Is your company a victim of its own success when it comes to product design and development? The better you are at creating products customers want, the more complicated your process can become.
You may have more customer demands to deal with, bigger project teams, and more external people to collaborate with on a regular basis, including clients, vendors, and consultants.
All of a sudden, what got you there won’t keep you there, as they say. Collaborating efficiently is vital, and achieving it requires going beyond e-mail, spreadsheets, and one-off applications.
Here are five tips for how teams can collaborate better using technology:
Employ a less is more approach to technology: Whether your team members are across the hall or a continent away, it is essential to standardize on a limited number of collaboration tools.
With the glut of tools on the market – everything from productivity apps and task management to social media and instant messaging – it is easy for individuals to download and use their favorites.
This makes it difficult to collaborate efficiently with everyone else. Fewer tools will make it easier to promote a consistent collaboration process for all involved.
Also, technologies that are simple to master will encourage frequent use among teams. It may be helpful to conduct an audit of the tools the company is currently using in order to standardize on a select few.
Use a centralized collaboration and project management platform: One way to streamline your toolset is to have a shared collaboration platform. This should go beyond your intranet to a Web-based solution that your entire team – including external members – can use.
Having one place to communicate updates and information prevents important content from being lost in e-mail chains, which speeds decision-making and execution.
The more tools you can incorporate into this platform – including features such as instant messaging and even video conferencing – the easier it will be for everyone to collaborate.
Plan visually: The ability to plan visually helps the entire team better understand goals, priorities, activities, and deadlines. Gantt charting offers a way to do this via a traditional project management tactic that vendors have taken into the 21st century.
Using digital Gantt charts, everyone can plan and track projects in a common setting. This is also helpful for workload management, including determining how busy team members are and who can take on more work.
Execute visually: Taking visual cues a step further, a digital board based on a traditional Kanban system helps with project execution. Kanban boards let team members place electronic Post-it style notes in different columns to represent tasks and workflows of projects.
This visual perspective helps keep everyone on the same page and makes it easy to assign tasks to individuals as well as check status. Kanban boards are made even more powerful with interactive elements, such as the ability to include documents and comments on the cards.
Also, combining Gantt charting with Kanban boards and cards can provide a unified view into the progress of the overall design project for better execution.
Share documents and other information more efficiently: Speaking of documents, another feature to look for in a shared collaborative platform is one repository for documents that any team member can access from any location with real-time updates.
This means making it available to external team members from any device. Features such as version control, locking, reviews, and relation back to project activities and tasks make collaboration much easier.
Using a common set of collaboration tools can help simplify the product design and development process. Instead of using pure scheduling or single-feature tools, look for a shared collaboration platform that has as many interactive features as possible.
By giving all team members the ability to share project updates in real time, you can plan, execute, and deliver products on time and on budget. You will be prepared for team success no matter how complicated your product design process becomes or who is involved.
For more information, visit www.projectplace.com.
