Reducing the Challenges of Workforce Collaboration

How Do You Reduce Headaches Of Managing Projects (While Saving Money On IT)?

It’s a special kind of relentless attack which all business owners and managers face: the persistent, crazy, chaotic assault on your time and attention. No one is immune, and every business deals with it.

Some leaders handle the constant pressure on their attention brilliantly, keeping the team organized and highly productive. But most people struggle with this, They often feel crushed and overwhelmed by all the things they have to keep track of and do. This goes double if your business is in growth mode and not “standing still” or casually strolling through its existence. 

Add to this a remote workforce, and it can be intensely difficult to wrap your head around all the projects, to-dos, deadlines and client deliverables you and your leadership team must manage. Pulling all the pieces together from many different directions is complicated. Keeping things from slipping through the cracks can become a full time job. 

While we as an IT company cannot tell you what projects are most important, we can absolutely help you and your team stay far more organized. With the right tools it is easy to know if the people on your team are properly aligned, prioritizing the right work, and focused on their MVP's (Most Vital Priorities). We can also help you organize communication to lessen the chances of a dropped ball or a breakdown in communications. In our experience, this is by far the #1 reason why problems happen in business.

One of the tools we recommend to clients wanting to regain operational control and experience clearer communication is Microsoft Teams. There are a lot of reasons why this is a “super tool” for productivity and organizational alignment, and as a bonus, it typically ends up saving our clients quite a bit of money on technology. We often find that clients are using multiple channels of communication between different areas of their business. Applications like Slack, Zoom, and a myriad of popular project management platforms can be replaced by leveraging the power of Microsoft Teams, a core component of Microsoft 365. The result is putting all of these divergent technologies into one lower-cost, more secure, and more tightly integrated system.

Let me share just a few of the cool features you’ll love in Teams. Keep in mind that this list is far from complete. Microsoft Teams has over 1,900 applications you can pick from to integrate into a Teams Channel to organize information, workflow, tasks, deadlines and documents.

Posts: The “post” feature works a lot like Slack in that it will allow you to post questions, reminders and status updates to everyone on that Team regarding that project. This not only keeps ALL communication for a project in one place, but it creates a history and alerts everyone on the team to what’s going on. This feature saves a lot of money for companies using Slack since it’s native and included in Microsoft Teams.

Workflow Management: This section of Teams is one of our favorites because it allows you to create “complex” to-do lists where you can assign each item to one or more people; have a progress status, priority and due date; add documents and files; and create a checklist of all the things that need to be done. Better yet, team members who are responsible for the project can provide status updates and check off items that are completed so you know where you are with any given project. If you want to put this part of Teams on steroids, consider integrating with workflow management apps such as Tello. One of the challenges, especially in a distributed, remote workforce, is keeping an effective sense of workflow.  Being able to easily assign team members to particular project tasks using an app like Trello means fewer details fall through the cracks.

Video Conferencing: While Teams is not as slick as Zoom, it does have some features that make it better for team collaboration and projects. The biggest advantage over Zoom is that you can hold a video conference, and the recording of the meeting – along with all of the notes, files and links – will remain in that Team for easy reference later on. This can be extremely helpful for people who might not have been able to attend a meeting, making it easy for them to find and watch the recording, and it also retains a record of critical conversations. Plus, it eliminates expensive Zoom licenses for all employees because it’s included in Microsoft 365.

Business Intelligence: Tracking project goals, data points, and trends is made easier in the Teams environment when the data mining and reporting features of Power BI are integrated with the popular collaboration platform. Embedded interactive reports can help move discussions along and fuel innovation, growth, and a deeper sense of buy-in.

These examples only scratch the surface of what you can do with Teams, With such a wide array of integrations, Teams can be customized to fit most every business to enhance organizational collaboration and control. If you want to see a demo of Teams or do a cost analysis to see how implementing this can save your organization money on Slack, Zoom and other project management platforms by combining it into one application, click here to schedule a brief call.