Shifting demographics, cross-organizational initiatives, and agile approaches are changing the way today’s teams do their jobs. People work anywhere and everywhere, across time zones, locations and cultures. More and more people are managing projects on a regular basis, though they’re not officially project managers. In addition, companies are working faster to get products and services to market. They’re much more collaborative and much more data driven than a few years ago.
As Forrester Research analyst, Margo Visitacion points out in the August 2015 “Vendor Landscape: Collaborative Work Management for the Enterprise” report: “Cross functional and cross-organizational initiatives are becoming the norm, and sharing information is essential; unfortunately, employees require a multitude of applications to do this. Firms are demanding more-seamless user experience for the technologies that employees use, and as a result, a new market that brings together task management and collaboration has emerged.” In other words, people need tools that work for them – not the other way around. So how can they embrace the new reality of the collaborative workplace and work smarter, not harder?
Teams are turning towards tools which will enable them to plan projects, learn who is working on a project at any given time and share information in a contextual way. As they adopt collaborative work management tools, people are able to share information and work together with customers and business partners in a more effective way.
This means today’s tools cannot be pure scheduling or collaboration tools. They must allow teams to communicate, build awareness about what they’re doing, work more effectively, communicate faster and plan workloads more effectively- in essence, they should allow teams to get the work done. As Margo Visitacion notes in the report cited above: “As companies continue to scale digital initiatives that rely on distributed teams that need to share information in real time, collaboration work management vendors can fill the gap between the formal planning that project managers require and the activities their teams perform.”
At Projectplace, we’re bringing this together into one tool – not more tools, so that teams can keep up with the when and where of tasks and deliverable, so that project managers – accidental or not – can ensure their projects are delivered on time and on budget.
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