Introduction

Firstly, we will explore how Microsoft Teams Governance best practices lead to better ROI and an engaged workforce that is productive and efficient.

Governance is a dreaded word in the IT industry. People think this leads to a lack of freedom and lockdown.  People regard the IT department as a blocker to productive work and the creator of unwanted processes. However, a lack of governance leads to a wild, wild west collaboration scenario resulting in terrible user experience and decreased engagement on the platform. Users become frustrated with too much governance. Consequently, this leads to a lack of freedom thus hampering creative uses and productive work.

Common Governance Scenarios

Let us explore some of the Governance problems specifically for Microsoft Teams

Implement simple and easy governance by considering a few things before rolling out any application across the organization. Implement a few steps correctly go a long way to provide structure. Let us look at the few common scenarios in Microsoft Teams that cause chaos –

• Teams sprawl – First of all, creating too many teams results in confusion and chaos on each Team’s intent and collaboration purpose. 
• Content sprawl – Secondly, wastage of time and effort occurs to find the right content if many versions of the same content exist across Teams.
• Thirdly, a bad user experience results due to incorrect features being enabled or disabled.
• Lastly, users avoid adopting the system if they are not coached, trained or communicated about the purpose and the various business problems that it intends to solve.

Solve all of the above-stated scenarios and problems by addressing the following. However, before going for the big bang there should be a pilot group of early adopters to test the waters and provide feedback. Based on this feedback, iterate and improve to roll it out to alpha and beta users for further iterative improvements before doing the final big bang push across the organization.

Best Practice: Roles and responsibilities

Considered assigning roles and responsibilities properly as it determines a few points discussed further in the article. The right assignment of role goes a long way in maintaining order in the system. Assign important roles with responsibilities to people who are proactive, excited and enthused.

Best Practice: Permissions

Based on the roles, determine the permission model for your organization. This helps maintain the structure as the permissions determine who creates and maintains teams.

For example – Create people who understand the system and can manage the responsibility as Team Owners, others remain Team Members.

Best Practice: Structure

Teams are organized by topics which in turn decides structure. It is the digital metaphor for an open office to encourage conversations, discussions and ad-hoc meetings and to share ideas and solve problems

Remember to have standardized names that are easy to find and intuitive. Structure everything around topic or content.  The content becomes a Team and a topic can become a channel

Best Practice: Features

Also, do not neglect many of the seemingly simple but effective features. Always enable features that can increase engagement and collaboration. The majority of users seldom use advanced and powerful features. Plan for advanced features, use cases or business problems you intend to solve if they are being rolled out early as well.

Best Practice: Training

Based on the roles and responsibilities along with a permission model created focused training sessions. Identify people who can be part of these group training sessions and have them engaged early on.

Best Practice: Communication

This is the most important aspect of any rollout or Governance model. Communicate early, always over-communicate than under, have engaging sessions during the training. Always gather feedback and improvise.

You can find more information on Microsoft Team’s Governance article

To know more about automating Microsoft Teams governance using our product – TeamsHub by Cyclotron, please click here