Collaborative Tools: Together is better - Thing 12

I was recently involved in a project to devise and deliver an eResources training course for staff. The project involving nine staff working in four different locations around Dublin city. Oh, if only we'd been used some of these collaborative tools we could certainly have saved time travelling to and from and attending meetings and cut back on long email strings. Both welcome measures at a time when staff resources are stretched.

If I had to do it again I would certainly suggest setting up a project team on a collaborative tool such as Asana to keep communications together, to assign tasks to members and monitor progress. In the absence of a common shared drive it would also have been a handy repository for training documentation, recording FAQs and presentations.

Having said that, I feel face to face time is crucial to connect with team members who work remotely, either in same or different institutions. Working in a public library authority with many different work locations can mean years can pass without seeing (or ever meeting) some colleagues ( I know!!). Meetings can also give rise to unrelated but serendipitous conversations, sharing ideas, troubleshooting as we "nab" a colleague to progress some other issue or propose a different idea. But I think using collaborative tools can certainly reduce the number of meetings, phone calls and emails without having a detrimental effect on team building.

Moving to Asana 

Working side by side, in a small team of two as I do, means collaborative work is very organic. However, our Senior Manager works on a different floor so recently he
suggested we try Asana to plan and manage project work. Previously we had used tasks on our team's private group site on our intranet, which is delivered using Microsoft Sharepoint. While this was a useful way of assigning responsibility, task descriptions, deadlines and monitoring the status of tasks, it didn’t offer much functionality for more complicated or long term projects. From time to time colleagues reported that collaborative working on shared documents was glitchy. It could only be accessed by members of our team on staff PCs, so it wasn't suitable for projects involving colleagues in other sections of the organisation, or from other institutions.

Although Asana is quite intuitive and user friendly, I found it took a few weeks to get used to consulting and updating it regularly, but now it's firmly positioned as one of the many open tab in my browser and as an app on my phone. And now we record most of our work - including regular tasks and our project wish list / long term ideas on Asana. It's also a useful means of communicating progress updates to management without emailing back and forth, by either marking tasks complete or recording a barrier, delay or dependency in the task comment section.

And guess what Asana has a personal projects option too, so it would have been remiss of me not to use to plan my way through Rudai 23!

Keeping track of Things!

A few things to consider.... 

Internet access privileges can be restrictive depending on where you work so there is a chance some of these collaborative tools could be blocked. Also security should be always considered when using a third party application or site. Also, when working on a larger project you will likely receive a high volume of notification emails - not all relevant! You can snooze your inbox for an hour which I might try when I need to focus on something. There are enough distractions in a busy office as it is! Also some interesting features such as project timeline are not available on the free version of Asana. This feature looks like it'd be great for planning large projects. But overall, I would recommend Asana as a useful platform for organising tasks and projects and the conversations that surround them.