Why You Should Use Online Collaboration Tools

 

Collaboration tools are used to help people work together to achieve a common goal or an objective. If you’ve ever worked on a project that requires you to work with multiple people, you might have an idea of how collaboration tools work. These tools can help project managers and teams to communicate, collaborate and manage resources efficiently.

Such tools are nothing less than a boon for smaller organizations as they enable them to find a global reach. Likewise, for bigger organizations, they boost inter-organizational communication. A new Mckinsey research indicates that benefits reaped by organizations using online collaboration tools are huge.

Let’s look at these benefits in detail:

Communication and collaboration

Timely communication is the key to effective project management. To boost communication among team members, it is highly suggested to use a visual project management software. As the work-status is available in a workflow, team members can see the work progress before, during and after in workflow. The ability to see work in various stages is beneficial for individual productivity as it helps them to prioritize their work accordingly.

It also helps project managers to: 

• Coordinate dependencies 

•  Manage inquiries and expectations 

• Keep the team on the right track 

Stay on budget 

One of the biggest challenges for project managers is to keep the project on the allocated budget. Every project manager tries not to overlook this aspect while managing their projects. However, if a project goes out of the budget, he should be able to foresee the repercussions and bring this to the knowledge of stakeholders involved in it.

Having a project management software by their side, project managers can identify the potential overage when it seems difficult to meet critical milestones. With the ability to visually track the progress with collaborative software, they can identify potential risks and can re-allocate resources as per the requirements. Therefore, such tools are helpful in predicting over-or-under-estimating of a project.

Meeting deadlines 

Poor or ineffective communication can often cost project managers missing critical milestones. Being a project manager, you can alleviate this risk by using online collaboration software where you and your team members can see a clear picture of the set priorities and the status of the work. With this, you get to see all the updates and developments in real-time and can make changes in the plan or strategize as new information and updates come up in the picture.

Reduce work-related stress 

Fear of not meeting deadlines, potential risks or threats - these are one of the many things that keep project managers up at night. When you employ a project management software, you have all the project-related information and progress reports at your finger-tips. It helps to manage workload and consequently, you perform better. When you perform better, your efficiency reaches a whole new level.

Managing projects will never be easy but project managers can take out the complexity by choosing the right collaborative software that meets all requirements. It will not only make way for seamless communication but will also empower teams to be more accountable. As the times are changing, we need to update ourselves with the changing technology and shake hands with new inventions that can make work life easier than before. So, what’s stopping you from joining the collaborative tool bandwagon?