Managing Projects on Microsoft 365? Here's How to Supercharge Your Team's Dynamics

Given powerful applications like Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive on Microsoft, it is hardly surprising that most corporate projects are managed here. Unfortunately, these applications are not greater than the sum of their parts when it comes to project management; they simply aren’t optimized for building and strengthening team dynamics the way specialized project management applications like Jira, Trello, or Asana are.  

Research has shown that improving team dynamics or engagement can have a significantly positive effect on project performance, productivity, and burnout reduction. As such, I’d like to share three key initiatives that you can drive to improve project management team dynamics in the Microsoft environment to 

Read on to find out more details on these initiatives!

When tiny frustrations and inconveniences are not resolved, they compound into a larger problem further down the road. If you're always leaving your dirty clothes around the house, there will come a day when you have to deal with an irritated spouse.

Similarly in the office, if your team members are constantly losing track of website links or documents shared in Teams (it’s a real problem), they might end up taking out their frustrations on each other, especially when they are wasting precious time searching for information to the point where it affects their productivity.

If your team has encountered these problems, you can try leveraging the Link Spotter app. As per the name of the app, it can quickly help you spot all the links from a Teams’ channel by gathering them in a single tab. You can then directly start working with the link, copy it, or join the conversation with your team members. This can reduce friction between your project team members and improve their dynamics tremendously! 

Project management is not the exclusive domain of Microsoft 365. As a project manager, you might have to liaise with team members working in other environments, like the Atlassian suite or GitHub. Unfortunately, there’s a major drawback when your team is working in multiple environments, chiefly when it comes to sharing or updating the team’s knowledge base.

Let’s take Confluence as an example. Since they share a lot of similar functions with SharePoint, it is not uncommon for companies to work on both platforms. Sadly, you’ve probably seen frustrations boil over when your team members find themselves suffering from the lack of synchronicity between both platforms. The most common instance of that is when time is wasted doing redundant work due to miscommunication and misalignment, which occurs when new document versions are not tracked automatically between both platforms.

I’ll paint you a picture – somebody made a last-minute change to a sales brochure in SharePoint, but the older version that’s located on Confluence was used in a pitch before it was updated. Or you needed some documentation done urgently, but it wasn’t communicated clearly what platform it should be done on, so two different versions were published by two different people.

In this case, you should check out SharePoint Connector for Confluence – an app that links them together and enables you to leverage both of their strengths. With SharePoint Connector for Confluence, you can instantly embed, share and edit SharePoint documents on your Confluence page. You can also upload files to SharePoint directly from your Confluence page. Likewise, you can easily embed Confluence Cloud pages in SharePoint with just a few clicks.

Let’s face it – you don’t really know much about half of the people you’re working with. Even basic details like their title, email, and business phone number. While ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem, it becomes one when your team members are working outside the Microsoft environment. 

Taking Confluence as an example again, let’s see how this problem manifests itself. A team member on Confluence might spot an issue that requires the attention of someone from the Microsoft environment; only to realize that he or she has no way of contacting that person since they are not directly accessible. Precious time is wasted as they exhaust various ways to reach the right person. If they’re procrastinators, they might even forget about the issue entirely due to the inconvenience. 

This is where a product like User Profiles for Confluence comes into play. This product can help your users locate and contact one another more quickly, thanks to the built-in integration with Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. As an added bonus, the Contact Person Macro also provides clarity on who is in charge of what topic in Confluence Cloud. This makes it easier for Microsoft users to acknowledge contributors on non-Microsoft platforms and make them feel like a valued part of the team.

To recap, the Microsoft environment is where most projects are managed, albeit suboptimally. To improve your project team dynamics, there are several third-party applications you really ought to consider. These applications were designed with Microsoft users in mind, and they can help you find information faster, connect you to applications outside the Microsoft environment, and generally improve the productivity of your project teams.

To up your project management game on Microsoft Teams, check out these applications now!