Microsoft Teams offers numerous benefits, including simplified and quick collaboration, productivity gain, increased transparency, seamless move to a digital workspace, and rapid onboarding of new team members through a single, streamlined and engaging interface. However, if not governed appropriately, these benefits will quickly turn into unmanageable chaos. This is where Teams governance plays a crucial role. When it’s planned before making Teams available for users, it helps businesses realize maximum benefits through strategized user adoption and ensures the security of your organizational assets.
Why Is Teams Governance Important?
In today’s world of geographically dispersed teams, with ever-increasing need to communicate and collaborate through sharing files, Microsoft Teams governance has become imperative. It’s primarily due to the increasing necessity to regulate the entire workspace for securing and managing it efficiently.
By default, Microsoft Teams users can create new teams. Imagine the chaos and mismanagement caused when everyone starts creating teams haphazardly! Also, there can be a concern when any user ends up setting up a process incorrectly or gives unauthorized access to confidential content. The governance sets business controls to enable users to get the most out of Teams. Lack of or poorly implemented governance can result in mismanagement and inconsistency in Teams. It can hamper the Team’s adoption and prevent organizations from enjoying the benefits it offers.
What Factors Decide My Teams Governance Strategy?
Microsoft Teams offers a comprehensive set of tools to implement potential organizational governance capabilities. While developing the Teams governance strategy for your organization, planning is the foremost step, and asking the right questions is essential. Following are some of the questions you may like to pose for planning your policies and processes successfully.
- Will your company want a specific naming convention for Teams?
- Will your organization need to restrict the rights of a team or group creation?
- Will your company need to restrict the Teams features in general or for some specific users?
- Do you need to limit the ability to add guests to Teams for specific teams?
- Do you want to grant the ability to the Team creators to assign organization-specific classifications to teams?
Key governance measures must be in place to manage multi-functioning, organization-wide collaboration platforms like Teams.
How can you govern MS Teams?
Following aspects can help you devise Microsoft Teams governance best practices for your organization.
- Process for creation and managing team –You need to decide Teams’ organizational structure and how to manage the team creation process. While governing Teams organizational structure is a continuous process, team creation and managing processes are crucial. It would be best if you decide on who can create teams and establish procedures for team creation by ensuring there are no similar channels or teams for the same department, project, or initiative.Allotting and communicating key roles such as members, owners, Teams Admin, and Global Admin is one of the Teams governance best practices, and it ensures transparency. You can use the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for this purpose.
- Process for creation and managing team –You need to decide Teams’ organizational structure and how to manage the team creation process. While governing Teams organizational structure is a continuous process, team creation and managing processes are crucial. It would be best if you decide on who can create teams and establish procedures for team creation by ensuring there are no similar channels or teams for the same department, project, or initiative.Allotting and communicating key roles such as members, owners, Teams Admin, and Global Admin is one of the Teams governance best practices, and it ensures transparency. You can use the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for this purpose.
- Structure and Archival Policies – Besides following a Teams naming convention, it’s best to adopt structure for quickly finding the documents and files. An appropriate document labeling is vital for not only quickly searching but also for effectively applying policies and maintaining data lifecycles and record management. Thus, it is critical to insist and ensure accurate document classification and labeling that indicates the information in files and documents, implementation of rights management for controlling sensitive content and enforcement of content-level security, disposition, taxonomy, and automation.
- Deciding on External Access – Microsoft Teams offers you the ability to invite external users. Though this feature is great for collaborating with clients and partners, it also poses security risks by exposing your sensitive business information stored in Teams. Thus, you have to decide whether you want to allow guest invitations and, if yes, the type of permissions the external guest will have.
- Third-party App Availability – The Teams expands collaboration opportunities by smoothly integrating with many third-party apps. Though it dramatically streamlines employees’ workflows, it can be a potential threat to corporate security. You should include only essential apps. Also, it’s necessary to understand which information is accessed by them. You can offer users a channel to request any additional app if they feel it’s missing.
- Training – Training is not only crucial from a governance perspective but also for successful Teams adoption. Team members and team owners should be trained on various Teams features and how to use them effectively. Most of the Teams features are customizable, and many of them can be modified at the team level. Team owners can directly impact the user experience by customizing these team-level features and permission and can make a difference in Teams adoption and productivity.Teams continuously offers new features to enhance user experience and increase organizational productivity. To give an example, Teams recently released a feature called ‘Together Mode’ that enables placing all the participants on a video call together in a virtual space such as a meeting room or auditorium that offers a feeling that they are in the same place together. It’s recommended to arrange training sessions at regular intervals, such as monthly or quarterly, to get acquainted with such new updates and get the best out of them.
Microsoft Teams offers the perfect team collaboration platform for enhanced productivity and quicker turn-around-times. Teams governance strategy ensures a successful and scalable adoption that pays off in the long run. Effective enterprise-wide Teams governance is comprehensive and can be overwhelming. If it seems too much to take care of by yourself, WaferWire Cloud Technologies can help you with hassle-free Teams adoption and governance. For more information, contact us, and we will be happy to help.
