Defining Collaborative Management

Collaborative management combines planning, recruitment, workflow, communication, document management, reporting, and more, all within a single solution. According to Newzy Executive, collaborative work management solutions allow employees

• Creating a workspace for teams to collaborate and deliver results: Distributed teams require a professional home base. A cloud-based solution ensures that virtual teams—whether they are external vendors, clients, or colleagues from across the globe—have a single centralized hub to plan and execute projects.
• Capture conversations within the context of the work being performed: No more searching through various email threads, intranets, and other applications to find project-related notes and documents.
  Plan and manage projects without the need to adhere to a formal methodology: Users do not need to be certified project managers to plan, manage, and execute projects.
• Customizing the workspace to support individual workflows: These solutions combine capabilities such as collaboration and task management. This eliminates the need for employees to switch between multiple applications, thereby boosting productivity.
• Overall, the solutions of collaborative management allow team members to communicate directly with everyone, plan projects and workloads, stay up to date on project deliverables, access and update project documents, and ensure that everything is managed in a single location.

Software and Collaborative Work Management Tools

Putting collaborative work management into practice

Here is how various teams across different sectors leverage collaborative work management to successfully execute their projects and achieve their goals.

Boosting Work Performance

An international hardware and software design company, with a revenue of $8 billion, has struggled to successfully execute its projects. The IT department completed only a handful of its projects within the designated deadlines. By the end of the year, less than half of its 105 planned projects had been fully completed.

« Project management and collaboration were handled using spreadsheets, SharePoint, emails, and other tools that were disjointed and siloed,” stated the IT PMO Manager. “This created a state of chaos that led to overcommitted resources, unrealistic estimates, prolonged project durations, and missed or delayed deadlines.

To address this issue, the organization introduced a collaborative work management tool to ensure that everyone is on the same page, collaborates effectively, and tracks all tasks within a single, consolidated platform. Mobile users can access the tool from anywhere via the cloud. This has eliminated the need for email regarding project-related activities and status reports, thereby improving communication and reducing the risk of errors.

As a result, the following year, the organization achieved a project completion rate on schedule of 94%, compared to only approximately 50%.

Communication Speed and Problem Solving

When a mining construction company embarked on a large-scale installation project, more than 1,300 people with site access had to be kept informed at all times throughout the project’s duration. The company’s collaborative work management solution provided a common online forum where all internal and external stakeholder groups could securely coordinate and share critical documents.

This has saved hours of searching for the latest document versions via email or within internal systems. It has also reduced the need to distribute large files by email. Furthermore, the company has lowered paperwork-related costs. Now, all core documents are electronic, and features such as document revision requests and change alerts minimize the risk of errors caused by using outdated versions.

The advantages of this collaborative work management solution have also extended to a wide-area fiber optic network builder. Several of the company’s subcontractors utilize laptops with wireless internet connectivity installed directly in the excavators used at various job sites. By providing all project stakeholders with access to a centralized online platform, they can quickly resolve any issues encountered during excavation—right from the excavator itself. This increased adaptability allows them to troubleshoot more efficiently and prevent project delays.

Boosting Productivity

A spirits consulting firm, with a highly dispersed team of consultants, sought to expand its client base and help its geographically scattered clients launch successful beverage brands more rapidly.

To bring new beverages from conception to market, the organization required constant, real-time visibility into project timelines and an efficient way to communicate quickly with clients. Previously, the team relied on email and Excel to collaborate, manage projects, and share team updates. This led to errors and an estimated 40% drop in employee productivity as the team struggled to rectify them.