For about a year I used Microsoft Teams, first to explore usability among staff at a real estate company and then to fill a collaboration gap as the company I consulted for only licensed PM’s to use Microsoft Project Center which housed project issues, risks, and decisions. See previous post on this.

I see an odd shift with PM tools turning into discussion boards, largely driven by those in favor of a Facebook approach to work and communication. Microsoft Teams is a perfect example of this approach.

On the Teams features wish list site, you will ready 2 year old requests for practical features such as the ability to delete tabs that you would not use (General Tab), ability to move or reorder tabs, ability to delete automatic posts such as when you try out integrated software and a shot out appears pushing out relevant items you want to appear, and on and on.

Teams in many ways duplicates the features of Outlook such as chat/email, Contacts, Calendar, etc.

What I needed Teams for was to have a simple list of issues I could review with my team each week. I wanted a simple display of open items on a tab rather than opening a spreadsheet online version then opening the same spreadsheet in the client version so I could truly work with it and have all the features available.

However in Teams you could only attach an Excel sheet or integrate OneNote and manage a table in a section, which is what I ended up doing.

In the end, I did not find Teams useful for project management. Priding itself on discussions and posts, the reality is a Skype call with everyone present gets more accomplished in real time than waiting for someone to read a post and comment on it, assuming they read and understood all the previous posts for a particular topic on whichever tab those words may reside.