Author: Gabe Shaughnessy

As Teams-based collaboration gathers pace among our remote workers, what’s the best way to allocate and manage tasks so we can maintain progress against client work or other projects?

 This is a great question, and one with a happy answer in the form of Teams’ great companion tool, MS Planner.

Although Planner isn’t an inherent part of Teams, the two applications work fantastically well together so that intuitive, at-a-glance, ad-hoc task management becomes a natural part of routine Teams-based collaboration.

Repstor’s native Office 365-based solutions add to this ease of use, enabling instant task set-up as Teams are created and making light work of task allocation, status monitoring, and the issue of notifications as deadlines approach.

Here are 4 handy tips for capitalising on the combined benefits of Teams & Planner:

1. Recognise the value of Planner.

Most teams, whether created around a given client or a particular project, will have tasks associated with them. So it is logical to have a means of organising this activity – with the ability to quickly call up status views, and automatically flag up outstanding activities.

Reliance on email for assigning and following up on tasks can be cumbersome and inefficient. MS Planner makes light work of ad-hoc task management and is a natural companion to MS Teams. Repstor joins the two seamlessly and boosts their combined impact.

2. Use Repstor technology to pre-create tasks during Teams set-up.

Repstor’s software enhances Office 365 productivity, by making it easier and more instinctive to store, access and link content as it is created or brought into play across the Microsoft business software suite. We’re experts in Teams, and we love MS Planner – particularly the way it helps to keep Teams activity organised and well-paced, to sustain momentum and drive results.

One of the ways we add value for users is by inviting/prompting use of MS Planner as part of each new team’s set-up. With Repstor, team owners can automatically add common tasks linked to common types of team activity within an organisation, using pre-existing templates. In a legal matter management context, that might be routine tasks associated with high-volume workloads such as conveyancing. In professional services, it could be the steps required as part of an audit.

For people collaborating on documents frequently, an ad-hoc task management solution is normally much more appropriate than a dedicated, formal project/task management system.

3. Use different task views to assign tasks easily.

We also make it easy to assign tasks to individual team members, exploiting Planner’s intuitive ‘drag and drop’ functionality. Managers/team owners can quickly look up current task allocations, due dates and the activity status, and balance workloads by assigning new tasks to those with less on their plate.

Rather than hoping team members have made their own notes about task deadlines and have added them to their calendars from initial email requests, Planner integrated with Teams – and boosted by Repstor – can ensure that timely prompts are issued to the people involved, keeping tasks and broader projects or client cases on track.

4. Drill down into Planner’s analytics to see how tasks are progressing.

To see how workloads are progressing, team or task owners can use Planner’s analytics feature to see how close the team is to its goals. They can slice and dice performance information into different views too – to see where certain tasks, topics or people are up to at any given time.

With Repstor’s ability to designate tasks at the outset – and require that team members tick off their tasks as they complete them, and that notifications are issued when deadlines or next steps are due, we can help you maintain progress and ensure that teams deliver results reliably, time after time.

We know first-hand what an impact Teams + Planner can have on productivity and task organisation, because we use these tools every day at Repstor – where our people are used to collaborating and co-developing software at distance.

I’ll be expanding on these points in a new Microsoft Teams Bite-Sized Webinar on Tuesday 19^th of May.  Register here to book your place.

We’ve been surprised and delighted at how readily remote employees have taken to collaboration using MS Teams, given the sudden need to let people work from home. For now, we’re just letting them get on with it. With teams popping up all over the place, though, we’re wondering how we’ll manage to consolidate all of this current remote activity with the carefully-ordered document and content systems we use internally?

This is a question that’s cropping up a lot on Office 365/Teams and information management forums at the moment, and which we’re going to make the subject of our next MS Teams webinar. It’s important to get this right, even if – out of necessity – much of this happens after the fact. Here are 3 tips to minimise the long-term chaos of these ‘feel our way’ times.

1. 1. Sow the seeds of good practice now.

If your people have switched from Skype for Business to Teams with more than a little exuberance, then by all means let them continue to experiment with all that the platform can do to support planned and ad-hoc chat and collaboration. These are crazy times and if good work is happening at home, don’t rush to put a stop to it. Microsoft is encouraging widespread experimentation with Teams, and even the analyst community has joined the chorus, promoting the positives of collaboration over the risks that need to be guarded against.

But it isn’t a bad idea to usher users in the right direction, by giving them a few tips that will make life a lot easier later – when they’re hunting back for a recent discussion that mentioned a client, for instance; or across team activity where colleagues were sharing the latest edits to a group document.

1. 2. A bit of planning now will ease efforts later.

Make team creators and owners aware from the outset that simple choices they make now – about how they name teams; the privacy settings they put in place; and the information they set down about a team – will have a direct bearing on their ability to refer back to that content and activity in future. Being hasty or slapdash when forming a new team or chat group might result in a rapid resolution to a query or problem in the short term, but if the haphazard approach makes it hard to retrace steps or locate information later, any upfront time savings could be surrendered further down the line.

