MS Teams or MS Chat? Collaboration software is more than a chat program

Good morning.

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Stefan Mintert works with his clients to improve corporate culture in software development. He currently sees the greatest potential in leadership; Regardless of hierarchy level. He set himself the task of taking advantage of this ability with some career changes. Originally coming from a computer science background with many years of consulting experience, he initially founded his own software development company. He found that leadership has to be learned and good role models are rare. It became clear that their customers’ greatest need for support in software development was not in producing code, but in leadership. So it was clear to him where his company Kutura was going: Improve leadership so that the people developing products can grow and develop themselves. Stefan has been writing for Heise as a longtime freelancer for iX since 1994.

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I don’t really like writing about individual products on this blog. And today it’s not really about Microsoft’s software, which is featured so prominently in the title, but about these types of products, however, the name of Microsoft’s product largely conveys what it stands for. I’m talking about teams,

When I first started working with MS Teams, without thinking I created a team in the software for each actual team. Later I learned from other customers that it is common practice in many companies to only use chat in MS Teams. Each group (each team) creates and works with a team chat. Should Microsoft have named its product MS Chats instead of MS Teams?

I think teams are losing a lot. This means that they isolate themselves significantly from each other. You can only join chat through explicit invitation.

When working in a shared office, you can easily reach out to another team. I would definitely like to have this opportunity in a distributed working world.

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That’s why I’m presenting my (temporary) preferred approach here. And then: This also applies to other tools like Slack.

1. For each real team I prefer to use a team in MS Teams. From now on I’m going to call this thing Team Room to keep it a clear name and because I want to use it like the physical world Team Room. It belongs to one team and other people are allowed to enter.
2. I’ve set up a channel for recurring topics. If there is only one team chat, it is a problem to have conversations simultaneously on different topics, for all the topic areas/channels I use most often: test, review, daily and of course general. Who do not have their own channel. The General Channel is also my favorite place for people from other teams (see below).
3. As a rule, channels are public. There are also non-public channels, for example for retrospectives or other confidential, internal team communications.
4. To understand public/non-public, it is important that team rooms are accessible to everyone in the company.

The last point is the digital analog of what is said in the physical world: “I’ll go to the other team.” If I can log into another team room or another team, I’m able to go into public meetings effortlessly. MS Teams allows you to plan meetings from one channel. Then a meeting takes place in the channel. People outside the team who are logged in as guests in a team room can see if a meeting is happening in a channel and join it. I have often observed that the review channel and the meetings held there were of interest to the neighboring teams. Developers who were not explicitly invited via calendar invitation came to these meetings remarkably often.

Fine-grained control of notifications about events across channels ensures that as a person potentially interested, but outside the team, you don’t have information you don’t need in high frequency. .

This approach is the best approximation of an open door policy that I have found so far. As an alternative, I’ve often seen teams invite countless people to appointments as a precaution. I did not see any positive effect.

I would be glad if experiences from several companies were shared in the comments. Which method did you try? What works well for you? What shouldn’t you try?

(rme)