Collaboration
What is collaboration?
Collaboration happens when people with different roles and skills work together to achieve common goals, i.e. a team.
Large organisations have many types of teams; formal and informal, local and virtual, ad-hoc and ongoing - and collaboration happens in them all.
Technology is what enables collaboration and team work - particularly if your organisation has dispersed teams with members in different locations. At its most basic this means phone and email. But these tools have limitations; a telephone can’t trace another team member. Emails can’t be accessed by multiple users, or searched-on effectively. File sharing can be time consuming and groupware difficult to use in remote locations.
Today, a new breed of specialist collaboration solution providers integrate hardware, software and/or services - opening a new more efficient world - and they facilitate a new level of collaborative working within or between organisations with their understanding of how human beings interact.
Why collaborate?
Have you ever experienced any of these situations?
Waited for information – where you have tried hard to get in touch with or get information from an individual in order to make progress on a particular process or task but failed.
- Been the target for unscheduled or unauthorized communications that disrupted your workflow.
- Coordination inefficiency – where you couldn’t fully interact within a team in order to move it towards its goals.
- Planning to plan – spending time on planning and organisation rather than actually make progress towards completing work.
- Barriers to collaboration – where you can’t access the tools you need to collaborate effectively with colleagues.
- Offsite productivity loss – less work done when you don’t work from one of the company’s offices.
- Customer complaints due to communications – where you have had to handle customer complaints and dissatisfaction that stem from ineffective communication policies or technology.
A good collaboration platform can not only help you save time and money but also enable more effective communications across your organisation.
