Online Collaboration
COVID has made working from home a reality and Zoom meetings have become a fact of life.
Is the work from home dream a reality or a nightmare? As a Project Manager it’s closer to the latter but all is not lost! Online collaboration tools abound and I’d like to share how I manage my workload with an assortment of tools.
As a consultant in Retail Technologies I get to work on a lot of exciting projects large and small.
All my projects have these in common:
· Multiple software vendors in disparate locations
· Client with staff in disparate locations
· Teams in multiple geographic locations and time zones
· Meetings - lots of them
· Workshops - lots of them
· Minutes, Agreements and Actions - lots of them
· Collaborative authoring of requirements and design documentation
It’s easy to drown in admin when attending meetings and workshops all day. When do you get the time to write up your notes, collate actions, and then herd all the proverbial cats to complete actions by their due dates? This is where the new breed of online collaboration tools come to the fore. My favourite is Confluence which is an Atlassian product that sits alongside JIRA.
Confluence is a great tool for sharing documentation across teams and managing workflow. If you’ve used Sharepoint or Teams, you’ll find limitations in sharing documents outside your organisation and workflow management. Yes, it’s better than paper and better than network sharing and has cool chat functionality, but it does not have a solution for workflow management.
As a Project Manager, I have to keep on top of actions, risks and decisions. Whilst these can be maintained in documents, the process of tracking hundreds of actions and decisions is difficult. This is where Confluence has some cool tools.
Meeting and Workshop notes can be recorded collaboratively. All participants of a meeting can edit the document concurrently, so note taking is no longer the responsibility of the designated scribe and more accurate as it is documented as the meeting happens.
Actions can be recorded within any document in Confluence, so from within the meeting notes document, I can create an action and assign it to a person with a due date. This action then appears in a task list for the Confluence user and easily tracked using Confluence reports.
Decisions like actions can be recorded within any document in Confluence and all decisions across the entire projected can be output to a single report
With the above features, I can issue minutes, actions and decisions immediately as the meeting finishes.
I’d like to hear what tools are being used out there in project land. Each of my clients has their own favourites, what’s yours and why?
These are some of the tools I use daily,
Microsoft Teams
Jira
Confluence
Asana
Apple Comments
Evernote
Outlook
Google G Suite
Zoom
Google Meet
Teams meeting
WebEx