Whether you are putting together a team to work on a specific project like planning an amazing special event or a team that will collaborate over time on many projects, creating a workspace your team can share and thinking about various things you’d like to accomplish together are two important steps in putting together a successful team.
Lets us have a small understanding about what you need to do to help your team be successful. Envisioning the type of team environment you’d like to create is a good place to begin. You’ll be doing more brainstorming. There were variety of tasks you might want to accomplish with your team, ranging from sharing files to translating documents to broadcasting presentations and more.
Starting with the End in Mind
Before you begin setting things up online to give your team the tools they need to get busy, it’s a good idea to think through the goals for your team and envision the process and benchmarks you can follow to help the team reach those goals successfully.
Envisioning the overall direction, even if you will be inviting the team’s input on that is a good way to set the foundation for the team’s work.
Here are some questions to get you started:
- What is the long-term goal of your team?
- When do you want to accomplish the goal?
- Will you have specific roles for various members of your team (designer, writer, editor, project manager, and so on)?
- Will you work collaboratively on specific pieces (for example, will an editor and a designer need to have access to the same document at the same time)?
- Will you have team meetings at regular intervals (weekly, biweekly, or some other regular schedule)?
Thinking through the ways in which your team will assign tasks, report on progress, communicate one-to-one and to the entire team, and find and work with important files will help the team work together more smoothly in Office 365.
Knowing in advance what you want your team to accomplish will have some bearing on the types of elements you add to your team site.
Here are a couple of ideas along this line that will Facilitate Online Collaboration:
- If your team is coming together to do a specific project, for example, the launch of a new exhibit, you might need to plan to include the following things in the site: shared calendars with regular team meetings; a document library for storing marketing materials and designs; announcements so that team members can see when new items are posted or updated; a way to view overall deadlines and your progress toward the goal; and online meetings with presentations and chat, to make sure everyone is headed in the same direction.
- If your team is working remotely over the long haul, perhaps you are a small business with offices on a couple of continents, your needs for your team site might be a little different. You still would benefit from a shared calendar and regular meetings, but you might also create document libraries for each member of the team, a public site you all work on, announcements and tasks, and other web parts that help you socialize as well as complete business-critical tasks independently and as a team.
Whether your team is working together for a short time or for an indefinite period, be sure to include the basics, calendar, document library, and announcements, as you start out. You can always add to the features of the site as you go along, when you notice what’s missing that might make your teamwork a little smoother.