Microsoft Teams can change the way your business works, improving collaboration and workflows. Without a Teams governance and adoption strategy, however, you won’t reach its – or your – full potential.
Microsoft Teams is the beating heart of effective teamwork within the Microsoft 365 environment. Its capabilities for meetings, calls, chat, collaboration content, and ultra-efficient workflows are how business stakeholders communicate and create to make their enterprises optimally productive.
To make that happen, you need to find the proper balance between slowly adopting Teams tools and establishing governance – or rules — that don’t thwart or frustrate those who want to access and implement Teams tools in innovative ways.
The Goldilocks View of Controls: Not Too Few, Not Too Many, But Just Right
To navigate the complexities of teams and app management effectively, you need to find that “just right” spot in the number of controls you implement. Essentially, you need to find your company’s Goldilocks zone.
When there are too few controls on adoption, people can run into all sorts of confusion: they can’t find the teams they need, or they find duplicate, old, disorganized, or out-of-use teams; the apps they encounter may be irrelevant to their work, dormant, improperly deployed, or contain security or privacy flaws.
When there are too many governance controls, people may encounter stifling bottlenecks when requesting new teams, applications, or features. They may be blocked from provisioning new teams to handle immediate needs, activating certain Team apps to improve work performance, or enabling features to enhance group collaboration.
You don’t want to create a system with a lot of administrative burdens. Consider: If you adopt a policy where Teams users can’t create their own Microsoft Team but instead must defer to an IT staffer, does that IT person have the time to do this? Do policies requiring scaling up systems and tasks create more work for people, and if so, do those people have the time and resources to handle it?
For the most effective use of Microsoft Teams, you need solutions that increase adoption across the entire organization and ensure users follow policies (e.g., initial Teams requests, team provisioning, and settings standardization).
Partner with Orchestry for Microsoft Teams Success
One such solution is Orchestry, a complete empowerment, adoption and standardization platform that simplifies work on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. We often encourage some of our clients to consider Orchestry for this purpose because our experience helping some clients develop and establish their own approaches for automating their teams’ lifecycles involved costly and ineffective integrations of several different technologies – integrations that rarely met the needs of those organizations. Indeed, it’s our standard recommendation to clients entering the Teams world that they make Orchestry part of the process.
Orchestry’s adoption value lies in providing Teams Workspaces preconfigured for specific business needs and in its simplified Microsoft 365 interface, which reduces the need for training and makes it easier for end users to request and discover Workspaces. Its transparent governance value is that it’s invisible to the end user but still supplies all the necessary power for IT and business needs.
Plus, Orchestry governance’s intuitive and scalable nature aids in building policies for groups and teams and empowers end users in a disciplined way without creating roadblocks or bottlenecks.
However, it’s important to remember that whether or not you involve Orchestry, adoption is continuous rather than something with a finite schedule. Business conditions and objectives change. More people within the organization will buy into – and then begin to innovate within – Teams. You’ll hire new people to work in a Teams environment. Microsoft will roll out new updates for Teams. For each of these scenarios, you will need to continue the education, and the orientation process will evolve.
Continuous adoption monitoring is also necessary to ensure people get the hang of Teams and use its tools properly. It’s also important to guarantee the business matures into the optimal use of Teams. For instance, do employee teams know they can use more than one channel in Teams? And they aren’t required to invite everyone from another team into a channel but can invite specific individuals or guests?
Here are some basic, best practices for Microsoft Teams adoption strategies.
Best Practices for Microsoft Teams Adoption Strategies
Applying a three-phase introduction of best practices will help you begin driving the adoption of Microsoft Teams.
1. Start
The Start phase begins with understanding what teams and channels are within the Teams environment – i.e., teams are the people, content and tools that work together to produce the desired outcome. In contrast, channels are the spaces where collaborative work gets done. Next, you create the teams you need to use Microsoft Teams and empower them by pinning key and pertinent resources from the tab gallery of all Microsoft 365 and third-party apps.
After that, it’s time to find out if your team is ready to begin working in Teams. Determine if your stakeholders can effectively operate new and existing technology and how much rapport your business leaders have with their project teams. You will also need to identify early adopters — the people who are collaborative, risk-taking change agents who focus on improvements.
Finally, you need to know how adaptable and open your organization is to change, and if it can absorb the training necessary to effect change.
2. Experiment
The Experiment phase is next up. You begin by identifying which group of employees – champions –will drive internal awareness, adoption, and education. You follow this with a series of decisions that can help you test and understand how governance might impact end-user experiences and simplify the business choices you make in the future. These involve topics like guest access for partners and vendors, creating teams for early adopters, and team naming conventions.
Next in this phase is a related series of tasks:
- Identify early-usage business project scenarios that can deliver easy wins, such as personal productivity and modern project management.
- Interview business project stakeholders to learn about collaboration, communication pain points, and the strategic initiatives Teams could support.
- Map business project scenarios to know how project owners and workers view the path forward and prioritize the scenarios according to their impact and degree of difficulty.
As last steps, decide who to onboard onto your Teams experiments, how to orient them to their work, and gather their ongoing feedback. You also need to illustrate how you will provide appropriate support for early Teams adopters and champions.
