My Husky Taught Me Microsoft Teams

There is no question that Microsoft Teams is powerful. Teams is a powerful breed, just like my Siberian husky, Kai.

Siberian huskies can withstand temperatures as low as -60F; their bushy tail is used to wrap around their face to breathe warm air, and their almond shaped eyes, as opposed to big round puppy dog eyes, let them squint but still see through the snow. And huskies are the only dog that can change their chemical metabolism, being able to run for hours and hours while still reserving their fat storage so they don’t become fatigued.

Of course, Microsoft Teams does not have a big fluffy tail, and I doubt Teams can change its metabolism, but there is no doubt Teams is powerful:

• A team in Teams can have as many as 25,000 members.
• Any one organization can create as many as 500,000 teams, each of which can have up to 200 channels. That’s a maximum of 100 million channels! (Please don't create this many channels.)
• You can upload files as large as 250 GB, and in total store as much as 25 TB of files in Teams.
• Up to 1,000 people can attend a meeting, and Teams supports up to 20,000 view-only attendees! (Note that if you plan to use breakout rooms you need to have 300 people or less in your meeting.)

When the pandemic started, many organizations rushed to Teams. For many organizations Teams provided the power that helped keep their businesses running, even with everyone working remotely.

The growth of Teams demonstrates just how many organizations relied on Teams and attests to the power Teams can deliver. As of the beginning of this year, Teams had 270 million monthly active users.

Most importantly, Teams is delivering measurable business benefits to many of its users. A recent BCStrategies study I co-authored with Blair Pleasant indicated that 50% of users felt Teams made them more productive and effective.

This is both good and bad news. Great that half the users are being more productive, but what about the other half of the users?

Even many of the users who indicated Teams made them more productive, still believe there is untapped potential. Only a third of users felt they had a good understanding of the features and capabilities Teams could deliver.

I equate this to meeting a dog for the first time. It is fair assumption that most dogs understand basic commands: sit, stay, down. It is a fair assumption that most UC solutions implement basic commands: chat, call, meet.

(This is Kai and my daughter's golden retriever Promise)

Both Kai and Promise understand far more than the basic commands. And Microsoft Teams delivers far more than chat, calling, and meeting functionality.

This is where Kai taught me the key ingredient necessary to unlock the potential of Teams: training!

Huskies are not the easiest dogs to train. Multiple lists place huskies in the top 10 difficult to train dogs; I'd suggest, because they are strong, powerful, working dogs.

You might have heard Microsoft Teams is not the easiest collaboration tool and you may have heard using Teams as your primary voice system is not the easiest choice. There’s truth to this as Teams is a powerful, capable platform, with a complex partner ecosystem.?

When Kai was young, we went through five different trainers until we found someone who was not just a "dog trainer" but a "husky trainer". With Teams, it has been my experience that to unlock full potential and power, you need not simply someone who understands collaboration and voice, but someone with expertise and experience in "Teams voice" and "Teams collaboration".

In our BCStrategies study, when we asked users “Do you think you would be more effective with additional UC&C training?”, 72% of users, the vast majority of users, said they would be more effective with more training. That’s a huge opportunity! (And the impetus for this Taming Teams newsletter!)

Training is what is needed to unlock the productivity potential of Teams, and the potential of dogs. Both training for IT Pros and on-going knowledge updates, knowledge reinforcement, and training for end users.

Training for huskies and for Teams is critically important, and yet both are often neglected, leading to dissatisfied users, and too many huskies abandoned. Most husky owners participate in too few training sessions, and most Teams users receive both inadequate initial and inadequate on-going training.

Kai taught me that training takes effort, it takes time, it is not "one and done". However, the investment in training is absolutely worth it. Too often organizations offer training but don't make time in their employees work schedule to actually take the training. Some organizations convince themselves, wrongly, that no training is required. Most organizations are afraid to ask users if the training was adequate.

A few months after we got Kai, I thought we were going to have to give him back. Kai would get so agitated on walks he would start biting, not to hurt, but because he was afraid and wanted us to do something. But we had no idea what to do. We lacked training. It got to the point where I was the only one in our family who could safely walk Kai, and even then it was a challenge.

Huskies are powerful. Initially I had no idea what I was doing. Teams is powerful. And Taming Teams is about helping you leverage the full power of the Microsoft collaboration and communication tools.

My husky Kai taught me the techniques to unlock the power of Teams. We both look forward to sharing what we've learned with you.

I welcome feedback and questions. Please connect with me on LinkedIn, on Twitter @kkieller, or via email [email protected].