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.
There are lots of different communication platforms available which do the job. But what is important? What have you take care of, when you look for a communication platform for your next project?
A modern, team capable platform must be easy to use. No one wants to spend time, finding out how things work. When you need to contact someone from your team you should be able to do this with just a few clicks. Otherwise you won't use your new communication system which will make it obsolete.
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.
Online or offline? You can use an online system. The benefits are that you don't have to setup everything and the system will be available over the internet. But this approach has also some disadvantages. What happens when the provider (where your data remains) goes offline for some reason? Will you be able to access your data when you don't have an internet connection? And finally: Do you trust these foreign guys, that you give them all your data? It's often safer to invest some time and set up a local system at your company. All data remains at your place and modern groupware systems offer the possibility to access your files via the internet, too.
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.
There are lots of different communication platforms available which do the job. But what is important? What have you take care of, when you look for a communication platform for your next project?
A modern, team capable platform must be easy to use. No one wants to spend time, finding out how things work. When you need to contact someone from your team you should be able to do this with just a few clicks. Otherwise you won't use your new communication system which will make it obsolete.
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.
Online or offline? You can use an online system. The benefits are that you don't have to setup everything and the system will be available over the internet. But this approach has also some disadvantages. What happens when the provider (where your data remains) goes offline for some reason? Will you be able to access your data when you don't have an internet connection? And finally: Do you trust these foreign guys, that you give them all your data? It's often safer to invest some time and set up a local system at your company. All data remains at your place and modern groupware systems offer the possibility to access your files via the internet, too.
About the Author:
Dominik Sapinski is lead tech developer at soft-evolution, a software company which has developed the team management software Pimero.
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