Champions team | Build your Champions team. In Teams. Allright so many organizations are creating their Champions teams of early adopters to help them in their quest to adopt the services and ways of working with Microsoft 365. Refer to this blog post as guidelines or to give you inspiration on how you can improve the environment for your Champions within Microsoft Teams! It will only take you 10 minutes from start to finish!
First things first! Create a new Team in Microsoft Teams. Call it something nice, like “The Champions quarters”. You’ll want the name to reflect some kind of privilege or status. If you have access to these quarters then you’ve got access to more information than others, you are able to influence the organization and really drive a change for the better. Basically you want people to feel a sense of pride to be members of this team.
The settings
Set a nice picture for you Team (all teams should have a nice icon).
Here is the settings for my team that differs from the defaults.
• Turn on discoverability = false
• Members – Allow creating and updating channels = False
• Members – Allow members to delete and restore channels = False
• Anyone can post; show alert that posting will notify everyone (recommended for large teams) = Selected
I don’t want the Champions team to be discoverable by others. This is a premium team. Invite only. The illuminati should be jealous of the kind of great insights and knowledge that is shared behind this walls.
Someone owns the Champions program and is responsible to it’s structure. There’s no reason for the members to alter the channels and so I turn it off. Sure these are the greatest learners in the organization when it comes to adopting new technology but to be honest, that usually comes with some nasty habit of wanting to try every button. This is simple risk management, you guys.
Finally, I want to alert people if they’re sending posts to the entire team. Not only will this team has (hopefully) a lot of members but I generally prefer to be informed so this is one of those “feels good in the stomach”-kind of settings for me.
The Channels
For my team, I’ve created 4 channels apart from the General one.
Improvements
This is a place for feedback both from the Champions and from the people trying to steer the team. How can we improve the Champions team in itself? What would be a good app to push to everyone’s phones? Wouldn’t it be great if we all had a shortcut in the waffle menu to that other web based application we’re using?
Apart from just having a place to talk about this stuff in the conversation area, I also created this Form in Forms.
It’s just one question at this stage and you could just fill in any number of questions you’d like to get a more detailed request.
I put the Forms in a Tab in the Team.
Now let’s go to Flow and activate this template:
Using this flow we’re able to create a Task in another Teams planner. I’m using our Groups and Planner testing team as a substitute for the internal IT team in this case.
There we go! This could also be the project team and improvements are being sent in by our pilot group.
News
Guess what this channel is all about!
Since the Microsoft 365 cloud platform is evergreen and ever changing, a constant flow of updates is coming in and that means we want to keep everyone up to speed!
In this channel I’m setting up a connector to use RSS for a weekly flow of news from the Office 365 Blogs.
I’m also setting up a link to the blog as a tab in the channel for easy access to older posts.
Problems
This channel is mainly a fast lane for your users to give you feedback regarding problems they experiences. Things aren’t working, they’ll tell you here!
If they’re doing something wrong, you can just correct them and note that if these guys had this kind of problem, others are sure to have the same one. You should use this information to create FAQ for the rest of your organization.
If it is a real problem, you can either solve it or channel it to your service desk.
Questions
This is were your users can ask questions. Any kind of questions. All is welcome!
It might be stuff like “How do I create a workflow that will automatically save attachments from Outlook to OneDrive?” or “When should I use Planner and when should a create a task list in OneNote?”.
You might not always sit on the answer right away but rest assure; if your champions have these questions now, the rest of your users will eventually catch up and ask the same ones. You’ll prefer to answer it for 3 people and the create an FAQ for the rest instead of waiting to respond when 300 requests gets submitted at the same time.
The only thing I’ve done with this channel is putting in a tab to Office Training center.
And that’s really all there is to it!
You’ve literally just spent 10 minutes to create a nice and comfortable place for your champions!
A nice touch could be to create a PowerPoint with some instructions and post it as a tab in the general channel. PowerPoints looks great in this manner!
There are of course a lot of other things you could and perhaps should do, but from my experience it’s better to act and do something than plan a lot and do nothing. You need to get your users comfortable in their new quarters and the faster you can get them gathered and start to create meaningful content, the faster you’ll have your building blocks to create value from. You can always improve on this team as you start to outgrow it.
If you would like to get my help or counseling in getting started with your Champions Team or if you have questions in regards to Microsoft Teams, I’m always here and eager to assist!
Send a comment, contact me on linkedin or just call me up on Teams!
Hey – this is really useful! Exactly what I was looking for. Question – where do you put new learning stuff? Like if you’re sharing a new tip or trick, or want to host a live webinar or share a video to something?