Trent: Hi there welcome back and thanks for joining us at TechScoop. Today I’ve got a special guest he’s one of our superstar project managers, Galvin Marques and I want to have a quick conversation this morning about Microsoft Teams and the advantages that we’ve seen here at Techware after adopting Teams into our workplace. Thanks for joining us Galv, good to see you.
Now for the people out there who don’t really know what Microsoft Teams is, they might not have heard about it can you give us a brief description about what it is?
Galvin: Teams essentially is a collaborative platform, it utilizes one to one chat with a team member or a group chat, it also utilizes file sharing.
Trent: Okay, so my first question right off the bat Galv is the top three things that you’ve seen Techware experience after introducing Microsoft Teams.
Galvin: Well, top three things easily has to be staff buy-in, information management and for me personally easy access to my project files.
Trent: Okay, so when you talk about staff buy-in can you expand on that a little bit?
Galvin: Alright well just like any new product that anyone is trying to implement whether it be internally or externally you’ve got to have staff buy-in. So that means you know, are they going to adopt the product that you’re trying to implement well? Are they going to use it as it’s intended? Luckily for us Teams has fit that bill. The reason why I think it’s fit that bill is as it feels fun. It feels just like a normal, you know, text message chat. Like Facebook messenger or WhatsApp so the interactions within Teams has been really quick and responsive and people enjoy using the product.
Trent: Okay, so at Techware the technicians and everyone on staff they’ve adopted the technology?
Galvin: Yes so everyone is on Teams and everyone’s main source of communication now is just Teams.
Trent: Okay, fantastic. Now the next thing that you touched upon was information management and that’s a big factor or somewhere we’ve seen success with Teams. Can you tell us a little bit more?
Galvin: Sure, so information management I guess for us we used to use WhatsApp as our primary source of communication. That was fine in a sense, but then it started to get a bit spammy for our liking because we had social aspects in there and work aspects and you know, P1 incidents all meshed in to that one group conversation. Sometimes things would get missed and then that made us prompt the move towards Teams and the benefits of that was we could now segregate those sections off in Teams in different chat groups. We’ve got a P1 incidents group, a social channel and a process and improvements channel so that kind of stuff has helped us stay focused when we need to. We can also have fun in the same place without distracting the main core functions of the business.
Trent: Okay, so within that functionality when you have a P1 Group and incident group things like that are you separating members of staff depending on their credentials?
Galvin: So the beautiful thing about Teams is that you can add or remove people from certain group chats. So here at Techware we’ve just taken the policy of everyone gets to be added to every chat. But you know in other organisations you might not want that. You can separate it by organisation group and so on and so forth. But the only key benefit for teams is you can turn off notifications. Like for example if you don’t want to hear what we’re all having for dinner or you know, what’s the next social event happening. You can turn off the notifications for the social aspect and just stay focused in the business world.
Trent: Okay and the last one that you talked about was quite close to you in being a project manager was the easy access to your project files.
Galvin: Correct, so the great thing about Teams is Teams as a Office 365 product integrates really well with any Office suites. So that includes SharePoint and Office 365 products. I’ve created my own type of chats for each project that I run and then I connect the relevant SharePoint site which has the project working documents inside it. That way I can send the working documents to my engineers and to the customer and say – “Alright we’re all going to work through here, this is our main source of truth.” And gone are the days of us going I send out an Excel document and call it Version 1 and then send it off to the clients and the engineers. Then they get it back to me and then I collate it and roll it up. We now just have one source of truth, one document working file and then I feel confident that I’m communicating to the best of my ability the most up-to date information to my client and to my team.
Trent: That’s it, so it’s about speed, because you’re not doing revisions, you’re not doing that, there’s nothing lost in communication between old and new documents. It’s all in one place ready to go. It’s all sounds fantastic, now the question is for the people out there who hear this and they say “Maybe this is something our organisation is interested in” What’s the process in getting onto Microsoft Teams?
Galvin: So we’re a Microsoft house so we’re actually currently on Office 365, so I guess the first step for anyone who is interested at looking into Teams is – are you I guess, on a Microsoft 365 subscription? Just check what level you are because teams does get bundled in with certain levels of 365.
Trent: Now the three things you spoke about, buy-in, information management and easy access to project files. To me just having a chat with you it seems like Microsoft Teams is like a portal where a user can go to get answers. Would you agree?
Galvin: I 100% agree because sometimes we’re not all in the office so you know, we’ve got engineers going out onsite. I’m in project meetings with customers and if someone wants to get a hold of me that’s the easiest way if you don’t want to send them an email and wait for them to check them. Most people just go in (to teams) and go, “Hey where are you or what are you doing? I need some help on this” and it just pops up like a text message on your phone and then I’ll say “What’s up, how can I help you.”
Trent: Hey Galv thankyou so much for joining us for that, I really appreciate it and I’m sure the people out there appreciate it as well. Hearing your insight into how Microsoft Teams has helped us out here at Techware.
Galvin: Sure anytime.
Trent: Thanks Galv and thank you for watching as well. Until next time I’ll see you soon.