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62 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S U M M E R 2 0 2 2 Parita Kanevskiy heads the Project Management Office (PMO) at Eversheds Sutherland (US) LLP. The project management team provides best practices and standards for successfully executing projects across the firm. Parita is also responsible for project portfolio management. Parita holds a Master's degree from DePaul University, an advanced project management certificate from the University of Chicago and has PMP and Scrum Master Certifications. Outside of work, Parita enjoys oil painting, bowling, attending theater, volunteering, and travelling. Dawn Sheridan has been with Thompson Coburn for over 20 years. Dawn honed her skills as a Training Specialist and Business Analyst before becoming the Manager of Business Analysis and Projects. Dawn's experience in the Firm helped her develop a solid understanding of the Firm and the software used while building relationships with legal teams. As Manager of Business Analysis and Projects, she and her team are excited to be the first to provide formalized project management methodologies and practices within the Firm. Cindy Foellmer is an Applications Manager who has worn several "technology" hats since 1996 beginning with creating Word Perfect templates to managing enterprise applications. Her expertise includes, application analysis, design, development and management; end user documentation and training; user experience testing, validation and workf low processes and project management,. Cindy possesses excellent analytical skills and is able to identify potential issues and resolve those issues to ensure continued productivity. Cindy is an end user advocate and designs, implements, tests and manages applications to ensure strong user acceptance and adoption. Cindy specializes in in various desktop applications, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, Forte, DocXtools, Innova, Change-Pro, Contract Companion, pdf Docs, Workshare Professional, Acrobat, Best Authority and document management systems. A B O U T T H E A U T H O R S F R O M T H E T E C H S O L U T I O N S C C T 79 I L T A N E T . O R G B Y C I N D Y F O E L L M E R , P A R I TA K A N E V S K I Y A N D D A W N S H E R I D A N Boost Project Engagement & Productivity by Leveraging Microsoft Teams 78 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 F R O M T H E T E C H S O L U T I O N S C C T What is Microsoft Teams? MS Teams ("Teams") is a chat and collaboration platform for Microsoft 365 customers designed to simplify group work for people who work closely together on a common goal. You may create teams for projects (e.g., product launch, deployment), by a department or functional area within a department (e.g., PMO, HR, IT), or to address any cross-collaboration needs. Teams is also Microsoft's answer to competing platforms such as Slack and Zoom. Teams' integration with other Microsoft services allows users to share files and calendars, work collaboratively, and easily switch between voice, video, and text chat. Benefits of Teams: Allows all project site members to have: • Document collaboration and co-authoring • Conversation posts which allow for visibility among the team • Reduced email traffic • Real-time chat during meetings, as well as continued meeting chat afterwards • Easy on-the-go connection with Teams phone app How is Teams set-up for collaboration? Public vs. Private Teams Refer to the ILTA blog Vendor Governance to Integrate Teams and Document Management Systems that explains this. Standard vs. Private channel within a Team Within a Team, you have the option to create a standard or private channel. Every Team will automatically have a standard channel, General. The owner(s) of the Team can add additional standard or private channels; however, your organization's Microsoft admin will ultimately control the policies of who can create Teams and channels within your tenet. A standard channel is a space within the team. Channels are often named by topic, project, or team and inherit the full membership list from the team. There is also an option of having a private channel. This is a focused private collaboration space within the team. The Team owner(s) can create a private channel and will have the ability to add a subset of the members from the team. If external users or guests are added to the general channel, you may want to create a private channel for your internal team to keep internal sensitive data secure. The padlock next to the channel name indicates a private channel. Boost Project Engagement and Productivity via Teams Teams is integrated with Microsoft 365, which means it is tied to other Microsoft Office services, such as Word and Excel, as well as its cloud storage and sharing services such as SharePoint, PowerPoint, OneNote, Tasks by Planner and To do (formerly referred to as Planner), and Power BI. Since we have started using Teams, the amount of email traffic within our departments has decreased significantly. Here are some ways we were able to achieve this outcome: D I D Y O U M I S S T H E F I R S T A R T I C L E ? Boost Project Engagement & Productivity by Leveraging Microsoft Teams R E A D N O W »

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