MS Teams is very intuitive to use without any formal training, so asking users to pause and think about naming conventions, security setting/team membership, and other bits of essential housekeeping, before they create a new team shouldn’t impede their progress. For them, and for information managers, this is a strong case for a ‘stitch in time’ saving nine. That is, there will be less work to do later, whether in trying to find and archive useful content, or in making sure that sensitive conversations are locked down appropriately.

1. 3. It’s never too late to restore information lifecycle management.

If these good intentions don’t come to fruition, try not to worry. Our software is very good at ‘discovering’ teams and all related information and displaying this in a dashboard – to support teams lifecycle management (security checks, information archiving, and so on). If information about certain teams is lacking, a quick look at who set them up will make it possible to track down missing information, so that administrators/information managers can edit settings and process rules as appropriate.

Our next Microsoft Teams Bite-Sized Webinar is on May 5^th and focuses on making light work of Teams Security for Home Workers.   Sign up here to find out more.

How can we get people up and running on Teams quickly so they can work effectively from home, without storing up information management and compliance issues for later?

Microsoft Teams use continues to soar as more employees are called to work from home, to help slow the spread of Covid-19. According to Microsoft’s latest figures, there are now 44 million daily users of Teams globally, who generated 900 million meeting and calling minutes collectively via the platform – per day – over the last week[1].

But where does the surge in demand for Teams leave IT/information managers? To preserve productivity, the immediate priority must be to get users up and running quickly on Teams (assuming they are not already habitual users of the collaboration and chat platform as part of their everyday Office 365-based activities).

Fortunately, this needn’t mean sacrificing information management. By setting a few simple housekeeping rules up front, IT administrators can reinstate information compliance after the fact.

Here’s how.

1. First enable, then control.

Try not to panic about uncontrolled Teams take-up. While remote-access systems are creaking under the strain, cloud-based Teams is ideal for high numbers of people suddenly needing to work remotely (and Microsoft is investing heavily in data centre expansion to keep pace with demand).

Many organisations already have Teams cued up and ready to go as part of their Office 365 package, even if the application hasn’t been used extensively until now. Although it might have been preferable to plan the rollout and give users some preliminary training, the software is intuitive and easy to use from day one. So get them up and running first; you can introduce any information policy compliance and security measures retrospectively. (Our software can help with this.)

2. Create structure through meaningful Team/chat names.

The more casual ‘chat’ element of Teams could invite problems later if discussions are about specific projects or customer cases, and they involve document sharing. Ideally, people should create proper ‘Teams’ to keep discussions and content linked and coordinated.

To cover all eventualities, encourage creators of discussions or Teams to use meaningful names to describe them. This will make it easier to ‘tidy up’ content later – simplifying the process of searching for and filing documents and updated information. If a Team or discussion relates to a client case number or project name, for instance, including that reference information in the name will make it possible to map conversations and files to related pieces of work, and store them in the correct document/content repository back at base.

Rather than name a chat or Team after the people involved, then, encourage employees to name them after the given topic/client/project ID.

3. Reassure rather than restrict users.

Considerations should as whether to restrict external sharing, and other security and privacy measures, can be dealt with once users are up and running and using Teams confidently and productively. In the meantime, maximise the Teams set-up to influence how people use it, and to build their confidence that they are ‘doing it right’. This will help to reassure employees as they experiment with the software and discover how it can help them do their jobs more effectively.

Tabs such as Conversation View and Files View will be displayed by default, but consider which other features you want to add on the start-up page – for example Planner, to aid task management; and/or OneNote for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. Setting out a clear structure for users to follow will help ensure that the Teams rollout goes the way you want it to, even if the opportunity to ‘train’ employees has been compromised by the need for speed.

A tailored ‘welcome screen’ is a good idea for steering users towards preferred practice. You could include guidance and useful links in an initial conversation topic as part of a new Team, for instance. Microsoft suggests a page like this, which you could adapt with your own messaging/tips:

Welcome to Microsoft Teams for <insert_company_name>. Teams is a chat-based workspace that brings together chat, files, people, and tools in one place.

We created a team called “Get to know Teams” to get you started. Use it to experiment, ask questions, and discover the possibilities of Teams.

To join, click <link to the team>.

I’ll be expanding on these points in a new Microsoft Teams Bite-Sized Webinar. Sign up here to find out more.

[1] Microsoft cops to 775% Azure surge, quotas on resources and ‘significant new capacity’ coming ASAP, Then Register, March 29^th, 2020: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/29/microsoft_azure_usage_surge_coronavirus/

How can we empower our legal teams to collaborate on matters at home using Teams, without undermining our office document management system where all content resides?

MS Teams usage, already at dizzy heights, is going through the roof as a result of the call for more people to work from home. In recent days, MS Teams activity has soared by 500 per cent, a trend that is likely to continue as people adapt their working habits to the ‘new normal’. The surge in Teams use is not surprising: the platform is designed for remote collaboration – supporting both formal and ad-hoc communications and document-sharing to maximise productivity.

In this new series of short, practical articles, I’ll be addressing some of the common questions information managers have as they try to strike the right balance between rapidly providing flexible support for the way people need to work, and maintaining information policy compliance. Continue reading “Ask the Microsoft Teams experts: empowering home workers – Legal Teams”