Implement Microsoft Teams In 7 Steps For Successful Operation

A Digital workplace is now being widely adopted by organizations, corporates, and individuals across a variety of industries. The reason behind this is that these workplaces not only save time but also allow their users to enhance their productivity and flexibility while giving them more control over their projects. It also enhances the remote job enjoyer’s ability to stay connected with their designated company and helps that company save money on physical causalities such as workspace and equipment. This also allows such companies to grow their company without having to stick to a specified geographic area and allows for the formation of a much more capable cooperative staff through the capability of hiring people from different geographic locations at once, allowing them to be more flexible with their talent and skill formation.

If you’re fed up with using each required software one-by-one and utilizing extra time and effort into participating in a continuous exchange by opening the required software and closing the unneeded one, then you’re in need of a workplace. You can manage to access it whenever you desire and complete your work without having to open any other app than that workplace software. This is the best software for you if you don’t like to utilize your savable time by simply opening, closing, and switching from one software to another whenever your work demands it.

On the other hand, it’s not the sole rainbows and sunshine when operating a remote company. There are always causalities one must overlook. Remote work suffocates employee collaboration. Once physical proximity is absent from the work environment of employees, they refrain from conversing and forming the discussions that lead to brainstorming sessions and ultimately result in the formation of better ideas that then result in the company’s growth.

This issue has also been solved through today’s innovative technological implementation of ideas. This is enabling more and more organizations and companies to solve this issue of versatility. This solution requires companies to invest in digital team collaboration and communication software. This is where communication tools and workplaces such as Microsoft Teams come in to operate. That said, such businesses and corporations need to first understand the principle of operation behind the idea of Microsoft Teams. If their interests are rejected from aligning with what this workspace is capable of, their plan of action will surely be brought to dust, which is exactly what we don’t want.

So, if you’re looking to implement this software for building a safe work environment for your employees and business, you should know what this workspace puts on the table before you implement it, as it can surely backfire if you don’t yet know what you’re getting into. But worry not! We will be providing every bit of information you need to know how to operate and implement Microsoft Teams in a correct way.

So, without any further ado, let’s get into the main course.

What Is “Microsoft Teams”?

Microsoft Teams is a technological workforce confined in a digital workspace for companies, businesses, and organizations to provide the required facilities to their employees or co-workers to implement and take advantage of better collaboration, communication, document sharing, chatting through video, file storing, networking, and more. The main idea behind this software is to enhance the collaborative experience of companies, businesses, and organizations that require it.

The business world is continuously buzzing with newly formed ideas about enhancing the growth efficiency of businesses of all sizes. Such Ideas often include a relation to collaborations. The same is the case with Microsoft Teams. This is a collaborative solution for business to enhance their communication standards and approach co-workers in a more efficient and smoother fashion.

In simpler terms, it is a persistent chat-based collaboration platform that offers services including document sharing & storing, online meetings, forming channels, and much more. The services that represent Microsoft Teams include:

Teams and channels formation.
Communication within these channels and teams.
The ability to chat with one another or within a group.

Shared storage which is specifically composed for storing documents.
Online Video Calling and Screen Sharing.
Online meetings.
Audio conferencing.

Why Should Your Business Use MS Teams?

Microsoft Teams, being the solution for most problems faced by organizations that fail to build a system that enables their employees, workers, and co-workers to communicate in a desired manner, is known for its attraction towards many businesses, companies, and groups. Businesses should use MS Teams because it’s user-friendly and can bring everything you would want as a business owner or an employee of a company that fails to provide necessary measures for communication throughout the company.

Follow These 7 Steps For Successfully Installing And Operating Microsoft Teams:

When compared to other software and tools of such standard, Microsoft Teams’ installation and overall implementation is more straightforward. That said, this doesn’t necessarily mean that this workforce is incapable of providing any benefit for the Advanced user base. It simply demonstrates the ease of use and its ability to provide clarity as a deployed project.

However, by now, you must already understand the consequences of not implementing this software properly. Refraining from understanding the capability of this tool and then implementing it can result in a backfire, which might ultimately fail the entire project. To maximize your chances of success when implementing and installing this project into your business, corporation, or organization, you must follow these Step-by-step instructions to do so without being overwhelmed by the numerous customizable functionalities of this workspace.

1. Build Your Microsoft Teams Implementation Team:

Build a team to analyze and maximize the obtainable workflow through the implementation of this project. When putting together a team, investigate the following three options and include them in your strategy for this step.

Utilize the members of your in-house IT Staff.

