Microsoft Teams Project Template - Build or Buy?

Should we build, or should we buy?

For hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide, Microsoft Teams has become an indispensable tool when it comes to project management. Thousands of projects are kicked off and project management MS Teams are created every day.

What can significantly simplify the new project kickoff for organizations is a solid Microsoft Teams project management template.

The benefits? Consistency, speed of creation, mitigation of users' lack of knowledge of which tools to use for what, freeing up the IT teams.

Creating a robust project management team from scratch along with a fully configured SharePoint site can take multiple hours. And that's provided a deeply technical team member is doing it. In the hands of less technical PMs, it can take days to set up a project management MS Team. If you have multiple PMs in your organization, you can be sure that no project will look the same, making it that much harder for end users to collaborate.

So the ultimate question is not whether you should use a Microsoft Teams template, but whether to build it or buy it.

"Buy it - how do I do that?" you may ask, as you frantically search for MS Teams templates online. We will discuss that in detail shortly, but for now, let's see what it would take to build project management Team templates from scratch.

Building a Project Management Template

M365 is complex so if you are going to build your PM template you will need to have the following:

• A wide array of skills including M365 platform understanding, configuration experience, development experience, and deployment experience. 
• The means for these templates to be easily updated over time as your needs evolve. 
• The means to deploy these templates to the end users so they could easily create a new team using them.
• The means to approve Teams created using the pre-built templates to ensure consistency.

So let's discuss the steps involved in creating a template.

Requirements Elicitation (16-24 hours) 

Before building anything, you need to have a clear understanding of what to build. This means understanding the Microsoft Teams structure of the template, associated SharePoint site requirements, apps and tools, public vs private channels, and more. To do so you will need to get a group of stakeholders and a whole lot of time to:

• Run requirements workshops to understand user needs, get feedback, and document it. 
• Spend cycles iterating on the design with users to ensure it is working as they anticipated it would. 

Assuming you have a great group of stakeholders who are aligned this could take anywhere from 16-24 hours to run the workshops + 3-5 hours for each stakeholder to participate/provide feedback.

With an average labor cost of $60/hour for IT talent and some of the more senior stakeholders costing $150/hour, the initial stage of preparing a template would cost around $5500-9000.

Configuration (8 – 16 hours) 

A few weeks later you have the requirements! Now it's time to use all your technical prowess to create and configure your project management template. You might think that is easy but it's quite complicated. Here is what's involved: 

• SharePoint Pages: Configure all your SharePoint pages including web parts, pages, and permissions (Skill Level: Intermediate) 
• List configuration: List formatting is much more user-friendly and appealing, so we highly recommend it. (Skill Level: Intermediate to High if you are using JSON list formatting) 
• Icons and Images: For the SharePoint pages and Teams elements to look professional and enticing, you will want to add images and icons to them. Although it doesn't require much skill, creative elements may simply not be your thing and you will want a professional designer to execute them. (Skill Level: Basic) 
• Metadata Configuration: What metadata are you going to need to collect and configure? (Skill Level: Intermediate) 
• Teams Configuration: Configuring teams' channel templates, Tabs, Apps, Permission, and everything else you would need to make the template complete. (Skill Level: Basic) 
• Template-Specific Content: You will need to embed the template with documents and other template-specific content.   

With an average hourly rate of $60/hour for a talented IT Admin, the configuration of a single template would cost $500-1000. In addition to that, Admins will need to spend 4 hours on average every month maintaining and updating templates, which will cost approximately $2880 annually.

Provisioning

Congratulations! After a few weeks of solid work, you have a working Microsoft Teams project template! Now what? To provision this template in a repeatable way you will need code. So what are your options?

• Create Teams Manually each time: With this option, every time someone requests a project Team, you will need to spend 2-6 hours manually adding all this stuff together. This is not the best option for IT, especially in organizations where dozens of new projects are kicked off each week.
• Create a Script that IT Admins Can Run: Package the template into a PnP file that can be provisioned by an Admin using PowerShell. This means every request needs to be routed to IT and anytime a change is needed it must go back to an Engineer to update and re-test. 
• Create a Self-Service Provisioning Engine: Welcome to your new job as a developer! Creating a self-service provisioning engine must be simple, right? No, it is many orders of magnitude more complex than other options. 

