Organized Teams are Better at Collaboration

If your business could make money based on its process, you’d never need to worry about results. Unfortunately, things don’t work that way. You need to bring a product or service to market and sell it in order to make enough revenue to continue doing business. With the results-based nature of things, it becomes essential for the good of your company that you optimize your team’s ability to get things done. Today, we’ll talk a little bit about how collaboration gets better when your team is organized. 

Are You Organized?

Before we get into some technologies that can help your team collaborate better, we thought we’d touch on organization. We all have that person that works at our company that seems to have things laying all over the place, papers stacked up high on the corner of the desk (or worse yet in a common area), and overall it just seems as if they don’t have any type of system. We also all have that person whose desk looks as if they’ve never been given an assignment of any type except to keep the crumbs out of their keyboard.

Most of us operate in-between these fringe operators, but no matter what you do to keep organized, it’s important to have a system. We’ll get into the technology that can provide the average worker a universal system, but really staying organized comes down to three variables:

1. Understanding what needs to be done
2. Keeping related information together and available
3. Solid communication

If you are able to keep these three variables in mind, it doesn’t matter if your desk looks like it belongs to Dennis Nedry.

Organization Enhances Collaboration

Nothing is more frustrating to a member of a project team than a manager that doesn’t seem to know what is going on. It not only drags the project down, it drags down an individual's morale. People don’t like to be associated with inefficiency and ineptitude. Fortunately, today technology can do a lot of the heavy lifting for project managers and team leaders. Let’s take a look at some of the features today’s collaboration software can provide to take the pressure off project managers and team leaders.

• Document and Asset Management - If you want to keep organized, nothing is better than a centralized repository where all assets can be easily accessed by the people who need them. Better yet, with today’s collaboration software, each user assigned to the project has a profile, and decision makers can assign users who can access certain materials so that there isn’t any confusion, redundancy, or tragic mishaps with the information and work related to the project.
• DB search - Since each project is tied to the document management system, all assets should be easily found via integrated search.
• Dashboard - Many new collaboration apps provide integration with calendars and other scheduling and time-tracking tools that can all be viewed from a centralized dashboard. Users will see notifications for new correspondence, new tasks, and scheduled events to keep everyone working productively.  
• Communication tools - Probably the biggest improvement from older collaboration tools and those of contemporary times is the massive set of communication tools integrated into the software. Not only does it have email and phone integration, it also has a social networking faction that allows internal communication to be partitioned,  while also sponsoring instant messaging features that allow for direct messages. 

With these collaboration tools available, there is very little reason why teams should be disorganized. Sure, project managers still have to be on point and stay on top of the work, but with these platforms, that task is made significantly easier. 

Do you need to have a conversation about getting innovative collaboration tools integrated into your business’ software profile? Give us a call at (217) 428-6449 today to learn more.