Advise for Organizing my Projects in Teams?

Hello,

I’m looking for some advise on how to best use Teams when organizing projects.

Short background, My company started to transition from doing our work with emails and a local server to MS Teams about 2 months ago. We are an AV company that does installation of digital signage and more. Generally we have a “project” that is sold, then must go through the process of engineering reviews, Project Managers planning the installation, Order Entry doing all the data entry and Techs on site doing the work. We initially set up our structure of Teams by creating a new team per project coming through. That works great for keeping all communication consolidated. BUT now our problem has turned into a huge list of dozens and dozens of Teams. And that is only going to grow as we sell more projects. Many of the Projects are also for repeat customers.

Is there a better way than having one huge list to organize our workload? I thought of a single Team per customer and use channels for individual projects. But that presents 2 questions that I don’t believe have good answers. 

1. Can we do the things we currently down with separate channels in separate Tabs of one channel? – Not necessarily.
2. Do we want everyone to have access/visibility to every Team? – No we don’t.

I’d appreciate any ideas or advise on how to best work with Teams to limit the number of Teams we create.

Thank you!