The Rapid Rise of Virtual Work Management Tools

Why Microsoft Teams is the emerging leader

The role of collaboration in successful outcomes for work that requires many humans and has any complexity at all cannot be overstated. If you’ve ever observed a construction project, you’ve seen small and sometimes large groups of people discussing certain tasks or activities planned for the day.

Sure, there’s architectural drawings, project plans, bills of materials, but all these things don’t accomplish the work – humans do. To make sure the planned activities of the day go smoothly, without one group disturbing the work of another and making sure everyone is safe, frequent collaboration is essential.

In the past, information work was accomplished in much the same fashion. In-person planning meetings, daily stand ups (again in-person), drop in/hallway discussions, etc. all helped people stay aligned on the work and maximize efficiency. What has changed recently is a re-alignment of where information work occurs.

We all have been affected by two forces that forever reshaped how information work occurs:

1. Cloud computing hitting almost universal availability when, at the same time
2. The pandemic hit

Organizations across the globe rapidly re-aligned work to remote and/or hybrid models. Suddenly, almost all information work was being done partially or fully by virtual teams.

We’ve established that organizations have adopted and continue to adopt full feature collaboration experience platforms to address the new work realities. For many, Microsoft Teams is this platform. So why centralize information work in Microsoft Teams? 

Bear with us for a bit of math and consider the transitive property that says if two things equal each other and a third thing equals one of the first two, then the third also equals the other. 

So it stands to reason:

If Successful Work/Project Management = Collaboration

and Collaboration = Microsoft Teams

then Microsoft Teams = Successful Work/Project Management

Work and Project Management solutions heretofore have focused on the job of managing tasks, leaving collaboration as an afterthought. This design made sense when data was being managed in an application-by-application fashion – i.e., each app has its own database(s), often in a separate client or cloud tenant. 

The app-by-app for work management model is turned upside down with Microsoft Teams. In Teams, users can remain in the same experience for all their collaboration needs which, as we’ve examined above, is core to work & project management. Further, Teams data is stored in the Dataverse and can be managed and integrated with hundreds of other apps via the Power Platform.

The combination of all office app productivity and unified communications in a centralized experience, built on top of a universal highly connected data source, coupled with extensible via low/no code automation and reporting suite, uniquely situates Microsoft to provide all the tools for work management. If organizations really want to transform work and project management, Microsoft provides the only platform that can deliver all the building blocks in one platform.