These days no consulting company can go without digital collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, to manage their operations and employees. They offer a variety of capabilities that enable a smooth and efficient collaboration around any subject. At the same time, the nature of work of consulting firms requires them to constantly create new teams to collaborate on projects, deals, and accounts. To facilitate and streamline this process, you can leverage Microsoft Teams Collaboration templates.

In this blog post, you will learn how management consulting firms can benefit from Microsoft Teams collaboration templates and how to build them from scratch.

Why do you need Microsoft Teams templates for management consulting?

Consistent consulting process

Having fully pre-built teams that include all the content needed to start working on a project, including channels, the consulting playbook, and other resources, etc. adds consistency to the work of your consulting teams and structures the collaboration process.

Better coordination of all the parties involved

With Microsoft Teams Collaboration templates, you get all the necessary tools ready at place for your consulting teams. They won’t need to search for the right information across the organization and lose their time on organizing the workspace. Pre-configured channels empower your consultants to have focused discussions and pre-built set of tasks in Planner will help them better coordinate their activities and responsibilities.

Increased efficiency of consulting teams

Organized and structured teams create all the necessary conditions for more efficient collaboration, hence increasing team productivity, and efficiency. Your consultants can focus entirely on their client and project without distracting themselves from organizing their collaborative workspace.

Advanced Microsoft Teams templates capabilities for management consulting

The type of template you wish to implement for your consulting teams will depend on the nature of their activities and your organizational needs. In this article, we will see into Deal Room template dedicated to working on sales projects and delivering proposals.

What will you get?

Focused discussions in channels

Define the stages of the deal collaboration process of your consulting teams and all the topics they work on and formulate them in channels of the original team that you will use as a template. To differentiate regular teams and the teams used as templates, call it Deal Room – Template.

Having a specific channel for each subject of your sales projects will allow your employees to have focused discussions and navigate easily through the content of the teams.

Here are some channel name ideas that you could use:

• Planning
• Reviews
• Proposals
• Contracts
• Customer Updates

File storage and collaboration

You can save your consultants’ time and nerve by uploading all the documentation and files they may require for their work. That can be proposal templates, legal documents, guidelines, etc.

You may also want to include your firm’s playbook as a separate document or displayed in a SharePoint site with detailed instructions of each step of the selling process from the first contact to receiving the paycheck.

Pre-built tasks

Additionally, you can add a tab with Planner where you can pre-build tasks for every stage of the sales cycle. This will enable your team to better coordinate their work. They can divide responsibilities in a more efficient way, improving team performance.

You will only need to create tasks in Planner once. All the teams created from Deal Room template will be pre-configured automatically. 

Connecting with Communities

Your consultants can benefit from connecting with their colleagues from other locations and experts from other fields in your organization through Yammer communities. Add the right community as a tab and empower your employees to share best practices and expertise.

Knowledge sharing with SharePoint sites

SharePoint sites serve as an ideal place for connecting teams to shared content and resources. There you can add your playbook for consulting, store and collaborate on files, share best practices, create, and manage lists of information, etc. Create a SharePoint site for your consulting teams and pin it as a tab in a corresponding channel for easier access.

Integrations with CRMs

The great thing about Teams is that you can integrate any native and third-party app into its environment. For example, if your consulting firm uses Salesforce, you can add it as a tab and work in the system right from Microsoft Teams without the need to juggle between the two tools.

Moreover, with SalesTim advanced capabilities you can automate team creation from a specific template when a new account is added in Salesforce. Learn more about Teams and Salesforce integration.

What will you get from IT perspective?

Microsoft Teams Collaboration templates offer a number of advanced governance capabilities that answer key IT needs. Below we’re explaining what policies you can apply at the template level.  

Set up a Naming convention 

In some large organizations, there are thousands of teams created each year. Establishing naming rules, therefore, is key for effective management and navigation through teams. With Microsoft Teams Collaboration templates, you can configure naming policies at the template level so that each team created from a particular template is named in a defined way.

You can add both fixed and dynamic attributes from Azure AD to your Naming convention. For example, for the Deal Room template, you can establish the following rules:

Deal Room – Name of the deal (Name of the account) – User location

This way, when your users create a team from the template, its name could look like this:

Deal Room – SalesTim – France

Define who can use your template

You can also make sure only specific groups of people in your organization can see and access certain templates. That can be users of a particular country, department, job title, etc. To do so you’ll need to configure Audience targeting.

Limit team creation with an Approval workflow 

To have more control over team creation, you may want to establish an Approval workflow. This way, whenever your users want to create a new team from a template, they will first need to send an approval request to assigned people.

Add relevant people to your teams

You may want to make sure certain people are automatically added to newly created teams as owners and members. You can do it by setting up Permanent owners and members at the template level. This can be useful if the same employees are involved in each project or deal.

How to build a Microsoft Teams template for Management Consulting

Now that you’ve created your original Deal Room team and added all the needed content let’s move on to the next stage of the template creation process.

1. Install SalesTim app from Microsoft Teams store. Keep in mind that only admins can manage the application.

2. Go to SalesTim tab on the left bar of your Teams environment, then select Catalog > +New template.

3. Look for the team you just created and start configuring governance policies.

4. Set up naming, approval, audiences, compliance and security policies if needed, and click on Save.

To create a new team from the template, your users will need to head over to Home tab, click on +New team, and choose the right template.

Your consultants will have a structured collaboration workspace with all the content and tools ready at place to work efficiently on sales deals.

If you wish to see how your organization can benefit from Microsoft Teams Collaboration templates, book a presentation with us and we’ll find a solution for your specific business needs.