3. Scale
Scale is the last phase. Define what you consider to be Microsoft Teams adoption success by mapping four sets of criteria for success: organizational (cultural transformation), cultural (employee sentiment and customer feedback, among other markers), tangible (including customer experience impacts and cost savings), and individual (employee morale, productivity and engagement).
Next, communicate your expectations for success – and your vision and progress towards your goal – to your stakeholders. Then, you expand two things: your implementation team – perhaps with more business sponsors, IT support staff, champions, and change management personnel – and your governance and information management policies to better reflect where you are in the adoption process.
Wrap things up by ensuring you get the most up-to-date service usage, health reports, and employee feedback to adjust awareness and training programs. Drive internal awareness and training for Microsoft Teams. And schedule monthly service health reviews to keep Teams implementations effective.
Best Practices for Microsoft Teams Governance
Even the most painstakingly planned Teams adoptions can leave organizations playing catch-up to establish necessary governance protocols. But there are definitive Microsoft Teams governance best practices to give them appropriate control and keep Teams collaboration platforms secure.
One of the newest Teams updates, Microsoft Teams Connect, lets users create and securely govern shared collaboration channels across multiple organizations. Accordingly, people can operate within the same digital environment with customers, suppliers, partners, or anyone outside the organization. Still, now they have a privacy setting that lets them add a single guest or employee to an individual shared channel instead of being required to invite that person to the entire team.
The corollary to this is vigilance about keeping guest users from accessing sensitive and private data. This task involves having an up-to-date overview of how many external users are in the tenant and which channels they can access and giving suitable permissions to the guest users you set up.
It is also a critical best governance practice to manage the rapid sprawl of teams, which happens when dormant teams and obsolete, albeit sensitive, data aren’t archived or deleted, is a critical governance best practice. You can get a handle on sprawl in several ways, including:
- A provisioning solution that creates teams in a controlled manner that automatically applies governing rules, e.g., naming requirements.
- A provisioning solution that automatically enforces a naming policy, often connected to teams templates, that can prevent the proliferation of duplicate teams.
- The IT team runs a usage report from the Microsoft Teams Administration Center to find obsolete and inactive teams.
Another kind of sprawl, cloud sprawl, deserves your attention, too. Cloud sprawl happens when an organization’s cloud instances, services or providers have grown out of control – often because cloud activities haven’t been properly tracked and managed. Lifecycle management can keep this under control by setting up rules governing how users create teams and groups in the Microsoft 365 environment and establishing expiration dates for deleting inactive teams.
While Microsoft bears some responsibility for ensuring that Teams has no security gaps, organizations have internal obligations to guard their data as well as user identities and devices. A key practice in this regard is to use sensitivity labels in Teams, not only to classify documents but also teams and Microsoft 365 groups. Specifically, these labels enforce:
- Teams’ requirements for privacy
- External users invites, whether you allow it or not.
- Types of sharing links you establish – for everyone, new and existing guests, existing guests, or no one at all.
- Unmanaged device access – full access, web only or none.
You should also take advantage of Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager to take inventory of your data protection risks and manage the challenges of implementing controls. Purview Compliance Manager helps you keep current on regulations and certifications and makes necessary reports to auditors. Towards these ends, this tool offers pre-made assessments for basic industry standards and regulations as well as custom assessments to address unique compliance needs, and workflow capabilities for efficiently completing risk assessments with a single tool.
It also provides detailed, step-by-step instructions on improving your compliance with the most relevant standards and regulations and a risk-based compliance score that tells you how well you’re completing those improvement actions.
What Is the Overarching Purpose of Using Teams
Adoption and governance best practices aren’t an end in themselves. There’s no point in introducing Teams to your organization unless you have a carefully considered strategic purpose that Teams can fulfill. What problems will Teams solve? What operational efficiencies will it achieve? What aspects of Teams do you want to exploit?
The more Teams tools you want to wield, the more resources you’ll need for maintenance, testing, results monitoring and so forth. If you take on more Teams functionality than you can handle, you may require third-party support you didn’t anticipate needing.
When starting out, it’s best to identify those business process improvements you expect Microsoft Teams to create and limit early adoption to the Teams capabilities, specifically addressing those desired improvements. For starters, less truly is more.
We urge our prospective Teams clients to clarify what use cases they’re seeking to facilitate with Teams and what decisions they would make for that purpose. This usually starts with a Microsoft 365 productivity and collaboration assessment, a governance engagement analysis, and then a road map for going forward.
The Teams infrastructure also ought to be subject to regular audits, preferably annually, to ensure that it complies with the adoption and governance strategies and controls defined for Teams. That’s the way to measure if and to what extent Teams works to meet the objectives that justified adoption in the first place. Such metrics can yield insights that guide ongoing and more sophisticated deployment of Teams over time, and higher levels of Teams mastery.
The Right Way to Do Things
Microsoft Teams can do so much to enhance the way work teams work together to solve problems, reach goals, and position an organization for future growth and process innovation. But making that happen requires a sensible, credible plan for Teams usage, a balanced approach to implementing adoption and governance policies, tried-and-true best practices for said adoption and governance, and a commitment to continuous learning over time so that Teams can evolve in tandem with an organization’s evolving business needs and goals.
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