Top tips and tricks when using Microsoft Teams for IT/DevOps teams

1. Create house rules, plan how you’ll use Microsoft Teams 

Chances are, your DevOps team is using, or has used, Slack and it’s a big move to Microsoft Teams, especially as some developers like the idea of working in a space where they’re not interrupted by the rest of the business. So, work as a team to figure out how you’re going to use Teams on a daily basis.  

Byron Whitt, Director of Technology Services at ROI Communication, recommends DevOp teams decide on how they will use Teams for meetings, channels, sharing code within Teams, using tools and so on. 

“Work as a team and try to understand the overall experience and journey,” he said. 

Matt Dodd, Digital Workplace Consultant at Engage Squared emphasises the importance of having a conversation from the get-go on how a DevOps teams wants to work in teams. 

“Decide on what your ideal behaviours and working is,” he said. 

“Create house rules - this is how we want to operate.” 

2. Commit to working out loud 

Software teams love to use chat but it’s time to work out loud in Teams by using channels instead of chat. It’s not uncommon for developers to have lost content, so by working out loud in Teams, the content is stored for all to access. 

The top tip from Andrew Pope, Founder & Digital Skills and Collaboration Consultant at Designing Collaboration, is to start each day by posting a note about what you’re working on for that day. Forget about a daily stand up, just get into the habit of a quick note in the channel about what you’re doing so everyone knows. If you’re heading out for an hour for lunch, pop a note in the channel to let your team know. That may be in a social channel, as long as it’s somewhere your team knows to look to find you. 

“Just make it a habit,” Andrew said. 

“It’s just getting people to be proactive in sharing what they’re doing so people know what they’re working on and also when to contact them. If you’ve got a top deliverable channel, put in; ‘This is what I’m doing with this work’.” 

Andrew said it becomes a sort of informal, asynchronous stand up. 

Matt Dodd is a huge advocate for working out loud and recommends having a role model to ensure people are working out loud. 

“Capture those conversations into the channel, it gives so much more visibility. Visibility is the key,” Matt said. 

Another idea of Andrew’s is to create a Problems and Ideas channel – a separate space to surface problems and explore new ideas. 

“It makes it safer, it means we want you to surface problems because we’ve created a channel specifically for it, to put your ideas in there,” he said. 

3. Use DevOps tools in Teams 

Make the move to Microsoft Teams appealing for DevOps teams by bringing their tools to Teams too, making it a one-stop shop for work. 

Richard Acreman, Partner at WM Reply urges the installation of Jira, Azure DevOps Server and any other tools developers use on Teams, and then spend the time to show the team how easy it is to extend their functionality in Teams. 

“Show them how to automate, how they can hack it and build on it,” Richard said. 

“Then they will start to see the potential of how they can automate their work. It starts to become convenient, doing meetings in Teams…going back to Slack becomes inconvenient.” 

Thank you to SWOOP’s partners for sharing their expert advice on Teams usage. For this research, SWOOP Analytics interviewed:  

• Byron Whitt, Director of Technology Services, ROI Communication. 

• Matt Dodd, Digital Workplace Consultant, Engage Squared. 

• Andrew Pope, Founder & Digital Skills and Collaboration Consultant, Designing Collaboration.  

• Richard Acreman, Partner, WM Reply.