Challenge
International IDEA is an intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide. They have a large and diverse staff that collaborate on various projects and initiatives across different regions and countries. To facilitate their communication and coordination, they use Microsoft Teams as their main platform for online collaboration.
However, creating and managing teams in Microsoft Teams was not an easy task for the end users at IDEA. They had to deal with the following challenges:
- Lack of a standardized and efficient process for requesting and creating new teams
- Difficulty in ensuring that the teams have the correct owners, settings, and permissions
- Risk of creating duplicate or redundant teams with the same name or purpose
- Lack of visibility and feedback on the status of the team creation requests
Solution
To address these challenges, Ways developed a custom workflow that automates and simplifies the team creation process in Microsoft Teams. The workflow is based on a SharePoint list, where users can request new teams by filling out a simple form. The form requires users to specify the proposed team name and the team owners. In the form the users are informed that they will receive an email confirmation when the team is created.
When a new item is created in the SharePoint list, the workflow performs the following actions:
- Creates a team with the name from the field “Team name”
- Sets the “Team owners” as the team’s owners
- Sets the setting that does not permit users to create private channels
- Applies a site design on the team’s SharePoint site
- Sends an email confirmation, that the team has been created, to the person that requested the team and to a shared IT account
The workflow also checks if there is already a team with the same name, and if so, it sends an email to the user that the team was not able to be created as there already exists a team with the same name.
Result
With this workflow, International IDEA was able to achieve the following benefits:
- Improved efficiency and consistency in the team creation process
- Reduced errors and conflicts in the team names and settings
- Enhanced user experience and satisfaction with the team creation process
- Increased transparency and accountability in the team creation requests
Ways is proud to have helped International IDEA optimize their team creation process with Microsoft Teams, and to have contributed to their mission of advancing democracy worldwide.