Master Project Management in Microsoft Teams: Your Complete Hub Setup Guide

if you're just using Microsoft teams for meetings oh man Microsoft teams can do so much more today I'm going to talk

specifically about how to set up Microsoft teams to help you manage projects hey I'm Emma I'm a project

manager here at ball digital and whether you're just starting out with teams or you've been using teams for a while and

you know you need a refresh that's what I'm going to dive into today I have been there before where you're not really

sure how these tools work together you've got planner you've got Microsoft teams you've got files saved somewhere

what I want to talk through today is how to manage a project using Microsoft teams as your Hub and creating a space

where you can manage files um have meetings have all of your project conversation and track tasks just easy

seamlessly um all in one place one thing I want to get out of the way at the very beginning of this video is when we talk

about managing work with Microsoft 365 or Microsoft teams specifically a lot of people have different definitions about

that work that's being done uh we like to put these into two different buckets so we have projects and processes so if

you have a process that you're trying to track that's something that happens maybe weekly um monthly annually it's

sort of cyclical or iterative um it's repeatable that's a process well I'm going to focus on today is a project and

I Define that as something that has a start date and an end date and is likely a one-time initiative maybe you do

similar projects but each project is unique in its own sense and then within projects and processes you have tasks so

on the process side maybe that looks like every month you're going through accounting month-end close so you might

have a task uh like an accounting analyst pulls cost variances and sends a report to a manager to review that's a

task that might happen once a month on a project you we'll have tasks that happen just within the scope of that project

the way we treat these tasks might look a little different in these tools so again today I'm going to focus on the

project side of things if you are interested in the process side of things definitely leave a comment and we can

look at creating a video on that all right so now that we're clear that we're talking about projects let's get into

our first step which is all about creating a Microsoft team and the first channel so here I am in the teams app

and I'm going to create a Microsoft team to support this project so I hit the plus button I hit create team and I'm

going to give my team a name I like to call it the actual project name so let's give this a real example let's say I

work at an organization I'm the project manager on an HR System migration so maybe we're moving from one system to

another and I'm going to keep the team type private and I'm going to name my first channel now this is a little

caveat Microsoft used to always name the first channel the same thing it was always called called General um no

longer uh can you do that so I use the word all and I like this word for a few reasons one it kind of hints at it being

where everyone's together all the information can be found and also it starts with the letter A which means in

the channel list it will stay at the top because the channel list is alphabetized I can also add a description so this is

the project team and project hub for the HR System migration that will let everyone know

what this team is for so I'm going to hit create and it will create my team for me so now I can go in and add

members to the HR team so I'm going to add Miriam and maybe

Megan and let's see Lydia so I'm going to click add and

all of those members will be added to the overarching Microsoft team and any channels that I create within this team

will have all those team members added okay so now we're in the team and you can see that that first channel was

already created for me here I would recommend if you're just starting out on your journey with Microsoft teams to

just keep it simple and just use one channel so one channel for that project um especially if it is a more simple

project when you get a little bit more complicated with a lot more team members it does make sense to break out by

topics and different channels but for this example and again just for Simplicity I'm going to show you how to

set up uh this first channel as really being the hub for the project so this is where we're going to create all of our

tabs and direct the project team to have all of our communication and information living here okay so now the fun part

this is where we get to organize all of our tabs at the top of our Channel um which will really create one of the main

benefits of managing projects out of mic oft teams it creates this centralized Hub or this single source of Truth where

team members are able to go to one place for all of the different project information that they need so I'm going

to walk through each tab uh one at a time and show you how I build out projects so here at bulb digital we have

been curating and crafting this framework for a number of years on a lot of different projects and this is what

has we've found has worked best for us and I'd recommend you start this way but you can always adapt it to what works

for your team we all know that communication is super key to project success but what I found

is keeping that communication in one centralized location is really the key uh to making sure that your team is

