
it is free for the students. Our past solution cost $35 per student.”
› “Microsoft 365 is so easy to manage. It is a force multiplier. It is still me
and one other person managing the tenants, including Azure.”
› “We have removed at least four or five people around system
administration tasks and reassigned them to more valuable activities
[such as instructional learning].”
› “We used to have a disaster recovery solution. Now we don’t need it so
that cost has gone away.”
Interviewees had the following things to say about improved
performance, availability, and security:
› “Microsoft 365 is easily scalable and future ready. No matter how many
users we add, we don’t have to add hardware.”
› “It increased the whole security of the platform. Previously, schools
were struggling with securing their data.”
› “Information rights management is baked into the Microsoft world. We
have Azure rights management turned on, and our default setting is to
have One Drive locked. We also use drive encryption.”
For the financial analysis, Forrester included cost savings described by
interviewees and scaled them for the composite organization size.
Forrester assumes that:
› Upgrading an on-premises solution would have cost $3.5 million
upfront in hardware and licenses. There would be an additional
$250,000 per year spent on increasing storage and compute power as
well as a 15% maintenance contract cost.
› On-premises hosting and cooling would cost $75,000 per year.
› Four FTEs could be redeployed, avoiding future hires. This was lower
in Year 1.
› Other webconferencing and learning management solutions could be
eliminated, creating savings of $125,000 per year. This is less in Year 1
to account for the cutover and contract periods.
The savings from one school district to another can vary greatly
depending on their previous solutions and approaches to IT
management. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit
downward by 10%, yielding a three-year risk-adjusted total PV of $5.38
million.
B1(sum through
B2 Avoided infrastructure maintenance $525,000 $562,500 $600,000
current year)*15%
B1+B2+B3+(B4*B5)+
Bt IT savings $4,293,000 $1,298,500 $1,336,000
B6
(A1+A2)*2.5
C2 Device setup time savings $5,854,063
hours*$35.75
720 incidents*2
C3 Device security remediation savings $51,480 $51,480 $51,480
hours*$35.75
Deployment
The time and effort required to deploy Microsoft 365 Education varied
greatly across the interviewed organizations. Some of the main variables
were: if Microsoft solutions such as Exchange were previously in use; the The table above shows the total of all
size of the IT team; number of schools to be deployed; and available costs across the areas listed below, as
budget. Typically, Exchange and other solutions such as SharePoint and well as present values (PVs)
Teams were rolled out quickly, and there was then a long tail for discounted at 10%. Over three years,
the composite organization expects
adoption. risk-adjusted total costs to be a PV of
From a staffing perspective, the deployment team was comprised of more than $18.7 million.
existing internal resources and sometimes professional services were
used. Internally, most of the people worked on the deployment as part of
their regular duties, e.g., training, and worked on this part-time. The
project was spearheaded by the IT organization.
Below are deployment timeline examples from the interviewed
organizations.
52,000 Student School District
› “We worked with two companies that provided the devices with
managed installation and asset recovery. Part of the project was
“Teachers like being
getting rid of the junk we had. We would migrate a school over the
weekend.” upgraded. They like to be on
the latest and greatest
› “We got our licenses in September 2014. On October 20th everyone technology.”
was on [Microsoft 365]. Most of the time was spent in testing to make
Technology network coordinator
sure things were working better, e.g., synchronization and identity data.
Fifteen people worked part-time.”
› “Creating SharePoint sites took longer. We worked with Microsoft
consulting and didn’t complete that until May 2015.
80,000 Student School District
› “We created new credentials in April of this year. Everyone had access
then. Schools that previously had Office on-premises or nothing could
use Microsoft 365 right away. Those moving from other tools are being
migrated and receiving training through the rest of 2017. We are
migrating ten schools per week.”
› “It took around six months to migrate 163 tenants and the data.”
› “The integration/migration team consisted of eight people, mainly
contractors.”
D1 Number of months 9
Risk adjustment 0%
Ongoing Management
The IT labor savings from not having to manage on-premises
infrastructure is discussed in the Benefits section of the study. Ongoing
internal effort switched from keeping the lights on to other activities, such “Microsoft 365 is very user
as helping to rollout additional SharePoint sites and Teams sites. There friendly. There are a wide
are also ongoing efforts to configure Microsoft 365, handle new users, variety of tools that teachers
device management, and rollout new features. need to be prepared to teach
Overall, the added efforts and eliminated ones tend to equate basically themselves how to use. No
no change in overall IT staff. “We have not had to add additional matter what my team is
resources yet. We are supporting more technology, but still have same looking to do, they can find it
staff number as 15 years ago,” said one interviewee at a school district in Microsoft 365.”
with 75,000 students. Another district with 6,100 students reported, “one
Manager of institutional
FTE is dedicated to Microsoft 365.”
technology
Additionally, there are a lot of other roles across the district that are
working on Microsoft 365. These are mainly business as usual activities
that moved over from other learning support activities. For example, one
school district with 52,000 students reported that they have “nine
instructional training people, one data scientist, and two data analysts
that are all working with Microsoft 365 now.” They also have four
resources that are, “working on ongoing SharePoint adoption.” Overall, “I encourage everyone to go to
this district added around four FTEs, involved in managing the solution. Microsoft 365. The ease of
management and data
For the financial analysis, Forrester made the following assumptions:
synchronization makes a huge
› Four internal FTEs are dedicated to supporting Microsoft 365 and the difference in how we are better
ongoing rollout of solutions such as SharePoint and Teams sites. able to assist our students in
Although these are not new hires, they are included as part of a total learning.”
cost of ownership analysis.
Director of technology
› Other internal efforts around adoption and support are carried out by
resources across the organization, and this time replaced past
activities. Therefore, there is no incremental increase in headcount.
› On average, $50,000 per year is spent on professional services around
deploying new Microsoft 365 solutions and ongoing best practice
adoption.
These costs can be higher if a school district’s IT department is already
understaffed. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost
upward by 10%, yielding a three-year risk-adjusted total PV of $919,410.
PRESENT
INITIAL YEAR 1 YEAR 2 YEAR 3 TOTAL VALUE
Total costs ($16,615,200) ($852,600) ($852,600) ($852,600) ($19,173,000) ($18,735,490)
ROI 95%
DISCOUNT
RATE
Risks measure the uncertainty of benefit and cost estimates The interest rate used in cash flow
given: 1) the likelihood that estimates will meet original analysis to take into account the
projections and 2) the likelihood that estimates will be time value of money. Organizations
tracked over time. TEI risk factors are based on “triangular typically use discount rates
distribution.” between 8% and 16%.
PAYBACK
The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the PERIOD
beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted
using the discount rate at the end of the year. PV calculations are calculated for The breakeven point for an
each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are investment. This is the point in time
the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. at which net benefits (benefits
Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and minus costs) equal initial
investment or cost.
Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur.