Speaker 1: Pretty nice right? Today I'm showing you how to set up a project in Microsoft Teams and how you can use Microsoft Teams for project management. Microsoft Teams is one of the best and most easiest software to use that links everything together where all of your project information is stored. As a project manager you might be asked where are your project documents, where's the charter, where are the presentations, and where are the meeting minutes. You can set up different tabs inside of Microsoft Teams which stores all of this information and it's going to change your life. Trust me it's going to be your one-stop shop that contains everything that you need that's related to your project. So let's hop on inside my computer and let me show you how to create a project in Microsoft Teams. Now on my screen I've created a sample team called engineering program. You can have any name for your team and I recommend setting up a team for the high level program itself which will then contain your projects underneath it. The way that Microsoft Teams works is that you'll create a team to represent your higher level program and then you'll create channels to represent each of your projects. So in this example engineering program would be the name of the team and underneath it you would set up project 1, project 2, and project 3 which are all associated with the engineering program. So to create our project we'll have to add a channel underneath the engineering program. To do that right-click on the three dots and select add channel. In the pop-up window let's call our channel project 1 and let's add the description for an engineering project to develop a new electromechanical device for detecting air pressure. I'll leave privacy to standard so that everyone on the team can access it. Once you click add your new project will be added to the engineering program group. There are a few things that I want to highlight here. The first is the post tab. Now this is where you're going to have all of your instant messaging communication to your team that's on your project. Think of this as your online platform that anyone can see as long as they have access to your channel. Now what I love about this is that anyone can see the message in real time which means that an engineer, an analyst, or your manager can quickly respond in a matter of minutes to answer a question or to provide their feedback. So instead of having to send formal emails which can get lost in an ocean of hundreds of messages and you may not even hear back for a few hours or another day, the post tab will be your best friend. You're going to use it a lot. You can use this to quickly get feedback from other people, to share quick messages, or to make announcements in general. So as best practice all project communication will take place here and anyone can get up to speed by reviewing the post tab. So to create a message all you have to do is click down here for a new conversation. You can easily type a simple message here such as a welcome to our project. What's really cool is that when you click on the A icon that has a pencil an entire text box is going to appear. To the top left there's a drop-down menu where you can either make a conversation or turn it into an announcement. Now right below the top area is an entire row of icons that you can use to format your text for bolding, italicizing, underlining, strikethrough, highlighting, font color, font size, as well as how the formatting will look like. When you press the right arrow button towards the right hand side of the screen it will post the message to the team's channel. One pro tip I have is that if it's a very important message or announcement that you want to make sure that everyone reads, then click on the three dots and select mark as important. This will immediately flag your message as important so that everyone is aware of its importance when they're scrolling through down the chat. A small exclamation icon will appear to the right side of your message. Now I typically make general announcements here anytime there's a significant change, a new deadline, or a critical status update that you want to share quickly with the team. Now if there's a specific person whom you need feedback or you want them to have visibility on, tag them using the at symbol. The ability to have these kind of conversations immediately is what I love the most about Microsoft Teams. The next feature that makes Microsoft Teams extremely helpful for managing projects is the files tab. Think of this as your document repository where all of your project files are stored. So presentations, PDF files, documents, pictures, and videos. You can store any type of document here and because it lives inside the channel on your online server, all files can be accessed and updated in real-time 24-7 across the entire country. Now for me, I like to structure my files tab so it's organized like the following. Feel free to take a snapshot and use a similar approach or tailor it for managing your own projects. All the documents are clearly labeled so no one has any issues with using the most latest version of a document. And even better is that we can work on the same presentation, same exact Excel file or Word document live at the same time and we don't have to email back and forth the different revisions that we're using. Now if you're managing a project, I like to use the wiki tab as my repository for all of our meeting minutes. Anytime I'm leading our project huddles or our team discussions, I'll keep our meeting minutes here and I like to use the following structure. I keep it very simple so it's very organized and it's clear what's happening next and what the key takeaways are. So if someone missed a meeting, they can catch up very quickly with our meeting minutes tab. You can also manage and track your project tasks by linking your project management tool to your team's channel. So for example, you could link Microsoft Project, Asana, and Trello. For more simple projects, I personally like to link Microsoft Planner to Teams so that everything is stored in one location. To do that, I'll click on the plus icon that's shown on the top area here. Let's select the icon for tasks by a planner. Let's click on this and we'll create a new plan and we'll call it project plan for now. You can also post this to the channel so that everyone can easily see and access it. Now we're back in the main view for planner. The very first thing that you'll see is a project's Kanban board. If we go back to the post tab, we'll see the announcement that a new tab has been added for the project plan. So all of your team members can quickly see this by clicking on the tab for project plan. Planner works like a Kanban board and you use buckets to logically categorize your work into similar tasks. Now the way that you set up your buckets will depend on your project and your organization's preference. It will all depend on how you want to organize and structure your tasks. But keep in mind that we have to create the buckets first before we can add any tasks. So for the simplicity of this video, let's say that our project is to create a new product that requires a lot of research and development. So we'll create the following buckets. Ideation, planning, design and development, product manufacturing, verification