Teams + SharePoint--should begin with Teams for new sites or SharePoint Online sites & connect Team

[SusanMcClements]

Our organization (financial institution)  has not fully rolled out SharePoint sites for all departments, only IT have team sites. Should I work through the company department by department and create SharePoint sites or should we just begin using Teams and the SharePoint site behind.  I have been trying to do a combination--create all sites with Team connected but building out other document libraries and other SharePoint features. Then I demo the shared document library (I rename to Team Files to avoid confusion) connected to Teams. However, just trying to explain the two platforms to IT as a pilot has been very confusing for the leaders. I wanted to use the benefits of creating hubs:

• global navigation
• search across connected sites
• granular permissions if necessary
• collaboration capabilities of the Team

I understand that Teams+SharePoint are better together but just don't know how best to begin structuring for the entire organization.  What suggestions do others have for companies that have not already established SharePoint Online sites?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @SusanMcClements ,

There isn't a best practice approach, both approaches are valid and what it comes down to is what is right for your business. 

Change management and adoption of SharePoint can be a big task to get right for some organisations, for example moving from Shared Drives to SharePoint. If users are used to using Shared drives for the last 25 years and there is resistance to change and adoption has to be carefully managed with a lot of time and effort then go for SharePoint Team sites and roll out Teams later.

If you are a tech savy media company where all users self learn and pick things up with minimal effort then go for Teams and SharePoint  Team sites from the off.  Your business priorities may be another factor, if you need to get rid of Skype for Business then you are going to want to start on  a Teams project sooner rather than later. You may decide that you just roll out Microsoft Teams and look to educate users on more of the collaboration and document management features later. 

Getting your information architecture correct for your organisation is important, mostly this will consist of your SharePoint Team site rollout and as you have identified global navigation and hub sites so that you can build hierarchies and roll up content which isnt as easy in Teams. 

Last 3 projects I have done have been SharePoint Team sites first and then Teams rollout planned for a future phase. Due to the change involved for users, the level of internal resource available and the risk of not being successful if to much is rolled out at once. 

Hope that helps a little and doesn't muddy the waters further.

Kind regards

Andy

[#3]

I work through each department one at a time using first the Work Force Analysis approach Microsoft have so I understand how Teams would benefit them. I then subdivide if necessary to people who collaborate together and work with them to design a Teams structure helping them with understanding and how you work differently focussing on the benefits align with the WFA output. You get much better adoption as the people involved are then part of the design so have already bought into the change, it takes a lot longer than the just org structure based site approach but far better ROI.