completely on the same page so teams sets this up for you this is the post Tab and this should serve as your

channel chat I use the word chat Loosely because I know you can chat that in other areas of Microsoft teams and

that's not what this is this is actually so much better because you're creating a stream of conversation happening within

a channel again within this all Channel um but think of it like a group chat with all of the project team members all

in the same place couple Pro tips here when you start a post always make sure that you're at tagging the entire

channel so if you do at Channel or at all it'll give you that option and that will notify all of your different

project team members who are in that team that you've posted so that's definitely a pro tip or if you want

someone specific to do something like if I want Lydia to create the agenda uh for our next meeting I'll make sure that I

at Lydia and then again that really tags her it's kind of like when you're emailing you're making sure the person

that really needs to read the emails in the two line and then you're ceasing all other important people um by keeping

that all tag in there so a couple different Pro tips to make sure people are seeing your

your information and and your posts if you want to make an announcement you can come in and choose the announcement

option post or announcement announcements are obviously just reserved for the bigger announcements um

where you you would actually want to have like a headline and put some more information in I look at this a little

bit like on emails where people Mark emails as critically important or urgent use these sparingly if you're

using these for every single one of your uh posts it's not you're not doing it right the last thing I'll say about

using Microsoft teams and communicating in this way is resist the urge to have sideline chats with different people

about this project all of your conversation pertaining to this project should be happening in this post tab you

shouldn't have any direct messages um unless you have a super good reason as to why it needs to be confidential but

most and I mean like 99% of the conversation about this project should happen here in this post um we are

really big Believers in open transparent communication and that's one of the keys to project success here in Microsoft

teams if you're interested in this topic more we actually have a whole blog about what we call topic based communication

and like I said we're really passionate about it so we explain it and outline kind of how to get that started at your

organization as well as a online course that you can take called the total communication reset the TCR uh and it's

really helpful my cooworker Mitch breaks down why topic based communication is so beneficial and again how to get it set

up at your organization all right so moving right along to our next default tab so these

are the tabs that were just given to us when we set up this team within team so we've got files um same goes for

files that went for post as far as all of the project files that are pertinent to this project documents meeting

recordings um just honestly any type of resource that you want to have stored in a folder they should live here in these

files the other thing to note is that anything that gets put into that um post conversation anything that gets put into

a post or an announcement in that channel chat will also automatically get put here in the files and so that makes

it really easy to collaborate and know what document everyone's talking about one pro tip that I do here is I actually

usually create some structure of folders before I get started with my team so I usually create an admin folder and then

I create a meeting recordings folder and you'll see that I um name all of my folders with like 01 02 so that I

keep things in the same order and then if you're working on multiple projects with me you'll start to notice that all

of my projects are sort of set up the same way and there's this consistent structure where people know where to go

for certain information again this is just how I do it I'm not sure how it'll work on your team but uh I found this to

be really useful next tab is called notes this is where uh this video might get a little

controversial because I'm going to have you do something that might feel a little uncomfortable I'm going to have

you actually remove this tab completely I use the app Loop for all my note-taking needs and I find having a

tab called notes hanging around with a one note ready to go is just confusing for my project teams so I just go ahead

and remove this one note and remove the notes and replace it with a tab for Loop so today I'm going to just click the

little carrot and hit remove and go ahead and permanently remove this one note so now I'm back I've got my post

for all of my team conversation got my files a little bit of a structure already Loosely set up there now I'm

going to add in Loop so I click the plus tab Loop right now is not built into Microsoft teams so

I will just add loop as a website I'm going to call this tab Loop now there are a couple steps you

have to do to get a loop workspace set up in order to Loosely connected to your Microsoft teams so bear with me as we

set that up we do know that this connection between Loop and Microsoft teams is coming but for now this is kind

of how I connect the two so if you're new to Loop this is what it looks like um you've got all your workspaces set up

below I'm going to hit this plus button on the side and create a new workspace and I'm going to mirror everything that

