How to Drive Effective Projects in Microsoft Teams
Want to know how to leverage Microsoft Teams to manage projects more effectively, ensuring improved collaboration, streamlined processes, and successful project outcomes? Then this article is for you.
As the amount of project-based work continues to rise, the ability to execute projects successfully is becoming crucial for any organization. With the user-friendly capabilities of Microsoft Teams and the robust functionalities of Omnia, you can streamline project management, enhance collaboration, and ensure projects are completed on time and within budget.
Here’s a guide on how to drive effective projects in Microsoft Teams, following best practices and fostering an engaging collaborative environment.
Visualize Your Project Best Practice
The journey to driving more effective projects begins with defining and visualizing a project best practice. This involves outlining a project process with distinct phases, milestones, and tollgates, and detailing how delivery documents should be handled throughout their lifecycle.
For each phase, it's essential to highlight mandatory tasks, expected deliveries, instructions, and relevant templates and tools. This structured approach ensures that everyone involved understands what is required at each stage of the project.
Once you’ve defined your project best practice, publish the process so employees can use and learn from it. I recommend setting up a Project Center within your intranet – a centralized location that will serve as a reference point for all project-related activities. Make sure your newly published process is easily accessible here.
Next, create customized Microsoft Teams templates that reflect the project best practice, making it easy for end-users to drive projects in the recommended way. These templates should be published and made available to end-users in the Project Center. Including a ‘create new’ button will make the creation process even smoother.
Drive Effective Project Collaboration
Employees can now use a step-by-step wizard to create or apply for a new project by inputting details such as project name, description, project number, project properties, owners, and members. Once a project is created or approved, the owners and members can drive an effective project aligned with the best practices.
Within the Team, they can showcase project progress using color indications on project phases and signing off on project tasks. Efficient collaboration is key to project success, and Microsoft Teams offers various features to facilitate this. Assign tasks to members, set deadlines, and use visual tools like Kanban boards within Teams to track task completion.
The project team will also be able to collaborate on documents, manage drafts, and secure approvals using enhanced document management features from Omnia. End-users can create delivery documents based on templates and share these with the steering committee or other audiences via an approval workflow.
Approved delivery documents can be surfaced in the Project Center for the applicable audience, ensuring transparency and accessibility. Keeping stakeholders informed through regular updates and information pages is also crucial.
Improving the Solution Over Time
The Project Center should also hold a directory of all current and completed projects, providing information that can help colleagues and the organization understand what the project is about and how it is progressing, and surfacing delivery documents to relevant audiences.
Encourage a culture of continuous improvement by regularly seeking feedback. Gather feedback on project processes and tools from team members and use this feedback to refine and enhance your project management practices continually.
Administrators need a comprehensive overview to manage the project portfolio effectively. Provide access to a project directory with detailed project properties, including last activity dates and project statuses. Enable administrators to edit, support, archive, or terminate projects as necessary.
Finally, to ensure ongoing success, the organization should foster a collaborative culture by promoting open communication, knowledge sharing, and teamwork. Encourage transparent and open communication among team members, and promote sharing of knowledge, best practices, and lessons learned. Foster teamwork through regular meetings, collaborative tools, and team-building activities.
By following these guidelines, you can leverage Microsoft Teams to manage projects more effectively, ensuring better collaboration, streamlined processes, and successful project outcomes. Microsoft Teams, combined with Omnia, is a powerful platform that can transform how your organization manages projects.
Please contact us if you wish to learn more about how to embrace these best practices and drive your projects to success – or see how Omnia can support your organization going forward.
