Structuring Microsoft Teams

As I talk to organisations that are planning to introduce Teams there is generally a desire to create some idea of structure or hierarchy to organise and plan their use. Most people have either deliberately or accidentally piloted Teams to some degree and this starts to raise questions about how and where they might use the product. Lots of new features recently such as Org-Wide Teams, 5000 member teams, Yammer tabs etc. add so much possibility that it can be a little confusing.

@stevenc365 Teams Framework

Start with the Teams people work in

The sweetest spot for Microsoft Teams is, unsurprisingly, in supporting your real-work teams. By this I mean the groups of people that are generally working together daily. These may be projects, people within a specific business function, specific client accounts and so on. Typically these won’t be large, maybe 5–10 people, it’s pretty unlikely to really be any higher that 20. Teams shines for these groups as a place to unify all their work; conversations, files, apps, forms, boards all linked to that one team. The more complete that toolkit becomes the better Teams will work. There’s something magically unburdening for users when they just know that every single thing they need is in that one place.

This shouldn’t destroy any existing information architecture, use the trick around Add Cloud Storage to link to other SharePoint site, use the Website tab to embed your internal applications, existing SharePoint pages and lists.

Maybe you need a template to make a repeatable pattern, I’ve been posting about how to automate team and channel creation, to allow your Teams to accelerate to that point rather than starting from a blank template. Ideally to me you should allow your users to self-service create Teams, but this really needs to be combined with expiry to avoid unused Teams piling up.

Work your way bigger

Now you’ve got your primary use case sorted, many companies look at how they can keep more of their larger departmental comms within Teams. If your users are likely to be in the Teams client much of the time, you’ll be wanting to take your other messages to where the users are. The key factor to bear in mind is the 5,000 users per team limit. This is a hard limit, so if you had 4,999 members in a department you aren’t really planning for new hires, I would always leave a comfortable margin. There are probably several layers of groupings that are between your Teams and say 4,500 users.

As you get to these bigger numbers you probably want to start adopting more levels of control as the owner of the Teams. These Teams aren’t likely to really be a place of collaboration, it’s more to replace the use of a big DL with something inside Teams. Just like outlook you’ll probably want to limit who can send and reply to the groups to avoid things getting out of hand, I’ve shown before how you can limit posting to owners, disable @team etc. You could have additional channels to represent topics, an upcoming group meeting, volunteering etc.

It’s also at this level that you might start using the Team site behind these groups to be a divisional or departmental portal. Posting your news into the SharePoint news system can inform you team (via the SharePoint news connector) and also be rolled up to your homepage as recommended news for your team’s members. Add your pages as tabs to the Team so it’s still all there in one place. You could easily use these as Hub sites and associate your work Teams, so you get an ability to have a directory, and a defined search scope across that function. If your company gets to a point where it’s more than 4,500 users, then SharePoint really picks up the levels above as news and communication vehicles.

Also give careful thought to how you would get people into these larger groups, it’s probably not the case that there is someone who knows by name the 4,500 users in a division. To get started you could create a team and import an email list, or several email lists. A good manual way to keep it updated would be to publish the link to relevant teams to new staff as part of an onboarding guide, if you have open groups for these larger teams they can just join directly, if they are closed their join request needs to be approved by a Team Owner.

So what about Yammer?

You’ll notice I’ve talked about these larger Teams as largely one-way communication functions, replacing that departmental email DL, that’s not Yammer’s sweet spot. Yammer is for broader communities that anyone in your organisation might choose to be involved in. Consider Yammer as a different pivot on conversations, for example here you would have your Diversity and Inclusion networks, perhaps a community for people who work at a different site, or communities of interest where topics exist that might garner contributions across different areas e.g. a civil engineering company might have a channel about the science of mixing concrete different ways.

With this type of topic being at a different perspective to your actual work Teams, you can see why the Yammer tab exists, being able to bring the wider conversation and cross functional knowledge into the place where people are working every day.

Yammer is specifically not the same as Teams, and yes some companies aren’t ready or willing to adopt the open work-out-loud culture. They probably need to think hard about why as they are probably being outcompete by other companies which openly value their colleagues’ opinions an contributions.

Conclusion

This is a genericised case, your company will be different, but maybe some of my structure gives you something you can build around. It’s not something to overthink, if you meticulously plan a complete structure it’ll almost certainly fall apart as you apply it to real people in a company, roll with changes, break rules, just make it all seem kind of sensible to a normal person. It’s probable not best to just leave your Teams and SharePoint environment without a plan, people like a bit of structure. Park of my point is that there isn’t much missing in Office 365 now, it’s ready to go, embrace the new vision and make Teams a core part of your organisation to exploit the most out of your subscription.