Effectively managing projects demands a team effort to maintain momentum, meet deadlines, and keep customers and stakeholders happy. For your teams to be effective, however, they need a steady flow of communication and a simple way to collaborate. That’s why more and more organizations are turning to Microsoft Teams as their collaboration hub for managing these ongoing efforts.

But how your organization uses Teams makes a huge difference in the efficiency and productivity of your project team. Despite many people using Teams, most of the activity is still for video calls, chats, and screen sharing, rather than tapping into its full potential as a true digital workspace.

We’ll dive into how to make the most of Teams to deliver your projects on time and under budget while meeting expectations during our upcoming free webinars on March 19th and 20th, when Microsoft MVP Hilton Giesenow will join us for “Effective Project Management with MS Teams.”

Unlocking the full value of Teams for managing projects

Teams has much to offer, from video calling to asynchronous chat sessions to SharePoint-powered file repositories with all the permissions and version control bells and whistles you’ll ever need, not to mention a healthy ecosystem of add-ons and extras from third parties. But far too often, groups collaborating on Teams forget to include some essential pieces of the puzzle—external communications conducted over email.

Those message threads contain valuable information from clients, subcontractors, and outside legal counsel, yet instead of getting invited to the Teams collaboration party, they’re trapped in individual email inboxes. Instead of providing context and clarity to colleagues, those emails stay in Outlook and don’t factor into the holistic management dashboard Teams provides. For organizations to bridge this gap and level up their collaboration spaces, they must view relevant emails and their attachments as vital assets others can benefit from.

On the flip side, efficient collaboration with external parties means granting them selective, permissions-based access to files hosted on Teams, meeting with them in Teams chats, or potentially inviting them into a specific channel. Done well and your organization avoids duplicate efforts, communication breakdowns, and version control issues without adding any security risks or compromising data privacy.

Why it’s important

Teams is an ideal platform for creating a knowledge base and collaborating efficiently with colleagues. Projects continually receive updates from team members, outside contributors, subcontractors, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

Socializing these—particularly if they require changes to the project specifications, project timeline, or resource allocation—is critical to avoid wasted cycles or costly missteps. Since many of those updates arrive as emails or attachments, quickly sharing those with the entire Team ensures everyone’s on the same page.

Of course, sharing additional files and emails to Teams is only helpful when they’re saved in a logical location and the appropriate stakeholders are notified of their addition. That means creating a scalable taxonomy and organizing Teams so things are saved in the right location from the start and so it’s easy to navigate as colleagues dip in and out of any given engagement. Collecting metadata automatically can provide even more contextual clues for finding the information needed.

Finally, no solution can reach its potential without widespread buy-in and usage. In that vein, the session will also touch on effectively communicating changes around managing projects on Teams and how a focus on end users and their user experience is key to gaining momentum.

What you’ll learn

This informative session will educate attendees on using Teams as a collaboration hub for managing projects. This includes:

• The benefits and challenges of managing projects in Teams
• Best practices for project management using Teams, channels, threads, and tabs
• How to integrate Outlook and Teams for seamless communication with external parties
• Effective management of files and emails, using taxonomy, email views
• Change management and team adoption

We’ll also host a robust Q&A session with Hilton and harmon.ie product manager Corey Tinianov where attendees can ask follow-up questions and get additional guidance on how Teams and harmon.ie can help their organizations better manage projects.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn from the experts how to better meet your business’s needs. Register today for this free webinar and join us on March 19th at 11 am ET or on March 20th at 11 am GMT for the big event.