Development work for Provisioning (24 – 40 hours) 

It's time to build a provisioning engine for your template! There are lots of options available to help you get a headstart, including:

• M365 Request a Teams App: Power App that can help with provisioning 
• Provision Genie: Another community-based Power App that can help with provisioning 
• Provision Assist: Another Microsoft-based solution that can help you get started 

Unfortunately, you might find that some, or most, of these tools have limitations. Some don’t do SharePoint and some do. Some don’t support sensitivity labels or provide a full-fidelity copy.  

But you would use this as a starting point with all the complexities that provisioning has including ensuring that it is robust, stable, and testable. 

Development and provisioning work would cost $1500-2400 initially, and an additional $2800+ annually to maintain with an average labor cost of $60/hour.

Testing and Deployment (8 to 16 hours) 

It would be a mistake to assume that everything you’ve developed for your beautiful template can be extracted and re-provisioned in an automated fashion.

Unless you are planning on writing provisioning code from scratch, that means relying on the PnP provisioning engine which is a community-maintained solution with many limitations and challenges when it comes to turning all your customizations into something the PnP engine can understand and reliably recreate. 

This means a great deal of testing and checking of every single element in your template before it gets released to end users. 

At an average hourly cost of $60, this process would cost $480-1000 initially + an additional $2800+ every year to maintain.

Repeatable Provisioning 

Writing a provisioning engine is not just about creating a template once, and never worrying about it again. The real challenge lies in creating an engine that can evolve in tandem with both user needs AND a constantly shifting platform. 

Just because it can deploy once doesn’t mean it will continue working in a stable and reproducible manner, given the constant changes being made to the PnP Provisioning Engine and the underlying M365 platform. This requires constant vigilance and extremely agile responses to changes that are outside your control. 

"Buying" a Project Management Template

As cool as it would be, you can't exactly go to an online marketplace and purchase a ready-made Microsoft Teams template along with a provisioning engine.

You can, however, invest in a Microsoft 365 management platform like Orchestry, which is an AI-powered analytics, templating, provisioning, lifecycle management, governance, adoption, and management automation tool in one.

Apart from the tremendous value the other features bring, which you can learn more about in the Orchestry features sheet, it comes with a library of pre-built and fully configured Microsoft Teams and SharePoint templates.

In addition to that you get a robust provisioning engine that allows you to deploy templates of any complexity to the end users. The engine allows various users to approve new Teams, SharePoint sites, and Viva Engage Communities before they are provisioned. This platform comes with zero need to maintain code or watch for constant updates from Microsoft. Most importantly, you can start leveraging it immediately after Orchestry is deployed, instead of wasting weeks on building all the pieces.

A solution like Orchestry comes with initial upfront savings of $8000-14000 in the templating and provisioning aspects alone. In the long run, it will save you a minimum of $8500/year in labor costs and an immeasurable amount in headaches.

What are some of the things you will get with Orchestry that you won't be able to build yourself, or that will take an infinite effort to build?

• Custom Web Parts: Our PM templates come with beautiful custom web parts like our Tasks and People Web Part. You could build them yourself but that would take another 100 hours or so. Plus who doesn’t want a beautiful timeline like this: 
• 
• Approvals: Orchestry comes with robust approval workflows which you can associate with various templates. From configuring multi-approvers to multi-stage approvals to providing feedback on requests
• Naming Policies: There is no point in having beautiful templates if people can't find them, or Teams and SharePoint sites that were created using them. Orchestry's templates collect custom data from users during the process of creating a new Team, Viva Engage Community, or SharePoint site. It then uses the data and naming policies to dynamically populate a name that will be easily understood by any user.
• Metadata: to classify workspaces and let users find them easily.
• Audit trail: of the request, its approval, every step of the way. 
• Seamless integration with Lifecycle management and Guest user management policies.  
• Automatic provisioning of property bags that can be used by Search and Compliance. 
• A solution with endless integration and extension options using built-in webhooks. 

As you can see, building a custom template for Teams, SharePoint, or Viva Engage Communities along with a provisioning engine comes at a significant price. Your IT team will likely be engaged in the process for weeks, unable to focus on any other priorities.

On the flip side, having templates and an easy, repeatable, and autonomous way to provision new workspaces using templates saves a significant amount of time and effort.

With Orchesty, your investment in the platform will pay for itself every year, thanks to the templates and provisioning engine alone, nevermind all the other extremely powerful features:

1. Governance controls
2. Guest user management
3. Lifecycle management & archiving
4. Metrics & Analytics
5. AI-powered recommendations

Check out the live tour of the Orchestry's SharePoint and Microsoft Teams project template and get in touch to book a live demo of the full platform.