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Project-Aligned Collaboration concentrates on providing users with a solution to focus collaboration processes around goals and objectives, projects and milestones, and tasks that have to be successfully executed to achieve a successful delivery of any project and initiative on time, on budget and within project limitations. It facilitates good project management and execution processes by ensuring team defines their goals and objectives. Commitments are defined and owned by an individual to ensure accountability, and progress updates are always visible providing for focused reviews on potential issues. The open environment promotes clear communication.
Project-Aligned solutions support processes and act as information repositories for teams to manage and track their objectives, projects, milestones, tasks, discussions and documents easily. While participants will prefer various collaboration tools to support their processes, it is important to recognize key elements that will be critical to success of collaboration processes. Virtual or face-to-face meetings will continue to happen. Conversations will certainly be required. However, it is critical to incorporate processes and a supporting solution to have team on same page on goals, objectives, milestones, timeline, progress and issues.
The following benefits can be found when using Project-Aligned Collaboration:
* Focus collaboration and help team members to follow through on objectives, milestones and deliverables in timeframe desired. * Allow participants to exchange information on work that has to be done and has already been done, providing a clear view of steps, and their status, that need to be executed to successfully finish project/initiative and produce deliverable/document. * Give different stakeholders a view on status of a project or a portfolio of projects allowing participants to add milestones and tasks, and update their status themselves. This way a Project-Aligned Collaboration solution can also be used as an efficient vehicle to provide visibility into status of a project or initiative across different stakeholders (suppliers, customers, and partners). * Support learning processes and repository for future team members by capturing processes and information in a web-based repository reducing ramp-up time of new participants. * Incorporate critical project management and execution processes with ease to ensure collaboration succeeds.
There are several out-of-the-box solutions available that address specific areas of Project-Aligned Collaboration. Some of these are project management solutions, document management solutions, Email, web-meeting software, etc. Combining these essential solutions by having a unifying user interface that retrieves information from different data repositories and provides visibility into tasks and resources allows maximizing benefits from those solutions.
About gekima Solutions LLC
gekima Solutions LLC specializes in delivering solutions for optimization and automation of administrative business processes, including solutions to allow customers to benefit from Project-Aligned Collaboration. bizTE is gekima’s solution to automating timesheet and expense management processes of organizations, both large and small. bizTE’s easy to use web based interface ensures reduced training time letting customers instantly reap benefits of automated timesheet and expense management.
Gerd Schmidt is co-founder of gekima Solutions LLC and has over 15 years of experience in software and business consulting.