I just did to create a Microsoft team on the team side here in the workspace so I'm going to call it the exact same

thing HR System migration and I'm going to invite the exact same people so I've added Lydia

Megan and Miriam and this is really key so I'm going to pause here the creation of a loop workspace does not

automatically add in your Microsoft team so you do have to remember who did you add to your Microsoft team project team

and then copy and paste and and make sure all of those same people are added to the workspace that way the

permissions and the access will be mirrored between the two and so there is this kind of additional extra manual

step but once you've got it set up and everyone has access to both the Microsoft team and the loop workspace

you're golden and once Microsoft rolls out a connections between the two you hopefully won't have to do that anymore

and now I'm in Loop here's my Loop workspace I do usually add a couple of different Pages just as standard um

again Loosely structure I think that sometimes kind of helps I always call one page just the meetings page and then

nested below that I will have the different meetings kind of a pro tip here I always because Loop doesn't have

dates built into it of this was last edited on XYZ date when I have meetings I will put the actual date of the

meeting into the title and then that's kind of how I organize all of the different meetings on on different days

so I'll show you kind of an example there let's say I have this meeting standard every

15th of the month okay and I might yeah I'll have these oldest at the bottom and then the

newer meetings towards the top so again just an example of of kind of adding some structure to what can feel like a

lot of white space that's super important when you're trying to get team members to adopt Loop is sort of guiding

them into it and having some structure already set up another page that I always create

with projects I love their project planning template you can go ahead and just choose the template from the

template Library they show you a bunch of template gallery or a bunch of templates in their template Gallery

project planning it just thinks of everything for you which I love the roles on the project the background

context and then you can add in um all your details one thing you might notice in Loop that I do want to comment on is

that you can upload a file I don't recommend using this feature I actually recommend uploading the file into the

project team under that files tab that I just showed and then linking that file from that project team into your Loop

and you can do so through the the link option here the reasons for that are too long to get into right now but they're

very valid so I'm just going to grab the URL from this Loop workspace control copy I'm going to go back into to my

adding a tab call this Loop and paste that URL right here and I'm going to post to the

channel about this new tab so now when I click this Loop tab instead of having an experience right

here in Microsoft teams it's just going to open up uh in the browser and away we go so in theory let's say you've got a

meeting coming up that you need to create an agenda for and you want to capture that in your Loop workspace you

could come to your project Hub here in Microsoft teams click the loop Tab and here you are on meetings I'm going to

click right into my meeting and I'm going to start creating my agenda and adding all my bullet points decide on

date and what I love about Loop is it just creates a really clean formatting taken care of um list and you can write

everything in there everyone will see it and then you can go ahead and screen share that um on your next meeting

of course we can't talk about project management with Microsoft tools without mentioning planner so that's the next

tab we're going to add here so I'm going to choose new tab I'm going to choose planner so you guys get two options you

can create a new plan or use an existing plan from this team I'm going to just create a new plan and you can name your

tab I'm going to actually name it planner some people like to name it tasks and now I've got a new planner

board set up with the permissions and access that um includes everyone that's within this Microsoft team so my whole

project team's got access to this planner board I want to give a small caveat that I think planner works best

for simple project management I usually create pretty simple conon boards so having a column for

to-do in progress and maybe a done column um or you can have a lot of different stages for tasks

within that uh this is really where planner shines and I'll show you adding a task

like let's say create agenda let's assign that to Lydia set a due date and then Lydia can

actually come in she has access to the spner board when she's starting on that task she can move it herself into the in

progress and this really allows us to track status visually to see how many tasks do we still have to do haven't

started yet what is in progress and what is done again this is planner it's great for basic project management think

simple um not a ton of layers or complication to your project management if you do have a more complicated

project you might want to consider upgrading to planner premium or project okay so I'm going to assign myself a

task to demonstrate how tasks and planner all work together so let's say I need to

schedule a meeting before the company Town Hall I'm going to assign this to myself I am ad

