Premium Microsoft 365 plans are easy to assign and hard to walk back. Months later you’re paying E5 prices for people who only ever use E3 features — and nobody wants to be the one who takes a feature away and gets it wrong.
Find the mismatches
Usage data makes the over-provisioned users obvious: assigned a premium SKU, but never touching the features that justify it — the PC Office client they don’t open, the Visio or Project entitlement with no recorded activity, the Azure AD Premium features they’ve never used. That’s your right-sizing shortlist.
Make the change safely
The risk in any downgrade is removing something someone quietly relies on. Evidence removes the guesswork:
- Confirm the premium features genuinely go unused before you touch anything
- Stage the change and keep watching for fallout
- Keep a record of the decision and the data behind it
Done well, right-sizing is one of the highest-return, lowest-risk moves in the Microsoft 365 estate. With usage flowing continuously through ‘M365 Optimize’, it stops being a once-a-year project and becomes routine. Get in touch to see your shortlist.