Use the services provided by “The MS Teams implementation partner.”
Implement a hybrid system by introducing the capabilities of both your in-house IT staff and the MS team’s implementation partner.

To bring the chances of success to your favor, carry out a project implementation strategy based on “teamwork” using the members of your IT Staff or utilize the capability of the MS team’s implementation partner. Note that you can also introduce a hybrid setup by introducing both of these strategies to maximize your chances of successfully implementing and operating this project.

Take the first option into consideration and ask yourself if choosing to implement your strategy through this option is sufficient for implementing this project successfully.
Does this option have the workspace to withhold such an implementation plan?

Does this option possess the technical facilities to make the optimal decision when required to do so?
And does choosing this option bring about a team that’s capable of acquiring enhanced technical results while making the minimum number of mistakes through the process?

Asking such questions will lead you towards choosing the most suitable option when compared to the other two options to provide yourself with the most clarified path in sight, which will hugely increase your chances of success.

Having a third-party MS Teams implementation partner can help you maintain positive feedback throughout the entire process. The reason behind this is that they will leverage their wealth and experience to provide you with the facilities to operate the principles around implementing this project efficiently. MS team partners are known for their ability to plan, build, and train your team while providing you with options that would be underivable without their assistance. Their help will open doors of possibilities for you to walk through and pluck the ripe fruit of success.

If you decide on taking a hybrid approach, know that you can leverage an implementation partner while also including your IT staff in the action. People implement their desires through this method to ensure that they don’t need to depend on an outsourced partner. Your partners will handle the planning, building, and training of your IT team to help them positively affect the chances of success. Afterward, your IT Team can handle the end-user employee training and support for any solution necessary.

If you don’t have the roles of everyone on your implementation team in mind, take note that your implementation team should be composed of the following roles kept in mind when forming it. However, it should never be limited to the following personnel, and you should keep your mind open towards the addition of further staff.

Project Manager:

The services of this individual will include control over the implementation of this project, keeping the communication standards clarified related to the progress of the implementation and under what circumstances the progress will be blocked from further proceeding. The main responsibility of this role is to guide the process of implementation towards success.

Collaboration Lead:

The solution-attributed architect behind the brains of your implementation process is the collaboration Lead of your team.

Network Lead:

This individual’s role is to provide insights regarding the team network design and execution.

Security Lead:

This individual will provide insights regarding how secure the implementation is and what changes can enhance the output regarding the security aspect. This role will also provide knowledge about how well the process is going and what can make the implementation better than what it’s achieving as of the present.

Training Lead:

This individual is responsible for designing and implementing the training necessary to adapt users to this platform.

2. Design Your Goals:

The definition of your Goals will enable you to include the required attributes in the process of implementation and formation of your designated team. Designing your goal will enable you to answer the question behind why you’re implementing this project in the first place and what needs to lead you to such a conclusion. The manifestation of your end goal will help you project this idea into clarity.

Designing and manifesting your end goal will help you reach your conclusion much more swiftly than not having an end goal in mind. Some examples of your end goals are given below, reflect on them and generate the answer to why you’re implementing this project in the first place.

To simplify the communication standards by making them contact-centric and enabling persistent chat tracking to access chats smoothly.
Provide faster and more efficient access to organize and maintain the workflow of your employees or co-workers.
Eliminate the frustration of accessing certain lost information by storing it and maintaining the files in a central location accessible to everyone in the workforce.

If you’re incapable of forming a goal for the reason not that you wanted this change, then communicate the following points with your employees, staff, or the team responsible for imposing such a change and enable them to design the end goal through processing a momentary teamwork regarding the development of the correct answer to “why are we doing this?”. The right way of answering this question is by forming a collection of the pain points of the people involved in making the decision regarding this change’s occurrence.

Note that this exercise will prove to be beneficial only if your team decides to make the end goal as simplified as possible whilst making improvements to how your team operates as a team and then down to an individual level. That said if you don’t already recognize a method to accumulate the pain points of your team or employees. Consider asking them questions about the following criteria, and you’ll come up with a conclusion rather quickly and smoothly.

Ask them to describe their version of the business’s process and how it translates down to their day-to-day.
What are the challenges they’re facing with the current business process?
How can the implementation of this project positively enhance their daily experience?
What do they expect from the implementation of this project, and how will this help in maintaining consistency in communication and enhance the overall work environment?

Asking these questions will help you in deriving the pain points and, ultimately, the goal of this project’s implementation. Remember to not limit them to these questions only and allow them to showcase their own desires regarding the situation.

