If you\u2019re an IT executive, you probably understand the challenge of finding a unified, all-in-one business and communications platform for your company, particularly when there are a lot of moving parts. As organizations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to facilitate collaboration and support employees with easy-to-use and on-demand information, efficiency measures and applications built to meet their needs.<\/p>\n
In the business world, you could describe Microsoft Teams<\/a> as a \u201cunicorn.\u201d At one point, this word defined a mythical one-horned creature but has since come to encompass<\/a> \u201ca person or thing that is rare and highly valued, whether that\u2019s a billion-dollar startup (as it has also been coined in the business world) \u2014 or that special someone in your life.\u201d<\/p>\n With a host of features that not only enable \u2014 but also encourage knowledge creation and sharing \u2014you can use Microsoft Teams to help create highly engaged employees.<\/strong> Research shows engaged employees are:<\/p>\n With integrations and other solutions to power your work, Microsoft Teams is a perfect solution to meet many business challenges head on.<\/p>\n Expanding on the Teams as a Platform (or Teams as a Digital Work Hub) concept, I\u2019ll present a real-world example with one of our clients in the Life Sciences<\/a> industry. In this case, Centric Consulting designed and implemented a system that helps manage specialized, industry-specific projects for our client\u2019s customers.<\/p>\n This system leverages several different applications to manage tasks, billing, and related work that surrounds thousands of \u201cin-flight\u201d projects at any given time. Two key applications used in this system are Dynamics Project Operations and Dynamics Finance and Operations, which do a tremendous job in managing tasks and managing the finances revolving around the projects.<\/strong> However, neither application has strong collaboration or communication capabilities.<\/p>\n Because of this limitation, we integrated these applications into Microsoft Teams, giving direct access to the applications through Teams and vice versa. We created bi-directional access to the information used to manage these projects.<\/p>\n We also automated the provisioning of project teams, channels and underlying folders needed to store information and collaborate. Microsoft Teams automatically adds project members to the appropriate team where they can easily work together in real time while simultaneously interacting with the other project management applications.<\/strong><\/p>\n Prior to this enterprise-level approach, there were many issues and inefficiencies, such as a significant lack of standardization, inefficient communications and collaboration, and an absence of centralized reporting tools.<\/p>\n This situation is not unique to Life Sciences. A deficit in efficient and modern communication and collaboration tools affects many industries and the enterprise applications used within them, including most project management applications, financial applications, ERP systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and HR Information Systems. However, those working in these fields have significant collaboration and communication needs as well.<\/p>\n We see examples of Teams streamlining workflows in our own company as well. For example, managing accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities and project shells within Microsoft Dynamics CRM<\/a> at Centric requires a significant amount of collaboration and communication between account managers, project managers, and service offering leads to bring a lead from its beginning stages in CRM to a final project \u201cwin\u201d in CRM.<\/p>\n Dynamics CRM doesn\u2019t offer many collaboration and communication capabilities, so we must use another tool to fill in the gaps. Our go-to solution for this is Microsoft Teams. Without a platform like Teams, many organizations rely on email to communicate outside of Dynamics CRM.<\/strong><\/p>\n By integrating Dynamics CRM directly into Microsoft Teams, we can share the lead (opportunity, contact or project) directly with the team that needs to bring it to the next step. We can add the lead through a tab in an account team, a tab in a project team or even to a private Teams chat.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s another example where the end user ultimately interacts with at least five different applications, losing time each time they switch between applications.<\/p>\n This user likely accesses reporting dashboards to see the status of various sales activities and revenue leverages project management tools to manage the underlying project(s) for a particular account, interacts with the company\u2019s intranet to access various templates and documents used to work with the account and its projects, uses a telephone system to contact people related to the account and project(s), as well as uses many other enterprise-level applications.<\/p>\n Using a conservative estimate of three minutes to switch to different applications and find the relevant piece of the project, and estimating this happens 15 times per day, that results in 45 minutes each person working on the project could use more productively.<\/strong><\/p>\n When working within Microsoft Teams, rather than exiting the software, the user can stay in a primary digital work hub to work on projects. This integration drives efficiency, allowing the user to stay \u201cin the flow\u201d of his work and decreasing time spent switching between applications.<\/p>\n At a higher level, if you automate the provisioning, configuration and sunsetting of these teams, you save a significant amount of time in setup, management and administration, thus providing even more cost savings.<\/p>\n Hopefully, by now, you\u2019re starting to see the big picture. Integrating tools into one digital workspace will save your company and users time, drive efficiencies and workflows and provide a centralized space to collaborate. Teams allows you to automatically and directly preconfigure apps to connect with various projects.<\/strong><\/p>\n Later in this series, we explore integrations in more depth, including with Microsoft Viva and the Power Platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n As you consider going on your own Teams as a Platform journey, here are a few questions that might come up:<\/p>\n A:<\/strong> It depends on how well your applications have integrated with Teams \u2013 some are better than others. When you create team templates with preconfigured channels, tabs and integrations, you can significantly reduce setup time. For example, we\u2019re partners with Orchestry, which offers adoption tools, templates, controlled provisioning and more to drive usage and adoption success in Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. This simplifies the process. Additionally, automating some information flows or business processes can take much of the manual work out of the equation.<\/p>\n A:<\/strong> No. As of this writing, 1,244 applications integrate with Microsoft Teams, the vast majority of which are third-party (or non-Microsoft) applications. These applications support industries such as analytics, commerce, finance, human resources, IT, management, marketing, operations and supply chain management, project management and sales.<\/p>\n\n
![\"Teams](\"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Teams-Digital-Work-Hub-Part-1-01-3_18_22-1024x566.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nTeams as a Platform in the Real World<\/h2>\n
Microsoft Teams Drives Efficiencies<\/h2>\n
Integrating Tools Improves Workflow<\/h2>\n
Frequently Asked Questions on the Teams as a Platform Journey<\/h2>\n
Q: Does it take a long time to set up Teams to access various systems?<\/h3>\n
Q: By investing in Microsoft Teams as my digital work hub or platform, am I limited to integrating only Microsoft products?<\/h3>\n
Q: How much is this going to cost our company?<\/h3>\n
![\"Teams](\"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Teams-Digital-Work-Hub-Part-1-02-3_18_22-784x1024.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n