Top-5 needs for online project team collaboration

Today when I reviewed the newest release of Comindwork with tons of features and widgets I suddenly recollected the times when we didn’t have anything for knowledge work collaboration.

Well, I really can not imagine how we would work without any project management system today. I perfectly remember the times (although it was 5 years agooo) when the main tool was just Outlook and its folders with mess of unsorted emails, issues, suggestions, lost decisions and missed milestones.

I think the core needs of the project team didn’t change over last 5 years, although most of today’s project management systems provide much more than really desired. Here is my list of TOP-5 most demanding features for online project management:

• 1. Project blog – without this power of informal communication your project is just dead. This is excellent source for inspiration and place for sharing opinions and news in distributed team.
  2. Email notifications, RSS – you should ensure that every team member is aware about the latest project changes and events. The information should be shared immediately and target people should have 100% guarantee not to miss any critical comments to their tasks or project requirements and schedule.
  3. Bird view dashboard – “1-minute-dashboard to jump into the project context” – ability to review project state and progress during just 1 minute. This is critical for making immediate project decisions or making scheduled project audit.
  4. Project wiki and tagging – the powerful “knowledge shaping”. When we write requirements – we use wiki. We like co-editing wiki-documents as that is simple and powerful way to prepare really mature documentation, help-topics or tips for beginners.
  5. And the 1st prize is… Case (issue) tracking – our biggest challenge was to handle hundreds of small issues which must be tracked until closure and 100% never ignored. In such a situation we create a new case and give the flag to the person who is responsible to resolve the issue. In 2007 year every team player resolved over 200-300 of such cases.

This was the 1st wave of features for Comindwork and they managed to establish basic management discipline and culture in their team. After that the main task was to make the knowledge work truly effective.