You would, of course, have to be tactical when implementing your strategy; you wouldn’t want a case of “too many workers to handle on your hands.” To implement your strategy as effectively as possible, generate a committee of chosen representatives to fundamentally steer the management of employees across different departments of your company.

When you’ve accomplished a managing committee, discuss the given points with them to discover further pain points which you can then take advantage of and implement the required solutions into your strategy.

3. Prioritize Features And Set Project Timelines:

Once you’ve determined the pain points of your ongoing business process and setup, next comes the appropriate remedies for each of the accumulated issues. The problems and issues defined in the previous step will now be translated into the solvable element of your business process. Utilize these solvable elements and translate them into the goals of the upcoming timeline of your business procedure. Ask yourself the question of “what custom features you’re willing to implement in addition to the remedial strategies you’re already planning to implement. What further additions would cause this business model to remain more successful when operating in exchange for the currently ongoing business process?

That said, understanding the fact that not all business procedures have the same level of significance when being utilized to operate business models is the key. Further understanding the concept and realizing that once a process has been implemented, the features then refrain from having the same amount of significance when being utilized and implemented. The reason behind this thought process is that there exist features that will impact the collaborative movements of your business or corporation much larger than the others. Then come those features that simply back the basic claims of your business’s service-providing strategies. This is why it is pertinent to mention the level of significance of certain features. Their ranking determines their level of importance in a business; however, it differs in accordance with the type of business.

Prioritizing features that will impact your business for the better will allow you to understand that you’re implementing your limited time and energy into building features that will help your business overcome the most difficult of challenges. This is the reason why other “nice-to-have” features can be added later.

That said, you should also predict a designated timeline for your business to start operating in. Doing so will help your team stay directed toward the main goal of implementing this business model at large, and your team will stay on track.

4. Start Building Your Deployment Reach:

The features that you’ve decided to prioritize in the previous step will now be implemented. This is the step you need to implement to ensure that your MS team’s implementation remains manageable and easily maintainable and that the entire plan doesn’t get pushed toward the edge of a cliff.

Limit The Team Creation Allowance To A Few Suitable People:

Leaving the creational standards of your team on the shoulders of a few people who will surely act according to the plan and utilize their creational talent and skill to better the business is better than enabling the entire team to possess creational abilities. Enabling your entire team to do so will result in a higher risk of being victimized by mismanagement, confusion, and disorderliness, which is exactly why the implementable strategy was planned out before being acted upon in the previous steps.

This is the reason why it’s best to limit the permission of team creation strategy building to a few people, preferably HODs (heads of departments), and establish procedures for building and maintaining creational standards to further ensure the process goes smoothly and securely.

Set Up Tagging:

Tagging is the name of accumulating different people into groups and restraining them from performing certain specified tasks oriented differently to each group accumulated. Specific attributes can be utilized to drive the process of grouping, such as their location, job position, project, skill, etc. Putting a name to each group and tying them to a specific task each is the concept of this step. In this method, anyone can quickly start a conversation with a specific group of people by simply tagging them and by mentioning their group name instead of reaching out to everyone representing the relevant group.

Enforce A Standard Naming Convention Across Entities:

A naming convention is an already approved format for naming all relevant entities. These entities include many similarities, such as documents, channels, teams etc. A naming convention can be recognized when a set of attributes has been utilized to define the name of a department or its required functions and the process being utilized to fulfill the functional requirement in addition to the problem itself.

Doing so will help your employees and workers by making the process of finding relevant documents easier for them and not having them go through the entire database before finding the document they were looking for. Such a naming convention can come in handy in making your business process easier than before.

Manage Installation Of Third-Party Applications:

When Third-party applications are being installed on computers, they are required to be analyzed through a cautious perspective; otherwise, the applications can end up harming your device instead of showcasing and providing the service it’s factually meant to. When this concept is compared with MS Teams, you’ll find out that there are numerous third-party applications ready to be installed and utilized in collaboration with the MS Teams software. They can enhance the user’s ability to operate the business with a boost of available options to utilize.

Implementation of this step allows the software to reach out to more features and ultimately streamline workflows. The reason is their ability to access further sensitive information. That said, you should enable your device to further install only essential applications otherwise, your device will recognize a huge performance load and will cause hindrance to the smooth experience of turning stones to find further information and implementing strategies to overcome new hurdles by using the older yet provided information.

5. Organize A Pilot Launch For User Testing:

This step includes certain chosen employees using the provided software without any restrictions to further test the working conditions it based on their relevancy of utilization. This enables these employees to readily test and check if there are any issues at all before launching it for the entire employee base at large.

