Organizing Team Work: The 5 Key Tools
“Since the birth of man, tools have always been an extension of his brain. With his hands too.” Nabil Alami, thermician.
Since the dawn of time, humans have always used tools. This is what led our species to survive and evolve. The tools allowed us to meet our primary needs such as food and shelter, as well as our secondary needs such as entertainment.
Today more than ever, our society is evolving at full speed and new tools are being created daily. At work and in private life, using the right tools is therefore essential to be efficient, productive and organized.
In project management, it is imperative to use the right tools to succeed. Did you know that only 2.5% of businesses succeed 100% of their projects ? Is your creative agency using the right tools to succeed?
Discover 5 essential tools to organize work within your agency and thus guarantee its success. Collaborative tools and platforms for online collaboration are the essential element in the digital transformation of businesses.
1. An agenda
Time is precious and to meet deadlines, it is essential to have an up-to-date calendar in order to visualize the key dates, milestones, and deadlines for your projects and tasks.
Each employee can share your agenda with team members to keep them informed of his availability and his progress on the tasks for which he is responsible.
This type of toolshared agenda also makes it easy to organize important events for the project such as specific or recurring meetings with the team and the client.
Generally, it is possible to synchronize the tool directly scheduler with your inbox and smartphone in order to receive notifications and reminders.
2. A task management tool
This type of tool is essential to know the progress of the various tasks of the project.
The project manager easily creates tasks, sets deadlines, and assigns one or more managers. It sets up notifications to alert in real time when a task is updated, overdue, or completed. Everyone can visualize all the tasks and their progress on the project schedule. In the blink of an eye, the whole team knows who is responsible for each task and their state of progress.
Such a tool facilitates team collaboration. by allowing each member to easily organize themselves and structure their tasks within defined workspaces. Creating shared to-do lists (or to-do lists) allows everyone to know where they are at in their work and to have the feeling of accomplishment when a task is crossed off the to-do list.
3. A Drive
The days of exchanging work documents by email are over. Today, there are platforms to easily, simply and instantly store and share all your work documents with your employees, customers and service providers. These platforms are accessible both online and offline, and you can synchronize your documents from your computer.
The confusion of knowing which is the latest version of a document is over. Now, these tools offer automatic versioning as soon as a file is modified or added. And you can access older versions anytime.
Finally, you can control access to each document and prevent colleagues from accessing it when you edit it. This prevents multiple people from working on the same document at the same time.
4. Communication tools
At work, communication is the key to success. As a creative agency, communication is your field of choice and you should therefore avoid the proverb “shoemakers always have the worst shoes” at all costs.
To communicate effectively with your customers, your team and your service providers, you must use adapted and efficient tools such as:
- private messages that allow you to share information with your employees and customers, and thus reduce email flows;
- discussion groups that organize exchanges between members of a team working on the same project;
- The Real-time chats are ideal for reacting instantly, soliciting the opinion of your employees, asking a question and getting quick feedback, congratulating your colleagues and motivating your teams;
- Of audio and video calls to communicate very easily with your employees and customers, regardless of where you are. You can also share your screen, which is very useful for making corrections in real time.
This type of tool gives you the opportunity to exchange and share ideas and files easily and quickly, links, photos and comments related to the project you are working on.
5. A tracking tool
This tool is essential to have a global vision of the project and to closely monitor the progress of your projects as well as the performance of your teams.
Thanks to it, you can analyze the workload of your employees, know where they are in the progress of their tasks and know their availability. For example, you can ask a more available collaborator to help a member of their team to avoid being late on a task.
This tool is essential to give you a realistic estimate of the delivery date of a project based on the performance of your team and the time allocated to each task.
Conclusion
“You can't order productivity, you have to provide the tools to enable people to become better.” Steve Jobs
To be productive and efficient, a creative agency needs to be organized and use all of these tools (even if this list is not exhaustive). One project management solution brings all these functionalities together in a single tool. Thus, you save time by avoiding juggling between different software and you save money by only acquiring a single product.
