What is Microsoft Teams and why use it for Project Management?

What is Microsoft Teams?

According to Wikipedia: Microsoft Teams is a proprietary business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Teams (sic) offers workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Teams, and other software such as Zoom and Google Meet, gained much interest as many meetings moved to a virtual environment. As of late 2021, Teams has about 250 million monthly users.

If your organization uses Microsoft Office (O365 or M365), chances are you are, or will be, doing most of your daily work in Teams. It’s kind of the Swiss army knife of collaboration that does everything from phone/video calls, messaging, email, calendar and meeting management, file editing & sharing/co-authoring, to application integration – without ever leaving the Teams experience.

Why use Teams for Work and Project Management?

It is widely held that the majority of information worker work is ‘project’ by nature. Since most repetitive information work has been automated, that leaves humans to manage endeavors that have ‘project’ attributes, i.e. they are unique in scope/outcome, have a specific beginning and ending, and have some form of budget (hours, resources, etc.). 

So if the people in your organization are collaboration and doing most of their productivity & information work in Microsoft Teams, and the majority of this work is ‘project’ in nature, it only stands to reason that project management is happening in Teams. The only questions then is how well?

It’s extensible!

Getting everyone managing projects consistently in an environment they are already familiar and using like Teams is great, but what if more is needed?  Most people managing work of any complexity find that additional workflow or 3^rd party data would be super helpful. Without this kind of automation, people resort to compiling information manually which is not fun and not always reliable.

Teams is built to work with the Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse. These platform technologies securely aggregate data from multiple sources (currently 300+ and counting app integrations built in). Further, they allow for low code/no code development of work/project/business processes. This creates the ability to build in whatever ‘special sauce’ your department or enterprise has that creates strategic advantage and/or meets mission needs.

It seems clear that people in organizations that use Teams are managing work and projects there. The challenge is doing it in ways that create value and aren’t disruptive and frustrating. More on this in a future post…