Collaboration continues to grow in importance in the modern business world.
This is one of the reasons for the popularity of the Agile movement and more recent offshoots, like DevOps. Interactions between team members, or between an internal project team and external business stakeholders, help ensure valuable work gets completed in less time.
Increasing collaboration in the office needs to be a major goal of today’s project managers. Here are a few ideas geared towards accomplishing this relevant task.
Project Collaboration Equals Project Management in Importance
We previously mentioned Agile and DevOps as two of the reasons driving the growth of collaboration in business. Another major contributing factor is the rise of mobile technology and social media. It is now easier for people to collaborate on work over the internet as well as in person.
Some technology pundits feel project collaboration now rivals excellent project management in ensuring the success of a project. It is the responsibility of the project manager to create an environment that fosters interaction between team members. Getting everyone working together towards one goal becomes easier with the smart use of software.
Business Applications Making Collaboration Easier
Leveraging social communications applications with a focus on business functionality – Slack is a notable example – lets project teams interact with co-workers located in the next cubicle or anywhere in the world. A ChatOps application even enables software development teams, QA engineers and business analysts to communicate, collaborate and run software tests or builds using a familiar messaging app interface.
Document management software also plays an important role in a project while facilitating collaboration among the team. It helps capture the creative sparks from the brainstorming process at the beginning of the work. Developing a wiki structure for project documentation helps keep everyone on the same page even if some co-workers are on a different continent.
Project managers need to familiarize themselves with these kinds of applications that enhance interactivity between their team members. A competitive business landscape requires organizations to work more efficiently to accomplish their goals as quickly as possible. Apps that make collaboration and interaction easier play an important role in boosting overall productivity.
Improving interaction ultimately allows your team to create more with fewer resources. This added efficiency helps the modern business successfully compete. All project managers need to add collaboration to their list of capabilities.
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