Microsoft Teams Cleanup After the Rush to Remote Work

Building a Company Persona

You must identify your business persona and define clear aims for your organization. This is integral to determining your path towards MS Teams adoption and then engagement. In order to best build your persona, here are 4 crucial aspects you must consider:

1. Know Company Goals:  They can be of any category including but not limited to: organizational, cultural, tangible, or individual. Studying industry examples and case studies to know what goal is closest to yours is an effective strategy. The scale of business operations is another crucial factor that helps determine your business persona.
2. Audit Communication and Collaboration Methods: Identify the necessary number of teams, and determine the lifecycle of each team. This will enable users to get started with the appropriate Microsoft Teams template options. Templating is an effective way to get started quickly while maintaining consistency across the organization.
3. Drill into the Independent User Stories: The independent user stories approach is a task-based method outcome that will narrow down the expected requirements of your environment. This allows you to understand the needs before diving into solution building and really refining your requirements to guide your deployment.
4. Deliver with Process Mapping: This step should map out business processes and user activities to identify the necessary deliverables.

Defining desired outcomes and understanding the scope of operations will help you determine your business persona and select a service enablement strategy.

View Microsoft Teams not just as a tool with beneficial features, but as an ongoing mechanism to achieve business objectives. Treat it as a solution to manage a tangible problem at hand. Knowing your business goals is essential to maximizing the use of Microsoft Teams.

Pillars of Effective Microsoft Teams Governance Policies

• • There are three levels of administrative rights - administrator, owner, and Teams member - which specify each user's level of access. For essential teams, use an approval workflow to provision them. Customized request forms can be utilized for other teams.
  • Establish who can create, modify, edit, delete, or request teams. To manage member rights effectively, limit the ability to create teams for a specific group of people. Also, implement a pre-approved list of third-party apps that team members can integrate. Managing company-wide MS Teams' organization can be achieved by limiting certain members' actions.
  • Create a company-wide policy for naming teams that standardizes the naming system. Keep a log of approved abbreviations and set indicators for easy sorting and searching in the future. Use prefixes and suffixes.
  • Settle if and when external access should be granted to any user. Also, for complete control, you need to decide who can grant external access. Make use of organization-wide settings or sensitivity labels for individual teams.
  • Archiving or deleting are simple ways to get rid of irrelevant teams in the software. To implement such practices, establish a criterion that defines when a team should be archived or deleted.

  After implementing your governance strategy, ensure that both new and old teams follow it. Implement an automation technique and make sure all users have adequate knowledge of the software. Investing in proper training and skill development can greatly facilitate the smooth adoption of new technology.

  Effective Training Tip: Formalize training around a template instead of every capability of the team. Empower your employees by creating a way for them to self-create this collaboration place while also maintaining consistency. In addition to this, MS Teams templates provisions a cohesive structure, so make good use of it.

Another useful Microsoft 365 feature is the audit log search that can be used for both reactive or proactive searches.

With monitoring, admins maintain consistency and remove inactive teams and channels. Setting up an inactivity threshold or expiration policy is one way to identify and eliminate obsolete teams. Additionally, you also have the opportunity to suggest more relevant templates that make it easy to get started with new teams.

Most organizations are not using Microsoft 365 to its full potential.

Orchestry makes Microsoft 365 simple for all users.

Orchestry  is an adoption and governance platform that allows End Users, Workspace Owners, IT admins and organizations to take full advantage of Microsoft 365.

To see Orchestry in action, request a demo!