A Teams and Tools Guide
6 Things To Know Before You Buy Collaborative Software for Your Team
Networked software tools for teams are systems, products and services that improve the productivity of knowledge workers. Before analyzing which tools you'd buy, this is what you need to consider so you'll get the value delivery on your IT investment.
1. A team's ability to produce reports, designs, plans--any information deliverable--should be viewed as the ability to manufacture products. Collaboration tools and procedures for using them are:
- An investment in your organization's 'manufacturing infrastructure'
- An investment to increase the productivity of your high-value human capital
- Production tools that must be managed and supported--just as a steel mill must train staff to run and manage a new smelter. Plan on collaborative tool investments to include investments in training, support and use-management resources.
2. The people responsible for managing use of the tools should be the people who produce the products; the people who do the work must have control over their tools. You may have to encourage them to take on this responsibility. It's not in the production group's best interest to have IT configure and manage the use of their production tools. Either IT works for you (the 'production group') or you should get the tools elsewhere.
3. Consider the business' needs for productivity and innovation from your teams. Identify the 'pains' and the 'hows':
- The Pains: How teams are inefficient: too many meetings, can't find documents, wasted time seeking status information.
- The Hows: How they work (isolated versus collaborative): how they can individually be more productive, how they can collectively be more productive, how they can amplify each other's experience, knowledge and creativity to innovate.
Networked tools, well implemented, can approach:
a) the value of collective knowledge of face to face meetings, and
b) the productivity of individuals working privately in their offices.
4. Buy software (tools) your teams can configure; your goal is to not need programmers or the IT department to configure tools for your team members and project managers. There can be a delicate balance here; you want IT to help with administering the servers, security, etc., but you don't want them forcing you to restrict who has access, what the fields are in task-tracking or database records, what metadata can be collected for files, etc.
5. To scope what is a reasonable investment for the total tools systems (software, support, ongoing management) consider two perspectives:
- Cost perspective: Cost of staff time wasted in under-productive meetings, searching for materials, calling and emailing each other to coordinate, etc.
- Revenue perspective: consider the value delivery on your IT investment if teams can: create existing products faster; create better products in the same amount of time; create more new products which out-innovate competitors; improve quality of responsiveness to customers; create new categories of product for current markets; dramatically improve current conversion rates of Prospect to Purchase Orders.
6. Plan the metrics from the beginning: 'If it's not measured it can't be managed.' There are many useful measures; standard ones are page views and number of sessions by individuals, groups, the entire organization. Within these standard metrics:
- Review them for trends vs. absolute data values.
- Look at the usage distribution; compare trends and activity profiles of high-performing groups with others.
- Observe for 4-6 months to establish initial trend lines.
- Track who is logging how many sessions. If leaders aren't logging representative levels of usage, there will be problems with adoption and a resulting low return on your investment.