How to collaborate well for project management?

Henry Ford, an American industrialist and the founder of Ford automobiles, said, “If everyone moves forward together, success will come by itself.” Indeed, a project cannot be completed without the work of a united team. Team members pool their knowledge, experiences and skills in order to achieve the goals set and to ensure that the project is a success. That's what we call collaboration.

Whether your employees are in the same premises, scattered around the world or working remotely, here is how to collaborate effectively within a team on a project.

Setting the rules of collaboration

Collaboration is the act of thinking and working together in order to achieve a common objective, that is to say the success of your project. However, each team has its own way of working together. For example, remote teams will mainly use digital tools and applications such as video conferencing and instant messaging to communicate, sharing ideas and documents, and move forward with their project. As for employees working in the same premises, they will undoubtedly prefer face-to-face meetings.

So, for good collaborate on the management of a project, it is important to define from the start how your team works, and the best practices to follow to make collaboration as smooth as possible. That means:

• define the roles and responsibilities of each person;
• explain how you see collaboration within your team (mutual support, knowledge sharing, etc.);
• clarify the behaviors to adopt and the values to defend;
• determine how to work and communicate (synchronous and asynchronous communication);
• establish procedures to be followed in the event of problems or conflicts;
• celebrate every small success.

Thus, your employees all leave with the same bases. They know how to work together, when and how to communicate, and how to respond to each situation. This allows them to be more efficient and more productive on a daily basis in managing the project.

Develop team cohesion

If, for this project, you have assembled a completely new team, it is very likely that the members know little or nothing about each other. To collaborate effectively together, it is imperative that they get to know and trust each other.

As a project manager and manager, it is your role to promote team spirit and group cohesion in order to break barriers, create links and conviviality, and develop a climate of trust within your team.

To do this, bring your employees together at events within the company, but also outside. For example, have breakfast as a team every Monday morning, have lunch together regularly, and end the work week by going for a drink on Friday evening. You can also organize team building activities such as sports activities, a cooking class, a creative workshop or an introduction to theater or wine tasting. There is no shortage of ideas to unite your team!

Focus on communication

To collaborate effectively on a project and guarantee its success, communication is absolutely essential. Indeed, it is imperative that your employees regularly exchange and share key information on the project. This makes it possible to monitor the progress of tasks in real time and to know who is doing what in order to avoid mistakes, oversights, and duplicates.

As a project manager, you should encourage open, honest, and non-judgmental communication. Communication also means knowing how to listen. Thus, each of your employees should feel that they can ask all their questions and share their opinion, even divergent ones, without being judged.

Here are a few ideas to promote communication:

• organize daily, weekly, bimonthly meetings/exchanges with your team;
• encourage coffee breaks to promote informal communication;
• leave your door open to indicate that you are available to talk
• use communication tools such as instant messaging or video conferencing for geographically dispersed teams

Create a collaborative environment

Corporate culture plays a fundamental role in encouraging and valuing collaboration. Here are some tips for creating a collaborative work environment in your organization.

• Provide quiet, comfortable areas that are conducive to teamwork without distraction.
• Empower your employees and involve them in business results.
• Be transparent about your decisions and encourage feedback.
• Create a safe space where everyone feels free to share their opinions and ideas without fear of being judged.
• Encourage knowledge sharing and learning among colleagues.
• Value teamwork.

Use collaborative tools

There are a multitude of tools that promote communication and collaboration within teams. Collaborative platforms such as Wimi allow employees to work effectively together to carry out a project. Indeed, they find in the same space all the functionalities necessary to facilitate teamwork and monitor the progress of the project.

For example, with the Wimi collaborative suite, you have in particular:

• workspaces unified by project or activity;
• Of a task manager;
• of Discussion channels, instant messaging and a video conferencing system;
• shared calendars;
• file storage space.

Today, these tools are essential to facilitate collaboration within teams. This is especially true when team members are not physically working together.

To collaborate effectively on the managing a project, it's not enough to bring competent people together and wait for magic to happen. Collaboration requires a minimum of preparation and organization. This includes defining best practices, developing team cohesion, promoting communication, creating a collaborative environment and using collaborative tools. It's up to you to play!