Our today's world is very specialized. We expect perfect quality from everything. This can be a small iPod a beautiful new car.
But how can we deliver this high quality and still be competitive? How can we minimize the costs and hold the quality level on top? We divide the product development process into multiple parts and give it to specialists. The more people are involved the more we need a collaboration system to coordinate all the work.
A groupware or communication platform can help you to sync all the different productivity processes and ensure that you reach your goal within your estimated time frame and a satisfying result.
Easiness and functionality. No one wants to spend hours and hours by finding out how things work. Therefore a modern communication platform needs to be easy understandable and should be intuitive. Imagine you have a chat system where all your team members are online and it takes you minutes to find out how to send a message - you simply won't do that.
Ok - you're using your brand new groupware. But what should be inside? You need a scheduler for your day planning. Tasks and notes for your project organization should be there too. A team consists of lots of different people, so you need a contact manager. For communication you should have an email client and a chat. Important is, that everything's synchronized. You should be able to set new tasks or appointments for someone else and the system should deliver it to the appropriate person.
Don't put everything online. Yes, there are a couple of online services which offer a rich set of functions and you don't have to set up a system within your company. But what happens, when you get to work and the web service is not there anymore? Are you still able to work, when you don't have an internet connection? And - do you trust these guys to send them all your data? It's safer to have everything local within your company and modern groupware and personal information managing systems offer access via the internet, too. So you don't have to stop working, when you're on the way.
But how can we deliver this high quality and still be competitive? How can we minimize the costs and hold the quality level on top? We divide the product development process into multiple parts and give it to specialists. The more people are involved the more we need a collaboration system to coordinate all the work.
A groupware or communication platform can help you to sync all the different productivity processes and ensure that you reach your goal within your estimated time frame and a satisfying result.
Easiness and functionality. No one wants to spend hours and hours by finding out how things work. Therefore a modern communication platform needs to be easy understandable and should be intuitive. Imagine you have a chat system where all your team members are online and it takes you minutes to find out how to send a message - you simply won't do that.
Ok - you're using your brand new groupware. But what should be inside? You need a scheduler for your day planning. Tasks and notes for your project organization should be there too. A team consists of lots of different people, so you need a contact manager. For communication you should have an email client and a chat. Important is, that everything's synchronized. You should be able to set new tasks or appointments for someone else and the system should deliver it to the appropriate person.
Don't put everything online. Yes, there are a couple of online services which offer a rich set of functions and you don't have to set up a system within your company. But what happens, when you get to work and the web service is not there anymore? Are you still able to work, when you don't have an internet connection? And - do you trust these guys to send them all your data? It's safer to have everything local within your company and modern groupware and personal information managing systems offer access via the internet, too. So you don't have to stop working, when you're on the way.
About the Author:
Dominik Sapinski is senior project manager at soft-evolution, an innovative provider of team management software Pimero.
