A Short Guide to Using Teams to Manage Projects

Managing projects with Microsoft Teams. Can it be done? Certainly! The collaborative and communication hub is a powerful workspace that allows for so many team projects to happen. Here’s how.

The  power of using Teams to manage projects

This powerful platform functions as a hub to facilitate collaboration, communication, and productivity. Why powerful, you ask? For all its features, of course. With Microsoft Teams, up to five hundred thousand users can gather to collaborate and communicate in any group size. Holding a meeting, a video conference, or a public event can be so impactful using its screen-sharing features. This way, people can follow your compelling presentation, tutorial, or annual report. To grab more attention and remove distractions, enable the background blur. It also allows guests as occasional collaborators to access team projects.

Any files can be shared, and worked on at the same time, from anyone and anywhere, with all the changes and edits saved in real-time. These files can be a Word document, a PowerPoint, and Excel.

All the project data are safely kept, encrypted and accessible. Have storage space for your team of up to 10 GB or 2 GB of personal file storage. In addition, a growing number adding to the already available hundreds of applications and services can be easily integrated into the platform to have everything your team needs in one single place. All the relevant things you need to manage multiple projects and interact with various partners and stakeholders without missing anything important can be easily accessible in one place.

The organization of using Teams to manage projects

We all know how much goes into managing projects and how that means staying on top of things at all times. Teams was launched in 2017 and has evolved to help us do just that. To manage projects like a pro, you don’t need to be a project manager. Organize your workspace to fit your managing style, workload, and preferences. Create and properly name your team channels, topics, departments, and projects.

The same goes for group chats of more than 2 people. Pin those that are most important and urgent to have them appear towards the top of the list. Don’t be afraid to use the unlimited search capabilities within any channel to find project-related content. Learn the handy shortcuts to make Teams instantly more accessible (a sweet chart here!). Customize your tabs for important project content at your fingertips by adding them to your specific channel for quick and easy access for the whole team. View Activity on the top left menu to keep abreast of the latest updates, project developments, and progression.

To speed things up, get immediate and direct contact with colleagues with a quick video call with a simple click on the button. Flag your teammates by using @mentions to make sure the right people get instantly notified. Set up your notifications for the ultimate optimal workspace of your dreams by selecting your picture, and choosing Options, then Notifications. Bring your Teams with you, wherever you are by downloading the mobile app.

The flexibility of using Teams to manage projects

The platform accommodates all kinds of teams, industries, projects, and devices. You can use it alone as a self-employed or as a guest. Students, teachers, developers, first-line workers, or healthcare professionals can use it. It can be useful for a non-profit organization, a small business, in the most remote places, or within a giant company. Any task and project can be managed. Microsoft offers solutions for using Teams to manage projects like integrating teamwork apps such as Medxnote MT, Skooler, Remind, SkillerBee, Asana for Teams, SelfDrvn, Virto Kanban Board, Decisions, and Prezi Video.

What’s more, you also have the ability to design and build your own codes, bots and apps to fit your project’s needs and automate repetitive tasks thanks to some intuitive AI capabilities. In some cases, you don’t even need to know any code to build your own app. The platform is supported on almost all devices. To manage the best and most important projects, you can use Windows, iOS, Mac, Android, and web.

The innovation of using Teams to manage projects

Integrate Planner and Task to your Microsoft Teams hub to keep track of all your ongoing collaborative projects. Planner is useful for collaboration management to break high-level goals and deadlines into smaller, more manageable tasks. Spread these tasks among the team to be reviewed, tackled, and brought to full completion. These team-oriented tasks are all consolidated into this tasks management all-in-one solution. They can be viewed at a glance through a shared team calendar. Manage your group tasks using Kanban boards. Moreover, you can plan your teamwork by creating task cards filled with files, checklists, labels, due dates, and more.

With Planner’s charts, the visual status of teamwork progress is insightful to let you know what to do next. It’s easy to visualize the progress of your team’s work, see all the tasks remaining and the ones completed, as well as filter through the most urgent ones. As a group view, managers can see each team member’s workload and reassign tasks when there is a work overload, remove them or remove a team member’s availability when needed. You get to stay informed of activities via email notifications. Along with Task, an app currently being rolled out is also conveniently available as a tab and is all about bringing more coherence and integration to teamwork management across the Microsoft 365 apps. Assign tasks from any document like a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file within a comment using @mention to anyone on your team.

The meta capacity of using Teams to manage projects

Using other applications and services from Microsoft such as the SharePoint task list, the project site template, and Project Web App will enable a meta overview of project management to get a grasp on the progress of each of your projects. You might know SharePoint as a useful tool to create websites. However, this solution has extended to offer and includes more practical features along with other apps to assist in managing multiple projects at once. Start off by planning a project through a SharePoint task list in which you create tasks for your team. Indeed, teams can track all tasks. Then, reports can be generated via the Project Web App, as well as assess and review your available resources for your team projects and workload.

Finally, there is one more app to keep on your roster. If you’re looking for an exciting HR solution, look no further. Vacation Tracker is great for teams. Any project team can benefit from planning their vacations through Vacation Tracker.

It’s newly available for Microsoft Teams, so try it today!

Shirley Tran

Shirley is a Vacation Tracker occasional contributor. She’s held a few positions in communications, marketing and copywriting. When she’s not at her laptop, you can find her daydreaming about her laptop and chasing the sun while people watching.