Tools on Trayix

Collaboration platforms: fewer tools, clearer rules

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 09:00:00 +0000

When offices closed this spring, teams grabbed whatever worked. Zoom for meetings, Microsoft Teams for chat, Slack for another group’s chat, email for everything else, and a different board for each project. It was the right call at the time. Eight months later, many teams are paying for it: people check five places before they find the answer, and nobody is sure where a decision was made.

The fix isn’t another tool. It’s fewer tools and clearer rules.

Integration is the hard part

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 09:00:00 +0000

You’ve chosen the work management tool, and the team likes it. The pilot went well. Now comes the part nobody put in the project plan: making the tool work with everything else. Work management never stands alone. It touches finance, time tracking, human resources (HR), customer data, and the reports executives read on Monday morning.

Connect the dots, deliberately

Years ago we wrote about the value of connected systems. That idea hasn’t aged, but the stakes have grown. With cloud tools, it’s easy to start a new workspace in an afternoon. It’s much harder to make sure the hours a developer records, the budget finance tracks, and the milestone a manager reports all agree.

Choosing a cloud work management tool

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Spreadsheets and on-premises Microsoft Project installations are giving way to cloud work management tools. Teams are looking at Jira, Asana, Smartsheet, and monday.com (which changed its name from dapulse late last year), among others. The question we hear is “which one should we buy?” It’s the wrong place to start.

Start from how work flows

Before you open a vendor website, describe how work moves through your organization. Who requests it? Who approves it? Who does it, and who needs to know when it’s finished? Write this down for two or three typical kinds of work, such as a software release, a marketing campaign, and a facilities request.