If you are a regular user of MS Teams, you may have noticed an interesting button on the sidebar.

The “Teams” button.

At first glance, it’s a bit strange. MS Word doesn’t have a “Word” button, and Excel doesn’t have an “Excel” button. So what’s it all about?

As explained in the harmon.ie webinar with Hilton Giesenow, an MS MVP with over 25 years of expertise in the Microsoft ecosystem, that button is the key to one of the least-known feature sets in Microsoft Teams. If used to full advantage, it can radically transform the way you approach and execute project management.

But first, some background.

A powerful app with untapped project management potential

When you think about Microsoft Teams, you probably consider it a tool for video, voice, and chat. Indeed, around 1 million companies use Teams as their default messaging platform.

For most people and organizations, MS Teams is not associated with collaboration or productivity tools. But that’s only because they don’t know about the rich features available inside Teams that can make project management smooth and effective.

In the Effective Project Management with MS Teams webinar with special guest Hilton Giesenow, we explored many of those features and showed viewers the vast potential of Teams as a centralized tool that covers all the elements of project management – much more than just meetings and chat.

There’s no one way to do project management

Project management means different things to different organizations, and there are many ways to approach it. Yet at its core, project management is always geared towards the same thing: how to use a finite set of resources (people, tools, budget) to achieve a desired goal or deliverable.

Any project management process will typically incorporate a range of elements, from meetings to documents, timelines to time sheets, notes to emails.

A wide range of tools are available to help with project management. Some tools tackle some of these functions very well; so far, no tool can tackle all of them well. For example, Trello and Monday.com are both great organizational and team tracking tools, yet they do not support video meetings.

Renowned software developer and programmer Alan Cooper famously coined the concept of “the sovereign app” – an app that can perform all necessary functions in one place.

For project management, MS Teams could be the answer. To find out how, check out the webinar recording.

MS Teams can fill the gap

Leveraging MS Teams for its full project management functionality starts with how you approach project management. Setting up the right taxonomy is critical.

Remember the untapped potential of the “Teams” button? By setting up a project as a complete channel in Teams, you can unlock an incredibly versatile set of features that bring all your project management functions in one place.

Then, integrate first-party Microsoft apps, such as OneNote, Calendar, and Lists, or third-party apps like harmon.ie for Outlook integration, to easily build an entire project management ecosystem within MS Teams.

View the webinar recording now and discover all the project management functions you can do with an MS Team channel:

• Create customized tabs for project sub-channels and topics
• Pin and highlight important files or documents in sub-channels
• Set user permissions and customized access for sub-channels and folders
• Conduct threaded conversations
• Embed notes from OneNote
• Create shared lists with MS Lists
• Integrate MS Calendar to schedule and attend meetings directly in Teams
• Conduct meetings in project channels, to automatically get meeting recordings in the Files section of the channel
• Embed project timelines with MS Planner
• Drag-and-drop project-related emails and attachments to project channels directly from Outlook with harmon.ie
• And much more

Project management in one place: MS Teams & harmon.ie

According to Hilton Giesenow, MS Teams can become your go-to platform for every aspect of project management. It’s simply a matter of becoming familiar with the many features of Teams that most people are not yet using and integrating first- and third-party apps to create a launching point for a comprehensive project management portal.

If you’re looking for that “sovereign app” for your project management process, you can find it with MS Teams and harmon.ie.

Just check out the webinar to get started!