Microsoft Teams collaboration comes together

Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority

 Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) is a New Zealand government/Crown agency responsible for promoting energy efficiency and conservation.

The challenge

To collaborate effectively, EECA acquired E5 licenses and wanted to ensure that the enablement of Microsoft Teams would realise their goal to collaborate across their organisation. Due to the important information EECA held, they needed to ensure the security of confidential business information, specifically when shared within teams and channels.

“Everyone needs to work together, in a positive and proactive way to make the change.”

With a newly implemented SharePoint Online intranet, it was imperative for EECA to start right by ensuring a controlled collaborative Teams environment that would stop Teams Sprawl and the issues it causes around data duplication and internal security holes.

Without appropriate guidance and governance in place, content would be dispersed throughout multiple teams and become difficult to search and retrieve. This could also lead to content being shared externally unintentionally, risking leaks of confidential data.

The solution

Engage Squared New Zealand developed a Teams Creation and Governance App that enabled a governed Team creation process implemented from within EECA’s new intranet.

The Teams Creation and Governance App allows EECA staff to search for teams within the organisation, join an existing team or create a new team if the search result comes up blank. By providing this search information to the user, it ensures a team sprawl doesn’t occur through the creation of identical/similar teams.

The creation of a new team is both an intuitive and user-friendly process using a form webpart. Within their intranet, EECA staff members now simply fill out the required fields and apply the governance required.

These parameters include:

• Team name
• Team leader(s)
• Team member(s)
• Team privacy
• Team Purpose
• Department

Once submitted, an approval request is sent to an Admin User via an approvals functionality which is surfaced within Teams, as well as the admin’s email. If approved, the Microsoft team is created using the information provided in the form, applying the appropriate team template and EECA governance rules.

The Team is then automatically catalogued so that it is discoverable when the next person needs to search for it.  This templatised approach ensures a rich repeatable user experience at the click of a button.

The impact

The successful implementation of the teams governance and creation app for EECA has had a significant impact on the organisation by enabling safe and secure collaboration.

By allowing staff to directly create teams of their own accord, it has removed the manual work that would require an administrator to perform every time a new team was needed. This automated process also has the added benefit of no team sprawl and automated governance.

The EECA team of around 120 people now utilize an established, safe space to work together and tackle climate change. Here, they can share potentially world changing research and knowledge that is used by the New Zealand government in their efforts to promote reducing our national carbon footprint.

With a governed Team process, storage clutter has become a thing of the past, saving digital space and money. Teams are categorised and the tools allows all Teams to be auditable and reportable, adhering to the required retention that EECA requires.

Previously auditing Teams and SharePoint sites was a very expensive and resource intense process. With the use of the Teams Governance platform, this has become a much easier task for EECA with an easy to digest list that allows them to see all relevant metadata in one place.