Del Vance in this test environment add the task actually set a due date as well let's say it's due next

Thursday and now if you look at the planner tab here in teams you'll see that as I get assigned tasks in that

planner they will show up in my tasks so I'll be able to see all the different things that I still need to do what the

priority is what the due date is and organize all of these different items and your project team will also see all

the different tasks that get assigned to them in the planner so these two tools work really well together

okay so continuing on with our tabs the last one that I add uh relatively often because I still find use for it is the

Whiteboard tab so you can add a whiteboard for your team to use for brainstorming or for process mapping um

I'm going to just call it whiteboard go ahead and save it I have found that most of the brainstorming that my team does

on projects can happen in Loop but whiteboard is still great uh once in a while if you need to do

a sticky note session or um we used to always do Retros in whiteboards but I actually do those in Loop now as well

but either way you can add whiteboard as a tab if you find it useful now we all know one of the biggest challenges with

project management is getting consensus and actually getting the entire team on the same page around what you're working

on or what what decisions need to be made so a couple different features that Microsoft teams already has built in

that you can use I use the polls feuture so I'm here in my post communication thread where all of our communication

about our project is going on you just add that little plus button at the bottom type in polls and add this so

let's do an example here let's say we're trying to decide as a team what division we're going to roll the HR System

migration out to first so what division should we roll out to First can throw some options in there it

marketing executive team we are

accounting and I'm going to let people vote for multiple and just see what comes to the top so I can preview

that and I'm going to send that out to the team and this will allow all the team members again within that project

team to vote on what they think and I'm able to see live responses I can vote as well let's say I think

these two teams should win awesome and you'll see that my response comes through so just super

useful in trying to gain consensus and keep all that conversation all within that project team out in the open other

people can see uh what is winning and you know what decision should be made the other really important side of

getting a team aligned and getting everyone on the same page is having regular standup meetings uh this kind of

comes from the scrum or agile world stand-ups are regular daily meetings some of the time usually weekly uh

within our organization so to set those up I always go to the top here and hit schedule a meeting and create these as

Channel meetings so that means that um everyone within this channel is added to the meeting and maybe I have these on a

regular occurrence like I said most likely weekly so with that I've now gone through and created my team my next step

of course would be to schedule a kickoff meeting with the project team walk them through um how to access everything what

the expectations are for communication where to post how to post where the files are how to use Loop where the

tasks are stored all of this information can be found in this project Hub and I'd want to get my team on board and ready

to use this system so I hope this was helpful in kind of breaking down how all of these tools can work together I know

it can be very confusing how you can get planner to talk to Microsoft teams to talk to something like Loop and how you

arrange all of those different tools to be U accessible in one Hub this is the framework that we have found most useful

and this is what I use to run all of our projects and I hope it can be a helpful starting point and then you can build on

that uh what works for you and your team drop us a comment below if you have any questions or leave me your tips that

you've learned along the way on setting up this project Hub in Microsoft teams so what we're talking about is Work

Management right so it's just getting work done within Microsoft 365 tools within Microsoft teams whether you're an

official project manager and that is your day-to-day job or you're just trying to use these tools to get your

work done we think about this is kind of the everyday workflow so if you're curious about this we have lots of

different resources and a few events coming up um definitely check those out on bulb. digital

slpm and we'll post about different events that we're doing to share resources on these everyday workflow

items and how to use Microsoft tools to get work done so that's more on the individual side but if you're looking to

have your entire organization go through kind of a reset on how to use Microsoft tools we have something called our

Microsoft 365 everyday essentials boot camp that brings your whole organization on a journey of a sort of reset on how

to use Microsoft in their day-to-day to just get work done if you're interested in that we'll leave a link down below

and you can schedule a call and chat with us about what that would look like that's it for me today thanks so much

for joining and happy project managing [Music] [Music]