How to Use Microsoft Teams for Project Management

if your organization uses microsoft 365 and you have a need for a project management tool microsoft teams checks a lot of the boxes for an excellent tool and today we're going to show you how to set up a project in microsoft teams and how all the benefits of teams can be utilized for successful project management [Music] microsoft teams is an all-encompassing solution for a lot of business needs we're going to walk through some of the larger benefits that teams provides when utilizing it for project management and then also take you through step by step setting up an example project in teams and how that can be best be used for your next project one of the greatest benefits of using teams for project management is that by using teams you are creating a central source of truth for your project so how often as a project manager or as a project lead you're getting asked questions such as when is this due what tasks are assigned to me where can i get updates where can i find documentation or meeting minutes by putting projects in projects into teams you have a central channel that's clearly labeled with tabs that create homes for an array of information and because teams integrates with so many other tools and even outside tools that your team may use and be used to you can have all of those integrated into your channel so that nobody needs to leave the channel to access any aspect of the project another great benefit to using teams for project management is the ability to organize your project so by utilizing teams channels and tabs you can make your project super accessible and transparent to anybody on your project team this organization also addresses any security concerns because anything that you set up within this channel is just going to inherit the permissions and security setup that you've already created for your team okay so we're going to walk through how we would set up a sample project in teams just so you can get a feel for what it looks like how i like to set up the tabs so what i have here is my team which is called ashley's test team and what i would do is set up a team for clients for well for us it's clients for you it could be any different type of project but whatever your project types can roll up to that's what you'll want to name your team and that way you can have channels set up for specific projects so for this test team right here you'll see there's the general channel and then i have project one project two just to play out the scenario of having multiple types of projects with this client and then what i'll do is just go ahead and create a new channel for my new project all right so i'm going to add a channel just like you would normally so the benefits of this again is if you're setting up a channel and not a private channel it's going to inherit the permissions for your team so if you have a client already set up you don't need to add members change members as long as your project team is staying the same so i'm going to add a channel and i'm going to call this project three so you can add your description and set the privacy which hopefully it for the sake of ease of this one i'll just do standard to inherit the privacy settings for my team and go ahead and click add and then it's going to show up so a few things that teams adds as standard are these tabs up here so here's where you're really going to get into customizing how you're going to use this channel for your specific project first the posts tab that you'll always want to stay i actually i don't think you even can delete it if you wanted to but that's where all your communication is going to happen so this is the hub of communication for your project so we're not using email we're not using phone calls uh you know texting people everything happens here and it provides transparency for your for your project team everyone knows everyone's caught up if if communication occurs regarding the project then the rest of the project team can see that and also be in the loop of what's going on you can do conversations you can create announcements so right here start a new conversation you can have quick chats with somebody from your project team you can tag them hey i have a question hey this happened this might impact your task or you can set up if you're the project manager you can set up an announcement just by clicking down here and again these are features you may have already used in teams but it's just a powerful new twist when you're using them for a specific project uh so you can do your announcements here for hey this changed i want everyone to know maybe there's a deadline update um or just a status update in general and the ability to have conversations tag people chat back and forth is is really where the the power comes from in using the post tab the next tab that we'll go to is files so every time you set up a new channel you're also going to get a document repository in sharepoint that is associated so that's why you'll see this here you can open and open in sharepoint but that's going to give you a similar view the point is you don't have to leave teams to see all of the documents that are related to this project so anything from powerpoint if you have a slide deck if you have word documents excel files photos you can organize those in this document library just by accessing the files tab and everything for your project is going to stay right here one of their benefits to this files tab is that you can take any of your documents in here and chat about them in the posts tab so without having to open and save different version of the files i can post the document right here and you know tag somebody on my project team ask their opinion ask them to help me with it and documents in the files tab will can be co-authored so myself and anyone else multiple people within my project team can work on a document together at the same time and there's no versioning issues because we're co-authoring live nobody's emailing back and forth nobody on the team has to wonder if they're using the most recent version and then i can also ask for comments and feedback and chat about the document right here and the other benefit just like before is that your whole project team is going to see discussions that you had about the document so again everyone's caught up without any additional steps the next tab i like to add a tab for notes so teams automatically gives you wiki i'm going to remove that and just show what we like to use it for which is onenote so again as long as you're using something in the microsoft 365 suite it's going to inherit the permissions of your team so when i add a onenote it's going to use the same security settings that my team already has set up there was a team notebook automatically created when i created this team so i'm just going to select that i do want to post to the channel just because i want everyone on my project team to know where we're going to be going for notes and then i'll hit save and then you can see how that will show up it shows up ashley's test team notebook i'm going to go ahead and rename this we'll close out of that and i'll just rename it to something simple which is notes because again it doesn't matter what tool you're using you can keep wiki in here you can use a different tool for your notes as long as that tab is called notes your whole team knows where to go to access the notes so here you can have anything from meeting minutes to notes or documentation about your project and then there's never a question from your project team where they can access that information so if somebody missed a meeting they know right within the channel they can just go to notes look at that day's meeting minutes that they missed and be all caught up without having to ask anybody where things are the other tab that i always like to make sure is added to my project is a tab for i'll call it task management so whichever tool that you are using to assign and track tasks in your projects make sure is added for really the best practice for project management in microsoft teams so the benefit here when you add a tab is that teams integrates with a lot of different project management tools so you do have your microsoft ones project planner but there's other ones in here too if you use a third party if you use monday.com trello one of those other tools if that works best for your project you can add that as a tab and you're still getting the benefit of having your central source of truth which is all the aspects of your project in one place i'm going to use planner so that's what's called tasks by planner and to do as this app right here and again the benefit of using a microsoft tool for task management is that it's going to inherit the permissions that you've already created for your team so you don't need to there's no other logins logouts setting up security all of that you can create a new plan so i'm going to call this um yeah tasks for project three and then again you can post to the channel about this tab just to keep everyone informed and i'll rename this tab again just like we did with the notes one i'm just going to rename this to tasks because it doesn't matter which tool you're using it just matters that people can quickly and easily access what they need and now tasks you can you're going to have a planner board that's really integrated directly into your channel so here's where you can add your tasks make sure everything's assigned to people and then you can have discussions and remind people about tasks all within this channel and again without ever having to leave here's where you can also get into your charts for status updates for schedules if anyone on the project team wants to view the calendar or see where the project is at and this eliminates the question that people always raise which is i don't know how do i see what's assigned to me how do i find out what my due dates are this solves all of those problems that project managers can run into because there's one central source that your whole team knows they need to access to get all of that information and finally just one last note is that anytime you're setting up a project in teams you can continue to add tabs the way that we just did for the notes and for the tasks further if there's any tool that's relevant to your specific project whether that be a whiteboard tool if that's how your team you know generates and collaborates on ideas maybe there's a design site depending again on what type of project and what tools your project team likes to use teams integrates with so many different applications that you can scroll through and add all of those things as a tab or if it's just a website you can just add a website also to add as a tab and that way you're just keeping with the consistency of team members only having to access the channel to get to anything they need for the project teams is highly customizable and you're going to be able to set up a project in a way that works best for your specific team and project now that we've gone through the setup of an example project in teams how can we use this for future projects if i've found what i like this is what works well for us my team is used to it you can actually save yourself a lot of time if you're a project manager by using your project setup as a template we actually have a whole other video on this if you want step-by-step instructions on how to use a current channel setup that you like as a template and what that'll do is next time you create if i were to start project four right here i could use just use my temp template and my tabs will automatically set up the way that i've set them up here so this is a huge time saver it makes it very easy to set up future projects and the biggest benefit is that your team is already familiar with the setup and where to go to access the information that they need if you want to watch that video to learn more about creating templates in teams we'll throw that video up here in the cards so that you can check that out so overall microsoft teams keeps work visible and accessible to everyone on the on the project team while maintaining a central source of truth there are so many different tools and capabilities that microsoft has for communication and collaboration it really can be a powerful tool for project management if you like this video go ahead and hit that like button down below and don't forget to subscribe to our channel so you can see more of our videos in the future just so you know we also have a written version of this type of content and many more topics through a learning center that's on our website we will post a link to that down below for any more in-depth help that you might need we do office hours open office hours once a month and we'll post more information to that in the description box below as well thank you so much for watching and have a great day [Music] you

Channel: Bulb Digital

Views: 111,626

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Id: zf1sk_XXJeg

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022