Forum Discussion
How to organize Teams, Chats and Groups for small development projects
Hello.
I'm trying to organize our work in Teams. More specifically I',m trying to organize the communication in a project to be less chaotic and more manageble.
We work on small development projects. We have people that prepare software requirements, testers and developers.
We usually work on 3 or 4 small projects simultaneously that usually require about a month or two to complete.
A development project team usually consists of 2-3 testers, 3-4 developers and 1-2 requirements guys.
Right now all our communication is done in group chats and all documentation is being stored in a single Sharepoint location.
I want for us to have a more structural approach. Ideally it would mean that:
- all communication regarding a project is held in one place;
- all the roles have a separate space to communicate, plus a common place for the whole project team communications;
- all documents regarding a single project are stored in one place.
Initially I thought of a separate teams for every project.
Only people who are working on the project would be added to the team. The communication for each role could be separated in private channels. And the general channel could be used as a common place for the whole team. After the project finishes the team would be archived and no longer used.
But it has a disadvantage that every private channel creates a separate Sharepoint storage location and documents would not be stored in one place. Plus our admin worned us regarding creating too many teams, since it would be a hell for him to manage.
The second thought was to create one team with all the people we have and create separate private channels for all the roles for all the projects.
But private channels are limited to 30 per team and total channels are limited to 200 per teams. So this is definitly not the way to go.
The third option was to create separate teams for each role and use shared channel for communications between roles.
Though it is slightly better, it still does not allow the creation of more than 200 channels (200 projects in our case) which we will hit sooner or later. And storage of all documents still would be in separate places.
Finally there's an option to leave everything as is.
The project communication between roles would happen in group chats for each role. It seems there's no limitation on those. Common communication for project cold be done there too.
But it is not perfect since the storage of documents in group chats is done via personal OneDrive folders and not in common space. Plus group chats are messy, when there are several dosens of them in the same list.
Finally, sometimes our meeting chat becomes a project chat. And if we have another meeting regarding that same project, this new meeting chat becomes our new project chat. So one project could have up to 5 chats for the same role. It's really messy and I was hoping to get rid of it.
Do you have any suggestions on how to organize it better?
Dear Dmitry,
I have a similar struggle although my company is in the interior design field.I see that nobody has suggested anything, but I'm wondering if you had any luck at figuring out a solution?
I would also like to create a separate chat "hub" for each project which has also project specific files easily accessible and no extra clutter. Therefor initially I thought that I would create a Project team for each year. And then a channel for each project. As there could be many conversations within one channel and therefor all separate conversations could still happen within the channel. If a message is directed at a certain person, then @<person> could be used and if it is necessary that all channel or participants get notified then @<channel name> or @everyone can be used.
For me the dealbreaker is the fact that each channel gets a separate sharepoint. Therefor if I would like to do research from previous projects I would have to go and reasearch them one by one. It could be that not every team member is part of every project, but they all need the project data for previous project research.
It would be nice to get the discussion rolling. Then perhaps someone with experience would lead us to the right path.
Do you have any new ideas or perhaps could you share the solution you settled for?
