The Why, What and How of a Microsoft Teams Governance Strategy

Microsoft Teams Governance Strategy

Introduction

Creative uses of Microsoft Teams cannot be accomplished unless effective governance strategies are put in place. Usually, people mistake governance for the lack of freedom and acknowledge it as a barrier to workplace productivity. In contrary, you cannot pull out your teams’ productivity to the fullest if you don’t use Microsoft Teams governance.

In this blog, we will discuss why MS Teams governance is important in an organization and what strategies can be used and how to implement them. Let’s begin –

Why you need Microsoft Teams governance

To understand the chaos and conflictions caused due to lack of Microsoft Teams governance, let us walk through a few scenarios in your organization:

1. Firstly, users can create multiple teams by default which causes ‘Teams Sprawl’. It means there could be loads of dead teams, empty channels and data scattered all over chats, channels, and tabs.

2.  Secondly, due to ‘Content Sprawl’, discovering the right content becomes a challenge, especially if many versions of the same content exist across Teams.

3. Thirdly, lack of clarity about the usage of Teams may decline its adoption.

4. Fourthly, incorrect use of features may cause bad user experience.

5. Lastly, if users are not trained, business problems may remain unresolved and eventually MS Teams may fail to bring value to your organization.

Moving ahead, let us discern the areas where you can apply governance strategies in MS Teams to benefit your organization.

Areas to consider for MS Teams governance

Based on our real-world corporate experiences, you can broadly implement governance plans in four areas of Microsoft Teams:

1. Provisioning

Provisioning in Microsoft Teams governance can prevent users from creating teams in an uncontrolled manner and information overload or duplication. Provisioning decides how teams are created and ensures a proper approval system, better structure to Teams and consistency across Teams.

2. Data Security and External Access

It is highly important to consider MS Teams governance strategy around guest access management in teams if you are frequently collaborating with people outside of your organization. Guests can be given permissions to access your Teams resources just like a native team member. An effective governance strategy ensures that you define their levels of access and track every information shared with them.

3. Classification

MS Teams governance around classification by using tags, naming conventions and labeling helps to clarify the purpose of teams. By classifying a team as confidential, private, or protected, you can let other users know that the information stored in such teams is critical and hence sharing is restricted.

4. Lifecycle Management

Existence of too many orphaned teams or teams without owners or unnecessary teams cause difficulties in management of teams. Additionally, valuable resources tied to them concurrently remain underutilized. To resolve it, using MS Teams governance, you can configure expiration policies for teams to manage lifecycle of teams. The ones that have served their purpose already or are no more useful can be disposed to free-up the resources.

5. Analytics

MS Teams governance can be used around analytics to enhance reporting which helps to gain valuable insights into teams’ performance. Reports should be easy to access to show instant data on overall activities in organization. This helps in making accurate decisions and prevents similar errors to occur in future.

Teams governance automation

Let us now see how to automate MS Teams governance and simplify administration to help you achieve most out of it – all to make your organization a better and smarter workplace –

1. Automate site creation and authorization, enforce naming conventions, and manage external workflows through provisioning.

2. Classify teams to highlight their purpose, restrict the use of blocked words and automate naming standards with rules.

3. Automate inactive teams for archival or deletion by applying business rules and governance policies to enhance active teams’ visibility.

4. Automate notifications and alerts for owners and members during incidents or events such as teams’ inactivity, teams nearing expiration, member removal from teams etc.

5. Automate reports to generate real-time data in no time. You can derive various activity reports based on metadata usage, user performance, browser, and device segmentation etc.

6. Use Azure features such as Information Rights Management (IRM), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), etc. to automate governance for external collaboration.

Automation can work wonders to streamline governance in Microsoft Teams. Use it to make administration simpler and teams efficient and productive.

To know how to automate governance in MS Teams, visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo