Becoming Who You Want To Be

We live in a world full of specialists. The times, when one person accompanied a development process of a product from A to Z are over. Today, from a small gadget like a MP3 music player to bigger projects like a car, everything must be perfect, functional, cheap and reliable.

How can we ensure this high quality? We split the development process into different parts and let do every part by someone who can do it best. The sum of all parts is a high quality, very reliable and affordable end product. This splitting of the product development process needs a high level of coordinated teamwork.

There are lots of different software tools available for project management. But what is important? Which features should you take care of, when you look for a groupware?

One important thing is: Every function should be easy and intuitive to use. You can’t waste your time, learning how the new software works. You have to push the project forward. Therefore a modern and team capable platform must be easy to use. When everyone understands how things work, he will use it.

You should have all your important tasks, notes, emails appointments and contacts available in one single system. Everything should be easy accessible and now comes the important thing: it should be shareable and adapted to synchronization! This ensures that everyone of your team has access to all important information of the current project and doesn’t need to spend hours of running after it or waiting for others to give him the information he needs.

Online or offline? You can use an online system. The benefits are that you don’t have to setup everything and the system will be available over the internet. But this approach has also some disadvantages. What happens when the provider (where your data remains) goes offline for some reason? Will you be able to access your data when you don’t have an internet connection? And finally: Do you trust these foreign guys, that you give them all your data? It’s often safer to invest some time and set up a local system at your company. All data remains at your place and modern groupware systems offer the possibility to access your files via the internet, too.

Dominik Sapinski is senior project manager at soft-evolution, an innovative provider of team management software Pimero.