Since childhood I’m sure most of us have been continually told about the benefits of team work and how success is often achieved when people work together. Motivational speakers feast on team work and collaboration and sometimes the meaning can get lost in mushy motivational stories about working together.
But when teamwork is applied to your daily work life and your career, it all of a sudden becomes very important. In a project management sense, projects can often succeed or fail based on how well each member of the project team works with his or her other team members. No mushy motivational stories here, just purely and simply working together to help a project, and often your career, succeed.
Collaboration and effective teamwork between team members can often be one of the most effective ways of ensuring the success of your project. Not only do people work well together when things are going right, but when things go wrong they have a far better chance of coming up with effective solutions and alternative ways of working.
I recently read a great post from Brad Egeland on 5 strategies for successful project management. And out of those five strategies, two referred to the need to have a collaborative working environment, and the tools necessary to facilitate this. Egeland points out that success for project managers not only involves their own efforts, but also the efforts of the team. That’s why it’s also imperative that everyone is working to the same plan, the same set of expectations and the same information about the project.
One of the most effective tools to facilitate good collaboration between project team members is of course a central information system that is accessible to everyone and contains one version of the most up to date, relevant project data. In order to achieve good collaboration between your team members it’s imperative they all have access to the required information, and that they are all on the same page with this information.
IPM project management software is one example of providing a collaborative working environment for all project team members. Not only do all team members on a project have access to one central database that contains all the relevant information about the project, team members can also access this database when they are not in the office. The central database can be accessed from a laptop or mobile device so long as there is an internet connection. This makes it easy for teams that are sometimes scattered across different offices, field sites or even cities to maintain a collaborative approach to executing the project. And of course, collaboration between team members is, according to Brad Egeland, one of the top five strategies for project management success.
As always, you can find out more about working collaboratively with IPM by contacting us or posting a comment below.
