Teams use cases

I’ve used Teams so far for a couple of defined projects – for project-managing a grant submission and for organising a conference. It’s very intuitive to use and has been great to have a single place for all the documents, notes and conversations when working with people who each have multiple disparate roles. I found Teams useful to partition these projects off from my daily onslaught of emails, and it makes it easy to stay in the loop without receiving endless ‘cc’ emails. The shared documents help to avoid multiple versions flying about simultaneously, and I like the fact that you can still edit documents in the normal ‘desktop apps’ (e.g. Word and Excel) as well as directly online. It was sometimes tricky to get the other team members to use Teams consistently rather than reverting to email, as this requires a bit of a culture shift.

Teams helps to better mobilise our frontline workers and better serves the needs of users of our facilities. More specifically, teams has been used to overhaul the communication channels of our remote service desk operation which we use to designate technician support to teaching spaces across campus. In order to access real-time data about teaching space issues and broadcast this information to all support technicians which means we allocate the resources where they're most needed from our command centre more efficiently. This notifications-based communications channel allows for much better sharing of rich information, more than is possible with our previous phone-based alerts. Daily assignment of each worker to a specific campus zone more fficient and we can better cover shifts and holiday arrangements now.

Teams is helping bring more flexibility to me and my students for one-to-one's and has extended to live class chat which is a great benefit to the student collective as well as individually. 

I have also found the number of student emails overwhelming in recent years and so I started to look into chat-bots, slack and other communication tools.  I gave Teams a trial in semester 2 (2018/19) with two MSc courses, and I am currently using it for my fifteen dissertation students. Students themselves have reported a mostly positive experience using Teams, and it is easy for them to navigate. I have pushed for them to create groups for their projects on Teams so they can communicate, meet and engage with one another in an educational setting rather than switching between multiple Facebook or WhatsApp groups.

Teams is pivotal to the free-flow of conversations about our project work.  We're only scratching the surface of it's potential as a powerful communications tool but often utilise things like quick polls with an app called Polly which you can envoke simply be doing what's called an @mention in the chat post, we have bug tracking notifications from our bug tracking software which easily integrates into our conversation channels, planboards in planner, file sharing and much more.  The project stakeholders can more easily come together wherever they happen to be (branch out meeting styley) and engage in a rich, productive conversation that takes absolute minimal effort to organise, it's simply brilliant.

Shifts in Teams will allow my frontline workforce to plan their leave days, swap shifts through flexible shift patterns and with very little administrative overhead involved to maintain them.  We'll also benefit from the built in chat space and real time availability indicators which should help arrange cover more quickly in the event of unexpected absence.  The time clock feature will be useful so we can track time by staff out on various jobs.

As the semester progressed, I used it more often. I now use it slightly less as classes are over and it's mainly to communicate with my dissertation advisor

I've used it a lot more since starting my dissertation. 

During my dissertation phase, I’ve used it more frequently than during the course semester.