Establishing Teams Structure

[bburgess]

Hi everybody. We need to establish a more rational way to set up file storage and directories in Teams. It is too random as it is. Thanks.

[#2]

Good morning,
I'm going through something very similar. Teams was sort of flung out there shortly after everyone went home to work with little explanation or training. Creating new teams was not restricted and all sorts of teams got created by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

Now comes the part where we try to clean it up...

What I'm going to endeavor to do in my environment is to loosely structure team names after the org chart basing it on the philosophy that there should be fewer teams and many channels.

So for example, we may have a team named HR, and under there a channel called Benefits, a channel called Payroll and a channel called Annual Reviews or whatever. Similarly we'll have an IT team with an Infrastructure channel, a Security channel, maybe a Physical Inventory channel. You get the ideal.

Of course there are going to be exceptions to that rule, you may have a team for Board of Directors or something that doesn't fit in the org chart, but if the org chart is your rough guide, that will make sense when it comes to SharePoint and on line storage as well.

Hope that helps.

A. Jay

[#3]

HI there. I have a video on this topic that is still relevant you may want to review. I'd also suggest using some of our built in templates and seeing how we've structured them. I took that content from research we'd done across many different types of organizations though nothing is ever perfect. They are designed to help people make their own and more tools for managing organization wide template store are coming. Meanwhile though I always suggest bringing people together to have the working team who will actually use the team, participate in defining it based on your own best practices. Here's the link to the video from my Coffee in the Cloud channel: https://youtu.be/WkAVgNKn0hs

[#4]

@Karuana Gatimu I have watched the video, very informative indeed.

One question to everyone though: we are a company that delivers (IT) projects to many clients, and sometimes different projects for different lines-of-business for the same client.

From people's experience, what are the pros and cons of having

1. a Team per client, with projects as channels vs
2. a Team per project, with channels for releases/domains (or what else?)

I'm looking for matters of practicality, visibility, app availability etc etc that you only realize after you've done it for a while... Thanks!

[#5]

@msmelo 

One of the most important points would be to think of how often you will be doing a project with each client. If you're going to be doing several projects with a single client, it's easier to house all projects in one Team (M365 Group) /SharePoint/email.

Example:
Team = Contoso Project Managers
All projects, documents, power bi dashboards, etc  is housed in one Team and SharePoint site (M365 Group) .

Any team member that is added to, gets access to all of the above in the past and going forward.

On the flip side, if you're going to want different permissions per project, it may be better to make individual Teams (M365 Groups) for each project.