How to enforce Microsoft Teams Governance without Killing Adoption

Introduction

Microsoft Teams did an outstanding job in reviving business communications right after its launch. Exceeding its digital capabilities, MS Teams soon became official collaboration platform for organizations that went completely remote recently. Today, millions of active users around the globe continue to team up to create and innovate digitally without barriers using Microsoft Teams.

Now, let us face the fact. Though many businesses could achieve milestones by adopting Teams, yet there were some that faced adoption failure. Experts revealed that user adoption and governance in Microsoft Teams work in parallel. Thereby, lack of governance leads to uncontrolled collaboration and security breaches which fails to influence users.

We must understand that governance is not a barrier to productivity but a remedy to discipline user behavior and Teams ecosystem. Hence, it is better to prioritize governance and provide structure to Teams for long-term usage and success.

Further in this blog, we will try to clarify a few common questions regarding adoption success by enforcing governance in Microsoft Teams –

1. What is adoption?

Adoption is the process of promoting end users to start working with new technology and commit to using it long-term. It is important to configure the new technology as per user requirements to help them achieve their tasks effectively.

2. What is governance in MS Teams?

Governance is a discipline enforced by a set of rules and policies to organize business workflows and processes. Without governance managing and securing MS Teams platform gets difficult.

3. What are the disadvantages of not using governance in Microsoft Teams?

Without governance, productive collaboration in MS Teams is unachievable. Lack of governance generates Teams sprawl, information overload, data invisibility, data duplication, congestion of resources, difficulty in searching relevant content and other security issues such as shadow IT, data loss, etc., as roadblocks to adoption.

4. What is Teams sprawl?

Creation of teams in an unprecedented manner leads to Teams sprawl. MS Teams allows everyone to create teams by default and doesn’t detect replicated teams or abandoned teams by itself. As users have no defined way of creating teams, it piles up purposeless teams with intertwined workspaces, difficult to handle.

5. What are the different areas of Teams governance?

An essential part of Teams governance is team creation and management. To control proliferation, team creation can be restricted to specific users. Users must know their roles, responsibilities, access capabilities and permissions for better organization of Teams. Also, applying naming conventions is important to understand purpose behind teams. Next, managing lifecyle of teams is pivotal for better optimization of resources. Here, you must provide rules for content retention, archival and deletion after a specified time. Furthermore, you must configure external collaboration to limit guest access and overexposure of data.

6. What if too much control discourages users to adopt Teams?

While implementing governance, you must ensure that you are not curtailing user freedom to do their tasks efficiently. For example, using automation, team creation can be simplified in Microsoft Teams. If you want all your end users to create teams, you can design a request-approval workflow by automating the process. If designing an in-house product is not feasible for you, then you can easily achieve this by a third-party governance tool such as TeamsHub.io. To check how TeamsHub.io enables self-service by automating team creation, please click here.

7. How does governance boost adoption rate?

Teams usage rate surges when users are given necessary freedom to use Teams functionalities to work and collaborate effectively. Governance prevents potential security risks, manages compliance, and eliminates confusions and chaos among users for better experience.  Furthermore, by adding a layer of automation to Teams governance, you can strike right balance between user freedom and control. Automation makes administration effortless so that your users focus on what matters most. To know more about it, please click here.

8. Governance adds loads of administrative work, but we lack the relevant expertise. What should we do?

While governance is critical to Teams success, we understand that it invites new challenges to administration once teams proliferate. In this situation, we advise you to use a third-party governance automation solution such as TeamsHub.io which is easy for any user to operate. TeamsHub.io is a zero-code platform that makes Teams more manageable by streamlining governance and optimizing user experience. It offers a centralized governance console to reduce management complexities. It also offers a unified interface that brings everything a user needs at one place for least distraction and efficient collaboration.

To learn more about automation, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo