Microsoft Teams – Governance – Part 1 – Preparation / Plan

Hi All,

Greetings for the day 🙂 LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂

Since last couple of months we are discussing Microsoft Teams

• M365 / Microsoft Teams – Introduction to Microsoft Teams – for beginners / Administrators (help to prepare interviews and respective certifications) – Part 1
• M365 / Microsoft Teams – Introduction to Microsoft Teams – for beginners / Administrators – Part 2 – Teams management tools – Study guide for MS – 700
• M365 / Microsoft Teams – Introduction to Microsoft Teams – for beginners / Administrators – Part 3 – Teams settings from M365 admin center
• M365 / Microsoft Teams – Introduction to Microsoft Teams – for beginners / Administrators – Part 4 – Team Templates

In this article we will discuss most important part for the success of Teams in any organization – Microsoft Teams Governance

Since Teams Governance is huge topic I’ll be having series of articles for this topic. This will be first article where we will discuss :

• What is Governance
• What is Team Governance
• Important points to be considered while implementing Teams Governance in my organization

What is Governance ?

• Governance is nothing but set of
  • policies
  • processes
  • roles
  • responsibilities
  • to be put together so that our organization (users) follow them to achieve certain goals like data security, compliance with business standard, productivity of our organization users, performance of our organization users, smooth collaboration between our organization users
  • to control how our business team and IT team works together to achieve our organization goals

What is Microsoft Team Governance?

• Teams becomes the integral part of any organization. Teams plays vital role in productivity / performance / collaboration in our organization / company
• Since Teams plays vital role and if organization is big then its very important to govern the Teams so that effective utilization of Teams will happen, business success will be ensured

Most important points to be considered while implementing Teams Governance :

• Form the Teams Governance Team
  • Form the team which will plan and implement the governance for the Teams
  • Include the members those have enough technical knowledge of Microsoft Teams or know the administrative part of Teams – may be from IT department – Microsoft Team experts
  • If possible include some business users who understands the business of our organization or at least members who can effectively communicate with business users / organization users
• Decisions to be taken –
  • Once Teams governance team is in place, next step is communication (with business users / stakeholders / organization users) and preparing plan
  • For effective implementation of Teams governance its very important to take some decisions based on our organization business need / requirements
  • Decision 1# : Naming conventions for Teams
    • Are there any naming conventions are set for Teams
    • Is there any Teams naming policy is in place in my organization
  • Decision 2# : Are Teams creation controlled in my organization ?
    • Is there any approval process is in place?
    • Are only certain users are responsible for Teams creation?
    • Whether all users are able to create Teams? / are we empowering users with self-service ?
  • Decision 3# : Team membership management :
    • Does every team in my organization requires specific number of owners?
    • Does my organization requires process in place to manage Team members either for all Teams or specific teams ?
  • Decision 4# : External Sharing
    • Does my organization allows guest access / external sharing for all Teams or specific Teams?
    • Does my organization requires control over who can add guest to Teams?
  • Decision 5# : Teams life cycle / Teams expiration policy
    • Is there any expiration period for Teams ?
    • Does our organization requires specific retention policies for Teams ?
    • Does our organization requires archiving of not required Teams?
  • Decision 6# : Teams features available to organization users
    • Does my organization requires limiting certain features across my tenant or for some specific users
• Documentation and Documentation
  • Most important – Documentation – documenting decisions taken
  • Preparing guidelines for all users – updating them timely basis as per my organization needs / requirement changes
  • Publishing Teams guidelines at central location so that all users can access those and refer

In upcoming articles we will discuss how to implement outcome of decisions, there effect in organization starting with – Naming Conventions

Thanks for reading 🙂

STAY SAFE 🙂 STAY HEALTHY 🙂