Last month, we unveiled a theme on project management excellence for Life Sciences companies. We listed several topics in our theme. The first topic was leveraging Microsoft (MS) Teams for IT projects.
Life Sciences companies are highly global in nature. Furthermore, in this post-pandemic era, most corporations still operate in a hybrid working model. Employees continue to work from the home office or from remote locations either fully or several weeks a day. Therefore, it is essential to understand how an information technology project manager can increase communication and collaboration across large IT project teams with members working remotely.
Since this topic has many essential aspects, we will be covering it in two parts. The first part will entail the benefits of strong communications and sound content management enabled by MS Teams. In the second part, we will cover the advantages of leveraging MS Teams in integration, planning, and organization.
The MS Teams platform is a solution that pulls together many of the information-related aspects to effectively manage projects, and into a single interface by surfacing the following components.
Conferencing
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Video and Audio Conferencing: Seasoned managers know that body language is 90% of communication and seeing team members’ faces during meetings greatly increases productivity. People are working from home more and traveling less. Therefore, it is important to leverage the video aspects of the teleconferencing capabilities in order to gather people from around the world into virtual rooms.
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Phone Calls: MS Teams replaces the need for desk phones and enables streamlined audio calls from computers. Now, it is easier than ever to quickly dial a teammate when it is more productive to have a quick conversation instead of lengthy IMs or emails. You can also use the MS Teams smartphone app to call from your mobile phone to anyone in the world who has the app on their phone or PC. Such calls do not incur long-distance or international calling fees or taxes since it is through the internet.
Messaging
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Threaded Discussions: By leveraging this capability, one can reduce project-related emails by 80%. A larger percentage of professionals have become more efficient at communicating via social media platforms. This method of conveying project-related information, if used properly, can be a more effective and comprehensive method.
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Chat: The MS Teams platform allows team members to communicate with each other (or small groups) in real time through instant messaging. From the personal perspective, the world has shifted over to Instant Messaging and away from phone calls and email. The business world is quickly catching to this shift.
Content Management:
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File Sharing: One of the greatest features of MS Teams is carried over from SharePoint – a central repository for sharing a single source of truth. It solves two important problems related to outdated content and time-consuming searching for the latest content used across the project team. Typically, using the old method of file sharing through email attachments, a document is outdated as soon as it is sent via email. Many office workers also experience frustration with the time-consuming process of navigating and/or searching for files in a central repository. MS Teams file sharing solves these shortcomings.
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Co-Authoring: This capability enables team members to share and work on documents together in real-time leveraging the MS Office On-Line capabilities for simultaneously co-authoring. You no longer need to check-out / check-in and/or export(download) / import(upload) to work on the same file across a project team. Instead, you edit the files whenever and wherever simply via the MS-Team interface!
In a future article, we will explain how to go about leveraging and exposing these MS Teams capabilities by outlining proven best practices used across Spotline-managed Life Sciences IT projects. If your organization needs IT project management, contact us here:
