Collabora­tion Tools

More productivity within a team

A small project team, working in the same office and seeing each other on a daily basis will probably be able to work effectively together without software-support. However, with a growing team size and complexity of the project this is hardly possible. This shows: the more colleagues work together on one project, the more important good communication and professional coordination becomes. In order to optimize workflows and data transfer, enterprises and independent project teams (e.g. agencies) use collaboration tools. These allow a more productive and location-independent collaboration

How do Collaboration Tools work?

Usually, a collaboration platform offers multiple functions to support project-management tools. The aim of e-collaboration tools is the optimization of work processes such as planning, organizing and analyzing. The following features are often found in online-collaboration:

• Real-time communication
  Real-time communication is essential for team collaboration. For example, project boards allow to delegate tasks and to communicate project advancements. With the comment function situations can be virtually discussed live. Also, classic communication solutions such as messenger and video-calls are used – enabled through interfaces to Skype and Outlook. The implementation of cloud solutions enables communal and location-independent editing of text and table documents.
  
  
• Filesharing
  An essential feature of collaboration-software is the communal use and sharing of documents and other files (e.g. photos). Therefore, a series of online-collaboration tools use a central storage solution. Within this storage solution administrators and project leaders can decide on individual access rights.
• Management fiunctions
  In a fully developed e-collaboration software the project manager has the best possible overview over project-developments and work processes, in order to be able to plan everything. Resources can be optimally organized and distributed. Furthermore, many tools offer solutions with which working processes can be documented and analyzed. With the company-wide use the tools make the communication between the teams and departments easier.
  
  
• Mind-mapping
  A series of collaboration tools support creative teams in finding ideas together with help of brainstorming functions, e.g. mind maps. Thus, team members can actively shape a project with their own ideas. Even external contributors (e.g. clients) can be included in this creative process.

Efficiency improvement thanks to Collaboration Tools

Last year, the yearly Deutsche Social Collaboration Studie showed how much online-collaboration increases work efficiency. Depending on the sector the increase lay between 16 and over 40 percent. The study proves that the more intensively the tools were used, the higher the work efficiency. By using modern collaboration tools, the team members motivate each other to act innovatively. This results from the fact that new ideas can be implemented more quickly, if everybody knows who is working on which field and know-how can be offered accordingly.