So, you’ve just deployed your brand-new collaboration app and you’re looking forward to using it to improve your efficiency and productivity as you work with your colleagues on different projects. But hold on! How you use the application dictates your likelihood of success. You have to be aware that no matter how many features collaboration products possess (e.g., blogs, wikis, document libraries, etc.) they are only useful when properly adopted by the enterprise.
This article outlines eight tactics that can drastically improve your overall productivity when using collaborative apps.
How to Use Collaborative Apps More Effectively
1. Leverage Notifications.
The first step to reaching productivity nirvana is to ensure that your collaboration app notifies you of relevant events when they happen. Mobile device notifications are particularly valuable given today’s highly mobile workforce, but other notification channels include feeds (RSS & ATOM), email, and instant messaging. I personally like to be notified via SMS text messaging and IM, just be sure not to ignore these notifications, lest you forget to act upon them.
2. Avoid the Noise: Be Selective with Feeds.
As useful as notifications can be, it’s very easy to get carried away with them. It’s important to subscribe to events you know you are relevant to you. It’s more important to know that Jim assigned a task to you than it is to be notified that Roger just had tuna for lunch. Use filters if your collaboration app provides it to help improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
3. Be Diligent with Tasks.
Most of us are accustomed to using email to assign or delegate a task, but pretty much every collaboration app includes some form of workflow and/or task management. I cannot understate the value of this capability, particularly when combined with feeds and notifications that inform you when a task has been assigned or is due.
Letting the collaboration app serve as your taskmaster and “external brain” will relieve stress and ensure you and your collaborators finish work on time.
4. Keep Your Document Repository Up-to-Date.
Collaborative workgroups are usually formed around some form of document (such as a requirements doc) and tend to produce document artifacts (such as a proposal). Of the bad habits I commonly see in collaboration app implementations, the most common is a failure to keep the document repository up-to-date. This is often complicated by the need to check-out, edit, then check-in your document artifacts; an often time-consuming process.
Some collaborative apps, such as Alfresco, simplify the process through shared drive interfaces. Irrespective of all this, you do yourself and colleagues a favor by making sure the canonical version of a document is promptly checked back into the repository once you’re done editing.
5. Use Email Wisely: Link, don’t Attach!
A corollary to keeping your repository up-to-date is eliminating the nasty habit we all have to attach documents to an email. This leads to numerous problems, such as poor revision control and wasteful use of email storage. Virtually all collaborative apps that feature document management will include some ability to share a link to the relevant content. Be sure to use that link, your colleagues and email inbox will thank you.
6. Start Documents as Wiki Pages.
It is best to create a wiki page for content authoring if you know a particular document will undergo many revisions during the authoring process. Doing so makes iterations much faster, and you know your colleagues will always see the latest version of your content directly from a web browser without having to download it. You can then paste the content into your word processor once it’s closer to being finalized.
7. Simplify Discovery: Don’t Overuse Social Tags.
We all love social tagging; it gives us a simple way to simplify search, but beware of “tag creep.” It is best to use a handful of selectively-picked tags instead of going overboard and associating every adjective you can think of. Also, avoid the temptation to use commonly used words as tags as this virtually guarantees you will never find your content again.
Case-in-point, if you’re working on a project called “Alfresco Implementation,” don’t use “Alfresco” as a tag describing “Alfresco-Requirements.doc.” Most collaborative apps filter searches by the site/project you’re working on so you can safely skip using the project name in the tags and therefore make it easier to find the relevant documents.
8. Setup a Team Chat Room.
Chat rooms are often not considered a core requirement for collaborative apps, but they can be of great value when used properly. Most instant messaging apps include some form of group chat rooms. The Alfresco team, for example, makes heavy use of Skype for instant messaging and voice communication. Instead of relying on relatively “slow” email, we also often create moderated Skype chat rooms whose membership includes project team members to facilitate ad-hoc communications, group coordination, and real-time discussions.
These eight points are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, but I’m confident that, properly adopted, you and your colleagues will be more efficient and experience less stress when collaborating on projects.