You can use the members of your choice to test the software. Using members of a particular department or using members of the committee made by you is the correct way to implement this step. You can always opt to form a new committee specifically for this purpose, but that would result in the operation being closer to overkill, which will be contrary to the goal we’re striving to achieve here. Once you’re done with the process, you can utilize the accumulated and received feedback, then generate an effective strategy regarding the feedback you ascertain, and afterward implement the strategy once it’s completed.

However, keep in mind the problems and issues and analyze if there could be any other problems that would come out as related to the previous ones. The goal of this step is to achieve the correct software and its implementation strategy before deploying the software into your work environment.

6. Provide Comprehensive On-boarding To Drive Maximum Adoption:

To understand the comprehensive approach of your employees, you will first require them to test it. Once you enable them to test the services you’re implementing, after the pilot launch has been done, you can then further face the incoming issues from the feedback your employees come up with. Adopting a good approach and implementing the correct strategy while understanding the basic implementation rituals of a correct plan to achieve your goals is the key here.

An essential component for building and implementing the most effective strategy that will ensure positive results in the future is to have a specific training program for your employees to better understand and equip the newly announced business and communicational model at large. However, numerous issues can arise during the phases that are necessary to be implemented for the training regimen to operate successfully, and training each individual employee during this day & age would result in an overkill implementation technique, as the same goal can be achieved through much simpler means that are less effort demanding as well.

An in-house presentation style implementation, while the end-user presentation technique and style are being implemented, can result in initiating quite tricky problems for your business’s growth. The reason behind this trickiness is most users will need specified training styles as their way of understanding will differ accordingly. In short, they have varying working and learning styles through which they adopt new principles and understand newly introduced working techniques and technologies. They will also differ in their learning speeds, as many people differ when it comes to the amount of information that can be consumed and understood by them in a certain amount of time. However, if the users absorb a lower level of consumable information, they will indirectly affect the strategy being implemented and will result in more time consuming before it can be deemed as successful.

That said, the more time your employees consume to absorb the provided digital and technological information, the lesser the engagement statistics will be, and the lower the graphs will articulate the engagement. The reason behind this is the software and information at large are not customized according to the preference of each employee; it isn’t yet fulfilling each employee’s specified needs, which is why it won’t be considered wrongful if the employees take a bit more time to consume and adapt to the newly introduced principles as an orthodox behavior.

7. Maintain Your MS Teams Communication Business Model:

After you’re done implementing the required techniques and strategies to introduce a newer business communication method and skill to your business’s work environment, congratulate yourself! You’ve successfully introduced the MS Teams Application into your business; not only that, but you’ve also trained your employees on consuming, understanding, and using it.

That said, don’t get too excited yet; your work hasn’t finished just yet. You have accomplished a good feat, and it has now introduced another chapter into your professional life, which is to maintain the previously accomplished and successfully implemented strategy. You can do so by introducing a new team solely directed towards the maintenance and implementation of remedial strategies if ever there is a need. Other than that, if you’re not able to accumulate another team, you can opt to implement the following responsibilities on the shoulder of the individual chosen for this operation, otherwise known as the “Admin,”

Periodically install patches and updates on the public roadmap given by MS Teams.
Recognize potential and evaluate ideas for further improvement in the system through the feedback and tickets submitted by the employees and users of the application-based model.
Introduce features relevant to the present business model, fix bugs, and improve the areas where potential for improvement has been discovered through feedback-related content.

This individual or team’s role will be to ensure the application’s implementation is done by strategizing the correct method, and this will ultimately lead to providing a positive user experience for the employees at large.

Conclusion:

Implementing an entirely new application and exchanging it with the core communication-based principles of your business, organization, or corporation takes a toll on generic performance if not implemented through the correct strategizing techniques. The reason is the adaptation of your employees who are responsible for effectively inclining the statistical graph of the business or organization.

After the implementation process has been solidified, next comes the maintenance of the implemented strategy. Originate a team of members directed towards this mission or make an individual admin responsible for updating and maintaining the application to provide the employees with a positive user experience at large.

After reading this article, I hope now you know how to implement the Microsoft Team successfully.

FAQs:

What Are The Four Types Of Microsoft Teams?

The four types of Microsoft teams are

Class (teacher-led team)
Professional learning Community, otherwise known as “PLC”. It stands for Peer-led educator working group)
Staff (leader-led team promoting management and administration, etc.)
Other (study groups and extracurricular)