validation, and lastly transfer and launch. Before we go any further, keep in mind that Microsoft Planner is not meant to be used for very large complex projects that require tracking the capacity and management of a large group of resources. I recommend using Planner if your project is much smaller in scale and you don't need to keep track of the critical path, resource allocation, or the dependencies across tasks. For those more complex projects, I recommend using Microsoft Project or an online-based tool that gives you that level of detail. Now let's go back to Planner and let's add a few tasks for the first bucket of ideation. Let's add a task for a create business case and let's set a due date of February 13. After you click on add task, the task will be added underneath the ideation bucket. If you want to add more detail to your task, you can click on the task title and a pop-up window will appear. You can add a label to color code this task for future filtering purposes so that it's easier to filter your board based on the department it's assigned to or the urgency behind it. In this case, let's go to the blue color and edit the label so it's titled PMO. Below the labels is the bucket drop-down menu and we can see that this is associated with the ideation bucket. If you need to change this, you can update it to design and development for example and it's going to move to the correct column. For this example, let's keep it within the ideation bucket. Next to the bucket area, we can update the progress of the task to one of the following, not started, in progress or completed. Let's say that this is still being worked on so let's leave it as is in progress. We can also assign the priority of this task to urgent, important, medium or low. In our example, let's leave it as medium. To the right of the priority field is a drop-down to select when you want to start this task. For our example, let's say that we'll start the task on January 15 and that it will be due on February 13, 2023. In the notes box, we can add more detail about what's required for each task. I like to standardize each of these and the format I use consists of three bullet points. What is the purpose? What deliverable will be created? And what will the definition of done look like for each task? So for this task of creating the business case, the purpose is to define the business opportunity for the project. The deliverable will be the business case in the PowerPoint slide deck and the definition of done will be a final approved version of the business case about leadership. When you scroll down below, you can access the checklist and add subtasks or the steps that are required to complete that task. So for example, we need to discuss the opportunity with product management, research the market background, write the business case proposal, and obtain feedback and approval from engineering leadership. We can mark any of these steps as completed by clicking on the circle icon to the left and it's going to automatically strike through the subtask. This is a really great visual to see how much progress has been completed so far. If any steps are out of order, all you have to do is hover over the subtask and click and hold the six circles and drag it up or drag it down below. One thing to note here is that if you click on the show on card feature, it will show your entire checklist on the card inside your ideation bucket. So when we click outside the box, you can see the entire checklist and it gives you the entire overview of all the steps needed to complete the task. It only shows the subtasks which have not been completed yet. Inside of your tasks, you can also attach files from your computer and it will be stored into your online SharePoint site. And last but not least, you can add comments inside each of your tasks. So for example, you can include status updates here to show how things are progressing so far with your work. When you click outside of this box and you go back to the main view, each of your tasks shows very critical information. The first row is a label, which in our case is PMO, showing which group is responsible for this task. The other important information is a task name and the checklist containing the remaining steps to complete. In the row below this, you have three icons. The circle icon tells you how much progress has been completed and the bubble icon indicates if anyone has left any comments. And the checkmark indicates how many subtasks have been completed. The date at the bottom refers to the plan due date and to the right is the assigned owner. Now I've taken the time to pre-populate tasks for a few of the other buckets, so it's much more comprehensive here. To help speed up and standardize your work, I recommend copying one of your tasks and using that as your template to pre-populate your other tasks. So to do that, left-click on the three dots and select a copy task. Input all the information that you need for your new task name. Let's call it obtain RFQs from vendors. Let's make sure that it goes into the bucket for product manufacturing and we'll only include the description. After we click on copy, we have just created our new task. Now let's say you've already completed all the tasks under ideation. All you have to do is click on the circle icon next to each task to mark them as completed. And what you'll see here is that they are now archived under the section for completed tasks. The other great feature of using Planner for your projects is that you can quickly change your board's layout so it's categorized by other areas. If you click on the group by drop-down menu, you can change your board layout to either who tasks are assigned to, the progress of each task, so not started in progress or completed, by the planned due dates, the labels that you created earlier, and lastly, sorted by priorities of urgent, important, medium, and low. Using the filter drop-down menu, you can filter your board so that it only shows you tasks based on the due dates, priorities, labels, buckets, or assignments. So for example, if you want to only focus on tasks which are assigned to our engineering group, we can filter using our green label. Clicking on clear at the top of the menu will remove all of the filters that you just applied. Now the other incredible feature of Planner that helps tremendously with project management is the use of charts to visualize all the work that's taking place across your team. We can see how many tasks are left, how many are in progress, and how many are late. In the bucket chart, we can also see the performance breakdown of tasks by bucket. We can also see how tasks are being prioritized, and also a visual graph of resource loading among our team members. When you click on the schedule feature at the top bar here, you get a calendar schedule view that helps you visualize the project schedule on a month-to-month or a week-by-week basis. What's really great about this is that you can see when certain tasks will be worked on and when they're planned to be completed. So as you can see, it's very easy to manage your project using Microsoft Teams. Now to learn what it's like to actually be a project manager, watch this video next to take a closer look into my day as a full-time project manager, and I'll see you in the next video.