Microsoft Teams boasts the ability to invite others into your chats and hold discussions. This is done entirely in real time, similar to Skype (but with less of that annoying ringing). With the ability to discuss things in real time without having to take notes, keep track of ideas, or even to remember who mentioned what idea, Teams is an effective tool for brainstorming.
Brainstorming is a word that intrigues all business owners, entrepreneurs, and motivational speakers. The purpose of brainstorming is to develop an idea or a solution to a problem at hand or rather to generate as many ideas as possible. This means you should stick with the first idea if you want to learn about it because nothing else should come afterwards. If you have a problem with coming out with new ideas, try using brainstorming. It will help you come up with as many as possible.
Sometimes the best resources are the simplest ones. Remote collaboration is becoming important, but it can be difficult to operate as a team when you aren’t in the same room – sometimes not even in the same time zone. Enter the Microsoft Teams Whiteboard. The MS Teams Whiteboard is a simple utility that functions just like the digital version of the analog technology. Through the MS Teams Whiteboard, team members can jot down notes, brainstorm and communicate.
Like many aspects of MS Teams, the whiteboard in Teams is also constantly being updated and refreshed. Here are a few of the ways the MS Teams Whiteboard can make your meetings better.
1. CREATE AN OPEN SPACE FOR BRAINSTORMING AND COLLABORATION
Sometimes the tools that we have feel too restrictive. You can discuss your meeting in text, video or audio, but you may want a centralized place to take quick notes. The MS Teams Whiteboard makes it easy for team members to quickly communicate ideas on-the-fly. Everyone can write down important aspects of the meeting, things that need to be discussed in the future, or elements that still need to be resolved. With the MS Teams Whiteboard, everyone can remain on the same page. Much like screensharing, it’s an easy way to get the experience of being in the same room without actually being in the same room.
Most projects have a cycle – from initial idea or problem, to solution design, implementation, and completion. In the solution design phase, getting to the best outcome requires keeping an open mind, getting feedback as broadly as you can, and then systematically evaluating and iterating towards the best solution. Towards this end, bringing stakeholders together into a room to brainstorm, sketch ideas, or do sticky-note exercises to gather feedback can be useful for getting a bigger picture. In a remote working environment, many software tools can provide similar support, with the additional benefits of being digital – and that includes being connected with conversations and closely available within Microsoft Teams. As you tackle projects in a remote working environment, experiment with different tools to collect and operationalize ideas, brainstorming, and feedback.
Start up a quick whiteboard
Sometimes teams need a space to go back and forth and share ideas – and you need a free-form space to draw and ideate. A digital whiteboard can deliver that experience, coupled with the ability to save and share your drawings forever. Microsoft Whiteboard can provide whiteboard services within meetings. Additional applications can provide specialized whiteboard features and spaces for idea visualization.
InVision offers platform for design and development teams to collect ideas, prototype digital experiences, streamline handoffs, and share feedback – including a free whiteboarding experience in Teams known as Freehand. With Freehand, you can replicate the feel of a marker on a whiteboard for fast ideation or create something more polished with simple shape selection, color, and alignment tools – all of which make it easy for anyone to contribute, no matter their drawing talent. Everything in Freehand is shared in real-time, meaning multiple team members can draw and add images simultaneously. This makes it a great space to bring the team together, even when you are far apart.
Freehand by InVision helps with whiteboard and brainstorming
MURAL is another whiteboarding application integrated within Microsoft Teams that enables visual collaboration through digital sticky notes, drawings, and diagrams. You can create new murals or bring existing ones into your Teams workspace as a Tab, where they appear alongside your team’s Conversations and Files. Then, you can contribute and edit directly inside of the Channel to enable seamless collaboration. All activity in your murals and rooms is passed along through notifications. Using Messaging Extensions, you can quickly find the MURAL templates you need to run your design sprints, agile sprints, and sprint planning sessions.
Finally, Klaxoon provides a full suite of collaborative tools to make meetings, workshops, project reviews or training sessions more engaging and efficient. Their Brainstorm activity offers a two-dimensional space for teams to add collaboration tools and artifacts. Within this Klaxoon space, you can add and connect images, text, drawing and media – but also live polls, word clouds, and visualizations in one collaborative location. Ideas become flexible notes you can move around – and when it is time to further categorize ideas, Klaxoon can change its view to allow for seamless categorizing and bucketing. Templates are also available to help users get started more easily.
Visualizing the Idea
Just as there is tremendous diversity in communication styles, there are lots of ways to organize and collaborate on brainstorms. One such tool is mind maps – designing networks of ideas in a more spatial manner. MindMeister has long focused on providing a way to create mind-maps: interconnected diagrams and hierarchies of ideas, pulled together onto one canvas. Thoughts around a topic can be quickly broken down into a set of categories, and tasks for executing on those ideas can also be surfaced. MindMeister can also be used natively within Microsoft Teams through its app.
A MindMeister hierarchy of concepts
No matter your collaboration style – whether it’s free form drawing connecting to broader prototypes, using sticky notes to group ideas, or creating a visual hierarchy in the form of a mind-map, you can connect these styles to broader collaboration through Microsoft Teams.
Conclusions
Brainstorming is a specific stage in the problem-solving process, with goals to generate ideas about specific topics. Brainstorming usually requires the participation of several participants. These ideas may be used to develop plans to solve problems, test hypotheses, or develop definitions and explanations.