Promoting Profits: Collaboration

With most businesses looking to control costs, their decision makers need to find innovative new ways to do business. One way that many firms can increase productivity without raising costs is to promote a culture of collaboration. Today, we’ll take a look at some of the useful technology that businesses can leverage to improve their output.

Of course, a small amount of collaboration is necessary for a business to run. Different departments control different aspects of a business’ operations, and since each department collects useful information, by passing on said information to benefit another’s ability to serve the company, you are collaborating. What we’d like to highlight today are some technologies used to promote project and service collaboration. Mastering these will make business more efficient and effective at meeting goals. 

Demand

The demand for collaboration tools is quite possibly the most important concept when discussing them. What purpose do you have to think that collaboration improvements would alter the value that output has to your business? Many businesses have a lot of moving parts and few resources in which to accomplish them. They need to collaborate just to have viable products to offer their customers. 

With more and more businesses hiring remote employees and outsourcing some of their work to non-employees, there needs to be tools in the center that can allow remote and gig-economy workers to work with the staff that is on hand to produce the desired product or service. Let’s take a look at some of the technology that small and medium-sized business decision makers are looking at to help fuel necessary collaboration:

Integration

One major trend you are beginning to see organizations take advantage of is integration. Integration is the act of paying development teams to create software bridges with other software in order to promote efficiency. Software has been a big part of business for decades, but today, the pure supply of software development professionals makes it viable for an organization to create integrations with core pieces of line-of-business software in order to take full advantage of their technology investments.

Communication

Your business has had a phone system for as long as you have been there, but today there are other communication tools that businesses are starting to take advantage of. Today, instant messaging, video conferencing, and innovative new collaboration tools promote clear and concise communications throughout a project team, service department, or amongst decision makers. 

Management

Improving your business’ top-down approach to task management can have a big positive effect on its ability to be collaborative. Project management software, such as Microsoft SharePoint, or  collaboration apps like Slack, provide teams all the tools any project team would need. When your business is talking about improving collaboration in your day-to-day product or service delivery, however, choosing the right line-of-business software for your collaborative needs is important. If you are a smaller business, you can probably function fine with a SQL-based database management system (DBMS). Larger companies will want an end-to-end Professional Services Automation (PSA), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) title that can help you prioritize and assign tasks, get feedback from assigned teams, and get things done quickly, on both ends. 

If you are looking for a boost to your business’ productivity, consider reaching out to Washington Works for suggestions on how to make it happen through technology. Call us today at 301-571-5040 to learn more.