How to Succeed with Microsoft Teams Lifecycle Management

Common Microsoft Teams Challenges to Avoid

In the long run, the common Microsoft Teams challenges are only aggravated, making collaboration in itself a burden for users. Without lifecycle management, businesses are very likely to face these challenges:

• Duplication. Without policies around who can create teams and how to find existing resources, duplication of teams is inevitable.
• Inconsistent Naming. The purpose of a team in MS Teams is completely lost if a naming convention is not clearly defined and enforced.
• Findability Challenges. With ineffective naming and a lack of awareness among users issues with not being able to find Teams will arise.
• What to Use When. The most common of all dilemmas, end users will rarely know the right Microsoft tool to pick. This is due to overlapping capabilities unless otherwise defined by the organization.
• Unmanageable Sprawl. A common consequence of duplication, inconsistent naming, and findability is sprawl which only gets worse if left unchecked.
• Access Issues. Without a periodic review of member access, access issues become a point of frustration for users.
• Uncontrolled Content Growth. The ungoverned growth of MS Teams makes content growth inevitable. The lack of proper governance can lead to inactivity, abandonment, and/or duplication of teams in MS Teams.

All of these complications put together become burdensome for both end users and administrators. They adversely impact the productivity of the platform and the organization as a whole. The only solution is to give MS Teams cleanup fair consideration.

Use Case: Short Term Cross-Domain Project

Let’s assume your organization is taking on a project that requires inter-departmental collaboration. This project will run for a short span of time and both departments already collaborate through their dedicated MS Teams team. The first step you would take is to create a new MS Teams team with members from both departments. Since this project is temporary, you need to have a team’s lifecycle management strategy all the way through the sunsetting stage.

Stage One: CREATION, key considerations for creating:

• How can you avoid duplication of a team in MS Teams? You can manage creation in Microsoft Teams by limiting creation rights to a subset of users. It is important to establish who can create this team to avoid duplication by other members.
• Who should be included in this Team as owners, members, and guests? Deciding on owners and members in advance will clearly define the responsible actors of the team. This will help avoid team abandonment or orphaning. A best practice here would be to have more than one owner, at a minimum two.
• How to avoid ‘what to use when’ confusion in MS Teams? You need a standard template or structure to guide users into the correct tools to use within your organization. Templating will help you define the purpose of each channel. It will help identify tabs, and third-party app integrations, and will eliminate confusion with a consistent structure throughout.

Stage Two: ACTIVE USAGE, other key considerations for access:

• Who should have access to review MS Teams team membership/roles? Circumvent the issues of stale access management by periodically reviewing the access of members. Make note of the fact that for access review the license required is Azure AD Premium P2. It can get expensive unless you keep your membership limited.
• How will members be invited and/or removed on a consistent basis? This is also vital in case you need to invite some external members and remove employees that have left the company.
• Who will monitor the usage of created teams in MS Teams to keep the wasteland of unused digital workspaces in check? Monitoring is key to knowing more about the usage patterns and if team owners are still active. Make use of reporting facilities like Microsoft 365 Admin Center and MS Teams Admin Center for built-in, out-of-the-box reports on user activity.

Stage Three: SUNSETTING, key considerations for archiving:

• How can you keep this from adding to the sprawl? You can set an expiration policy. If the group is not active and renewed by the owner, then the group and associated content can be deleted. Keep in mind that this is also an Azure AD capability with a P1 license. If chosen it will impact anything associated with that group.
• How can you protect information without contributing to unmanageable content growth? Make use of retention policies at granular levels like folders and documents. At a higher level use SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts to ensure associated content is not lost at the time of deletion. At the end of the retention period, the content can either be deleted or go through a disposition review process.

Do you see how at each stage you can ensure optimal usage of Microsoft Teams with lifecycle planning and management? If you do not follow these practices you could be presenting yourself with all of the issues and challenges mentioned earlier.

So far the strategies identified only focus on a few aspects of what needs to be considered. The use case we presented is a common occurrence within many organizations. We hope it gives you clarity on why weaving Lifecycle Management as part of your MS Teams deployment is so crucial.

For more insight on how to implement Microsoft Teams lifecycle management and better control your environment, watch our on-demand webinar.

With each capability targeting the different stages of the lifecycle management of an MS Teams team, you can be assured that Orchestry will enable a standardized, sprawl-free, and managed collaboration environment.