Collaboration is the most overused word in the business world. Most managers often think of messaging, chat, and document-sharing activities as collaboration.
Sometimes terms like coordination, collaboration, and cooperation are used to explain “effective teamwork”. These terms if not used in the right context fail to convey the exact meaning of “project collaboration”. The lack of knowledge in project collaboration creates a barrier to building a powerful workplace.
A 2016 survey has found that 70% of American employees are reducing economic growth by not working with full potential. In this group, more than half were found absent and one-fifth are disengaged.
Around 96% of CEOs believe that poor communication and collaboration is the primary reason behind workplace failure. Lack of the right collaboration tools and processes at an organization level leads to project failure.
Project collaboration is a communication system that is used by resources to complete their tasks within the project.
When an organization grows, collaboration becomes more critical. From research, it has been found that organizations with good collaboration achieve better outcomes in the areas of enhanced customer satisfaction, employee productivity, better revenue, and accelerated innovation.
In earlier days, emailing was trusted as the preferred mode of collaboration by project managers and project teams.
But today, the demand has gone down. Project managers aren’t preferring sending emails each time for their project collaboration.
Today businesses and projects rely on remote workers. Several cases say that the time spent on email can reduce business productivity. Also, information gets lost in email because of CC’s, BCC’s, forwarding, and long email threads.
A report noted that- “time spent on email can be cut by 25%-30% by introducing a social networking communications platform for easy access and sharing. This can help prevent information silos and decreased productivity through disengaged employees”.
So the idea of every team member emailing each other became inconvenient.
The best solution is to have all team members on one platform. So that they can all engage, update, and connect with each other.
The use of a self hosted project management software can be the undeniable solution for all project collaboration needs. Project collaboration platforms bring all business stakeholders together and provide the needed clarity and transparency around project planning and execution.
Project teams become highly responsive and committed to the project goals as they can see the value of their work in real time and how it impacts the big picture.
Along with collaboration proper time and resource management are equally important to keep our projects profitable. Significant technological advances have given rise to automation and bots which also add a bit of complexity.
Monitoring the performance of all project elements is crucial and proper Resource Management has become essential for successful project completion.
So project managers need self-hosted project management software that allows for real-time tracking of task progress, highlights resource bottlenecks and delays, helps identify risks and provides actionable insights.
Moreover, it is proven that collaboration works best when all team members get engaged in a project to deliver the desired outcome.
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So here are some of the areas, an organization should consider while choosing a project collaboration tool;
Intuitive and user-friendly:
User adoption is the single most challenge for the implementation of task management software. Without doubt, the tool must have a zero learning curve, highly interactive and easy to follow.
After all, we just need to spend more time in learning and using the tool. Also, the software must be intuitive in offering relevant help content and interactive tips & techniques for quick learning and adoption.
A collaborative online work management tool must bring all the key elements of project management together on a single centralized platform.
Projects, tasks, teams, and clients all work & collaborate seamlessly in real-time enabling faster resolution of pending items.
Instant desktop notifications and email alerts are triggered for key actions such as project and task creation, user invites, task edits, replies, comments and status updates. Hence, teams are always aware of the latest progress of your most important tasks.
Project collaboration entails bringing the entire team together. This also includes your clients, cross-department teams, external users, vendors, and ISPs.
Managing users and ensuring your confidential information is safe and accessed only on a “need to know” basis is of utmost importance.
Having the most commonly used apps by your teams makes your work fun and stress-free. We understand it! Google Drive, Dropbox or Slack integrate them all with Orangescrum for seamless access to your important documents anytime.
Project reporting is critical to keep all your stakeholders updated on the project progress, open items, project health status and risks if any. Orangescrum provides comprehensive reports of your critical project elements such as tasks, time and resources.
To create high performing teams, project managers should opt for the right project collaboration tool that can enhance communication, removes administrative delays, allows teams to work out a faster resolution and provides the true project status in real time.
You need to keep your team connected on a single platform to ensure improved collaboration and team management. It is important to evaluate some of the good project collaboration tools in terms of features, cost, and usability.
Seeing all the requirements, tools like “Orangescrum Project Collaboration” can meet your expectations. So gift your teams the right tool to improve project execution, collaboration and time management.
Orangescrum is an all-in-one self-hosted project management tool that carries useful features like, task management, time tracking, Gantt chart, Kanban view, scrum methodology, resource availability, invoicing and others.
Orangescrum gives unlimited storage for any number of projects to your whole team for free.