The Need for Innovation in the Project Collaboration Space
The transition to an increasingly digital world in both our personal and professional lives has changed the way we communicate in the workplace. As our lives become more digital, our focus is pulled in various directions, stifling work efficiency and productivity. The average person spends a third of her life at work and day-to-day tasks usually require extensive communication with various people inside and outside of an organization. To remain successful, we must keep pace. Digital transformation forces us to face the daunting task of balancing work and personal life. As we attempt to become more efficient in our work tasks to better balance our work and personal lives, the need to innovate in the project collaboration solution space is obvious. Workplace communication needs a facelift and innovation in this space has proven there are time-saving alternatives to email when it comes to project collaboration. In today's work climate, project teams are rarely co-located and usually include people from different parts of an organization, rendering classic workplace communication such as the traditional face-to-face meeting a challenge. Exchanging numerous emails on multiple threads and playing phone tag is also an expensive time investment. Nonetheless, distributed project teams need to stay in sync to brainstorm and troubleshoot issues. Project team messengers can offer significant time savings and break down communication barriers while reducing the 'noise' associated with traditional workplace communications, resulting in fewer missed calls and email chains with irrelevant people copied. The hardest thing to obtain with a project team messenger platform is the balance between user interface simplicity and functional richness. When set up well, project messengers solve small questions faster and help people prepare for regular project meetings, leading to a decrease in workplace surprises and shorter meetings. Think of the new wave in project team messengers as a hybrid between Slack (used as an internal social work chat), email (used as a formal internal method of work communication) and iMessage (used as a multi-use tool to communicate with anyone). The result is a collaborative, work-centric tool that saves time and increases the probability that projects be completed on time. The ideal project collaboration solution should be customizable to best suit a users' needs. A user should be able to decide how many separate conversations are needed for any particular project – this depends on the nature, length and size of the project. My advice would be to create more conversations than to try to manage all different topics within one chatroom. This makes it easier for team members to prioritize their attention. As workplace communication continues to change, more work and value creation will happen in organizationally and geographically distributed project teams. These teams require modern tools to support their workflow – and communication tools are at the core. Project team messengers will become the communication tool of choice and eventually make email irrelevant.
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