There are a lot of people who blame Teams for their own issues

Mirko is entirely correct when he says this:

I once worked with a team who insisted Microsoft Teams was the source of their chaos: files everywhere, missed updates, and duplicated tasks. They spent weeks evaluating alternatives, but nothing changed—until they stopped and redesigned their process. Once they set clear principles for where files lived, how updates were shared, and how tasks were tracked, Teams suddenly “worked.” The tool didn’t change. Their approach did.

Full story – Why Most Team Project Systems Self-Destruct—And How to Make Yours Resilient (Even in Microsoft Teams)

I’ve worked with so many teams who tried to use Teams, Planner, SharePoint Lists, etc., and came away feeling like the tool “just wasn’t for us” when it was apparent that the problem was that they didn’t have a process for project management. They moved on to the next tool, but it didn’t work either, because it wasn’t magic. It still required the team to update information within the tool, rather than verbally during a meeting. Since many of them didn’t take the time to update, the tool was obviously the problem, as it was not easy to update.

Never mind how easy it really was to update; people got busy and forgot, and then no one could tell where the project stood. As a result, they had to hold more meetings to discuss updates, wasting time and ultimately making the whole test run of the tool a failure.

It was never about the tool.

Am I going to tell you that the tools you already own with your Enterprise M365 license are perfect? No, I’m not. Long-time followers know that I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft’s tools. They are sometimes great and sometimes very lacking. Often, they are lacking because Microsoft has a better option available for an increased fee. (see standard planner vs. what used to be Project.) At other times, there are features that we wish they had added that they haven’t. However, they are rarely as awful as people make them out to be, and most of the time, it’s because people are using them without a clear plan for what they want to accomplish.

Teams channels can be confusing when you don’t have a plan in place for organizing them. Teams chats can get noisy when you don’t define the purpose of each group chat. Planner can be lacking when people don’t assign tasks properly. Loop and OneNote can become absolute chaos when there isn’t a process for note-taking and storage. As Mirko points out, SharePoint can become a junk drawer when things don’t have a defined location that everyone agrees upon.

That’s not a technology problem. That’s a human problem.

Check out the rest of Mirko’s post for ideas on making your project system better, and follow his daily tidbits on LinkedIn.

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