New collaborative tools are fast changing the way we manage, learn and do things. In it’s simplest form, collaboration is defined as “working with others to do a task and to achieve shared goals.”
In the corporate world, collaboration “is the interactive dynamic of engaged people, who, when electing to work together, adopt shared behaviors and goals through conversation with an objective of driving new, emergent, innovative insights and outcomes.” It is therefore no surprize that collaboration is becoming a top priority for a lot of managers and business leaders. But knowing what makes your collaboration efforts successful is a tricky business.
The following are some secret ingredients for an effective collaboration, without which is almost impossible to drive your collaborative efforts.
- Engagement: You need to engage your team members and encourage active listening in order to establish rapport and trust.
- Keep it Real: Your collaboration efforts must be authentic, i.e. be who you say you are. False projections will only kill your collaborative efforts.
- Continuous Learning & Discovery Process: This is perhaps the reason why you wanted to collaborate in the first place. You need to cultivate this behavior within the organization; people must be willing to share what they know and ready to learn and discover new things.
- Respect for Each Other: In order to collaborate successfully, you need to have a mutual respect for other members in the team. Chances are there will be conflict of ideas and you may not always agree to one member or another. But to make collaboration successful, you need to respect the value of time and contributions each member makes.
- Focus on Results: Finally, it is important to consider why you are collaborating. Of course for the real outcomes. In a collaborative environment, you need to focus on the results. Issues might arise, but a real collaborative team focuses on what they are going to do instead of wasting time on blame games.
With Nutcache’s collaborative boards, you can focus on each of these factors to be successful with your efforts. This cloud-based collaborative project management solution helps you to “Team Up, Organize, Track, and Deliver.”
Nutcache’s Collaborative Boards – Living up to the Expectations
Our collaborative boards have live up to the expectation of our users regarding what we claimed during the launch of our collaborative project management update. Nutcache’s collaborative boards make “collaboration easier like never before.” Businesses can invite team members, stakeholders, clients and other collaborators work together on projects. It allows users to collaborate of files and documents and share ideas, comments, feedback and project advancement notes right from the board.
Using Nutcache’s collaborative boards you can perform a myriad of tasks, such as:
- Create boards for specific projects
- Organize your boards with lists and cards
- Invite employees and clients to collaborate on different tasks
- Get an overview of a board’s critical data
- Invoice an entire board with a single click
The entire collaborative features of Nutcache are based on boards, lists and cards that represents your existing workflow. These boards are so flexible that you can work the way you want. In fact, these collaborative project boards not only adapt to your existing methodology, but also allow you to manage your projects how you best see fit. For example, you can focus on team members and milestones/resources while following popular project management methodologies like Scrum, Agile, Kanban or anything else.
Working with Nutcache’s Collaborative Project Boards
The collaborative project boards from Nutcache are simple and seamless to use. You can ‘organize’ each of these boards with lists and cards and put together several information and data on the cards, including your worked hours, expenses, checklists, and attached documents. Better yet, you can even browse each and every activity happening on a card in real time. The drag and drop facility makes it further easier to manage cards and lists so that you can assign tasks according to your priorities.
These cards are further linked with our expense and time tracking modules to make it even easier for you to bill a customer. Other facilities offered by these cards are lists include:
- Organize lists to reflect your workflow
- Create estimated time for each card and set deadlines
- Drag and drop cards from one list to another as the project progresses
- Get notification in real time whenever a card or list is modified
- Use lists and cards as containers for tasks, ideas and other activities that are not really a part of a workflow
You can also manipulate your data with ease by using our data grids to filter, sort and group your data, which gives you endless reporting capabilities.
Benefits of Nutcache’s Collaborative Tools
One of the biggest advantages of Nutcache’s collaborative boards is that it allows you to be in control all the times. The board overview section sums up the critical information stored in the board, thus allowing you to get a clear idea of where your project is heading to. This helps you to determine if changes are necessary and you can easily respond to urgent requirements, if any. Besides, you can track the amount of time spent on each assignment and ensure that budgets and deadlines are respected.
Two other major benefits include:
The collaborative boards offer transparency. Invite your clients and stakeholders on your project collaborative boards and give them access to your status updates and project advancement data, giving them the possibility to react and comment on a daily basis rather than only once a week.
Work with teammates and clients alike. Nutcache lets you collaborate and share information between team members, but also with clients and stakeholders outside your company. Access rights can even be limited to viewing only, or set to full editing capabilities.
Let’s consider an example where Nutcache’s collaboration boards help businesses in a real-life problem.
Issue: Adapting to the clients’ needs:
Richard is a project manager in a software development organization. Many of his clients prefer to be billed progressively.
How Nutcache Helped: Richard used Nutcache’s collaborative boards with an Agile/Kanban twist to bill his clients as the work progresses. Within each project board, he created 4 lists, each of them labeled “ideas”, “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done”, He adds cards to the “ideas”, discuss them with the team, they select the ones that will be done first and drag them to the “To Do” plus one card for billing the client (as a milestone).
Once the cards have all been completed and moved to the “Done list” , all Richard needs to do is generate an invoice from the “Done” list ready to be sent to the client and voilà!
Conclusion
Nutcache’s collaborative boards make sharing ideas and information seamless, regardless of the location or device of the collaborators. Besides, it gives you the ultimate flexibility and freedom to follow your team’s preferred project management method. Most importantly, Scrum Masters, Kanban teams, project managers and marketing departments are hooked on Nutcache, and so should you!
