Use web collaboration instead of eMail to manage your group and project communications.

Do you get emails like "Can you resend, I can't find the original", "I never saw your email" or "Can you send me a progress report?"

Why? Because e-Mail has isolated your team from important project dialogue.  The act of bouncing messages, questions, answers and important tasks back and forth between participants and groups  has frayed the collaboration process.

How do we fix this?

Communicating in ripples rather than splashes

The Splash

Answering a question with an email is like throwing a stone into a small pool of water. You carefully craft a response and throw the answer into an isolated puddle. One single spash, benefitting one recipient and distracting others. Your time reviewing the question, clarifying the details and carefully crafting the response ends up lost in cluttered in-boxes. 

Is there a better way to communicate? 

The Ripple

Now let's look at answering the same question using web based collaboration. Ask the same questions in an open forum where the intended recipient becomes the moderator. The answer is posted publicly to a team of participants. This turns your puddle into a lake and your spashes into ripples that can be viewed by many, long after the initial question was posted.

The entire group benefits from your answer and you benefit from continued dialigue on the subject.  This open exchange becomes an online archive that can help answer similar questions in the future.  

E-Mail is still used, but instead of one-on-one communications, the entire team is notified daily, or weekly, on updates in progress reports.

You now have one central place where anyone invited can follow your project and you have control over all project dialogue. 

Isn't this is a far more effective use of team intelligence?

Collaborative Web 2.0 project sites reduce time, eliminate repetition and errors and enhance group creativity by centralizing the communication into one controlled place.

There are dozens of online tools to facilitate group communications ranging from collaborative wiki's, news forums, buletin boards, business social networks, social crm systems and even complete project management suites designed specifically for projects that require team collaboration.

These systems can be easily integrated into RefreshedIT's DIY self administered web portals so all your team needs to do is log in to your website to securely participate in your project. Alternatively, you could open up the collaboration forum (entirely or in part) to general web traffic to reach out and engage the Internet with your peoject.

Contact Kersten Kloss at RefreshedIT.com for more details on business collaboration systems through our DIY Website Portals.  403-775-6969