Microsoft Teams
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This article also has a Czech version.
TL;DR β¨
Over the previous few months, the author had been experimenting and playing around with Microsoft Teams. This blog post is therefore a summary of his experience and materials, from clicking through the settings to finding practical real-life applications.
First, however, it is worth starting with the general rules of communication. There are three types of communication across an imaginary interface. This imaginary interface means a specific phone conversation, email, message, or face-to-face discussion. A representative of company X (yellow) is on one side, and a representative of company Y (red) is on the other.
Over the previous few months, the author had been experimenting and playing around with Microsoft Teams. This blog post is therefore a summary of his experience and materials, from clicking through the settings to finding practical real-life applications.
1. Forms of Communication¶
First, however, it is worth starting with the general rules of communication. There are three types of communication across an imaginary interface. This imaginary interface means a specific phone conversation, email, message, or face-to-face discussion. A representative of company X (yellow) is on one side, and a representative of company Y (red) is on the other.
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β¨ 1.1 Symmetric Communication¶
Symmetric communication is typically one-to-one, like two people sitting together in a pub. Every tool works for this form of communication: Facebook chat, text messages, phone calls, face-to-face meetings, and email. It is the easiest form of discussion and usually works without problems until one side stops responding.
β¨ 1.2 Asymmetric Communication¶
Asymmetric communication follows a matrix in which one person communicates with many people. A typical example is sending an email to a bank. Another is when a particular customer sends an inquiry and the company processes it: one person prepares the quotation, another issues the invoice, and someone else delivers the work. Asymmetric communication is a variation of the symmetric form. The tools that help most with this communication matrix are ticketing systems, which manage the workflow from beginning to end.
β¨ 1.3 Multi-Party Communication¶
Multi-party communication is a form of discussion specific to teamwork: communication between many people from one company and many people from another. This form of communication is very often completely unusable when conducted by email. The only rational way to manage such a matrix is face-to-face, which is why so many companies hold boring meetings. Chat is the other, substitute way of managing it online.
2. Communication Etiquette¶
While discussing forms of communication, it is appropriate to describe communication etiquette as well. In the author's view, the following basic rules apply:
- When something is factual, use email.
- When something is urgent, use the phone.
- When something is one-way and no response is expected, use a text message.
- When something is important, communicate face-to-face.
Perceptive readers will certainly see how the statements above could be developed and expanded further.
3. Microsoft Teams¶
Microsoft Teams has become a major buzzword in recent months. Along with the global viral outbreak, companies have been talking about it more and more. Many companies want to try something new and modern but lack either the time or the knowledge. Their attempts usually end in failure because few people understand the platform's full potential. MS Teams is generally adopted naturally by early adopters or the IT department. IT departments often do not know what to do with MS Teams in their company because Czech management rarely explains in detail what it is supposed to do or which processes it should replace. That makes sense: not every manager knows the definition of a team. Consequently, implementation efforts in companies often result in "another chat."
When getting acquainted with MS Teams, it helps to think of it as Facebook chat on steroids. But MS Teams is only one piece of the entire ecosystem Microsoft offers. The vendor's aim is to integrate as many solutions as possible with its other tools, making the ecosystem as distinctive as possible, and therefore harder for competitors to copy, while also tying companies to it. Once everyone has become accustomed to Office 365, finding an equivalent product on the market in order to migrate for cost reasons will be difficult.
MS Teams is an excellent replacement for symmetric and multi-party communication. It brings all Microsoft tools together. Within the application's graphical interface, users can edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and collaborate with others on a single file. Documents are shared either through OneDrive or within a Team. The solution integrates the vendor's other applications, including MS Planner, OneDrive, Excel, and the conversion of emails into chat messages. It also supports third-party applications such as Evernote and Salesforce. It replaces everything Skype previously offered and can schedule meetings as well. Powerful SharePoint Online runs under the hood of MS Teams and is used to configure company workflows and other processes.
The biggest problem is deciding how to approach MS Teams within a company. There is no single perspective or manual. Every company is unique within the ecosystem, although many elements recur. Another common problem is the tendency to put everything into MS Teams. That is not right. MS Teams is not a suitable replacement for one-to-many communication.
Rather than describing everything that can and cannot be done, the author considers it better to present a specific example of applying MS Teams in a particular company, accompanied by an explanation of its advantages and limitations.
β¨ 3.1 Example of a Simple Deployment¶
Consider a model company called Connectica s.r.o. It operates as an external network administrator.
The company carries out two main activities:
- Project-based, or contract, work
- Support
Its typical customers include manufacturing companies, graphic design studios, and commercial engineering companies.
Connectica has a workflow set up in a project module for project work. It uses a generic ticketing system for support. Both systems generate a unique ID for every action, where an action means either a new ticket, such as a new request received by email, or a new project. The model company very often needs to work on projects in a multi-party communication matrix. It rarely, almost never, needs to communicate through anything other than asymmetric ticket communication. Its need to run internal processes through MS Teams is entirely negligible because it has another information system for everything.
An Office 365-based infrastructure for this company will therefore have a simple and clearly defined purpose: supporting broad project collaboration. A model view of the MS Teams administration interface for project-based multi-party communication is shown in the screenshot below.
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This structure is excellent for group work. It allows managers and other developers from outside companies to be invited into shared multi-party collaboration. The structure is appropriately defined and reflects the work process. A project has a beginning, a course, and an end. This prevents the typical communication stubs that become relics over time from accumulating in MS Teams, SharePoint, or anywhere else.
By contrast, the following would be a typically unsuitable structure for the model company:
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Why? Because "Proxmox" is too broad a term and is of little use for anything specific. This mistake is very common in other companies. MS Teams may be correctly categorized by department, such as IT, HR, or Engineering, but the channels inside are then organized around something current that has a beginning, such as a meeting held on January 21, 2020, and a course, such as taking notes, but no end. What was the point of putting it into MS Teams? This is a typical communication stub and a typical misunderstanding of MS Teams as a whole.
With such a setup, a pile of channels and clutter that nobody understands will accumulate within a few months, making MS Teams unusable. The mistake can be prevented with a simple question: does the entire HR department actually function as a team? Does top management even remember what they learned at school about the meaning of the word "team"?
The only meaningful variation is when a channel becomes a permanent work process. In other words, it handles part of the work that was previously done offline or by email. Such a channel makes sense, although it is usually difficult to quantify whether it has simplified the overall process or requires the same number of clicks. That is a matter of choosing the right metrics and measuring process efficiency.
Another typical mistake in MS Teams is trying to put every employee in the company into it, from the cleaner to top management. MS Teams is not a fully fledged tool for everyone. Its name reflects that it is a tool for teams. A cleaner does not belong to any team and has no role there. For many users, MS Teams will therefore always be nothing more than chat. Many users will not know what to do with it, and many will resist or bypass it, saying that they are used to WhatsApp, Facebook, or ICQ and do not need MS Teams. Innovation and change are painful. They always will be.
β π 4. Conclusion¶
The article has covered the general forms and etiquette of communication and shown a specific application of MS Teams in a model company. MS Teams can significantly improve the flow of company processes and effectively reduce email clutter, but it has limitations and often needs to be properly understood and correctly applied from the outset. Otherwise, unwanted threads may develop and lead to inefficiency over time. Companies that want to implement MS Teams should explore training options. If they are serious about MS Teams, the investment pays off twice over. Otherwise, the solution is merely a pleasant improvement to company chat with limited added value, and there is little point in engaging with it beyond reading this article to the end.