Introduction: The Vital Importance of the Information Exchange

The proper communication between teammates is of paramount importance for any company regardless of its size and nature of business. The information exchange should be made smooth and safe to prevent any loss of information and allow important information to reach an intended recipient in a timely fashion. This will provide a company with a good working atmosphere where all employees are duly informed and possess all the data they need to perform their duties properly. The latter ensures that your company is functioning well to meet the clients expectations and generate more profit.

The Power of Delegation: Deadlines and Task Management

Deadlines are of great importance for each business, because of a quite simple rule: if you miss a deadline you lose money. The ability to assign and track tasks is essential to share workload between employees. A chief has to delegate tasks to appropriate subordinates in order to meet a projects deadline. At the same time, the chief has to retain the full control over the assigned tasks so as to be able to modify them immediately if circumstances change.

E-mail Headache: A Wrong Tool for the Right Goal

It should be noted that email is not the best way to support communications within a work team because email is quite slow and inconvenient for short messages exchange. Instant messaging software such as ICQ and AIM do not meet the teamwork requirements too because they cannot control deadlines and do not support task management. That is why it is so easy to get lost in tons of email correspondence and finally forget an important task concealed in one of those messages. In order to prevent this from happening, you should use an appropriate tool supporting teamwork. Below are several key factors you should take into consideration when choosing teamwork software.

Convenience: Hassle-Free User Interface

Often people speaking about teamwork underestimate the importance of an individuals comfort at workplace, emphasizing the importance of the efficiency of a team in the whole. In the meantime, the efficiency of a team may be dramatically increased thanks to boosting efficiency of each individual team member. A good step for moving in that direction is to equip a company with a collaboration tool, which is user-friendly and easy-to-use. A teamwork solution of CuteReminder Labs is a good example of that approach. Let us take a more detailed look at this. There are several quite revolutionary things inside the box to provide you with the appropriate working environment. First of all, there is the user interface tightly integrated with the Windows desktop, so the program is running in the background and is always at hand yet does not clutter your desktop. Second, the user interface is designed with the main goal in mind to reduce the number of mouse clicks needed to operate the program, so the application spares your efforts while you actually use it. This is very important, since the program is supposed to be used quite intensively. Third, to provide you with a comfortable workplace, the user interface is made hassle-free, which means that the program is so gentle that it does not distract you even when reminding you.

Personal Info Management: Be Well-Organized

Each team member working in a team should be personally well organized to be an adequate partner for the rest of the team. This means that within the framework of a teamwork solution team members should be provided with a personal info management software to boost their personal efficiency. Personal means all matters, which do not require any explicit involvement of other employees. An employee, who can successfully work on his personal tasks, is able to do group tasks properly as well, since s/he has not to do emergency jobs thanks to good personal organization.

History: Case Tracking

Another important prerequisite for an efficient teamwork is the ability to track tasks. You should be able to access the history of any particular task in case any questions arise. This will help you to find bottlenecks and investigate what has gone wrong on the case-by-case basis in order to improve your business model. The ability to dig into history is very essential to discover intercommunication problems and it helps to find out who was instructed to do something important yet has not done so. This is exceedingly important in case you interact with a client and something has gone wrong on the clients side (this is, of course, beyond your control), and which finally led to the break of a deadline or increase of cost. In that case you can always prove to the client that you have acted properly, avoid the conflict and retain your client.

Installation and Maintenance: Reduce Costs

The specifics of a teamwork solution aimed for use in small teams is that it should be low cost, simple, and convenient for your employees. Low cost means that you should minimize your expenses regarding the installation and maintenance of a software solution. The software should be flexible and quite simple to eliminate the need to train your staff to use it. Better yet, the teamwork solution should be maintenance-free. This provides you with a good chance to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increase the Return of Investment (ROI). A software solution, which does not have cumbersome controls in the user interface, is easy to use. The convenience of software contributes greatly to the willingness of employees to actually use it. This personal factor is of key importance to the successful implantation of a new technology in your company and boosting the efficiency of your business.

Example: Handy Teamwork Solution for Small Teams

Cute Reminder Enterprise Edition is a teamwork solution, which provides you with the ability to easily manage tasks within a team, communicate with your teammates, and manage personal information. The teamwork solution is a standalone application, which is easy to install and does not require the installation of any server software nor Internet connection. You can easily start using the program after a short interactive introduction, which is included in the product. No training is required. The user interface of Cute Reminder is quick in the uptake and hassle-free.

Conclusion: Measuring the Results

It may seem not easy to measure the results of the implementation of a collaboration solution in your company. This is, however, a myth. Provided that all key factors remain unchanged (e.g. the number of staff members and their qualification, the average number of customers, the number of products/services your company sells, etc.) you may easily determine how much a teamwork solution added to the improvement of your business. Just compare the following figures before and after you implement a teamwork solution: (1) the number of positive feedback from your customers, (2) the number of clients complaints, (3) the number of satisfied and (4) dissatisfied employees, (5) the average number of clients handled by an employee, (6) the number of positive feedback from your partners, (7) the total amount of overtime hours spent by your employees, etc. You may find helpful to engage a marketing/PR company to arrange customer polls to estimate how you progress. A good teamwork solution can easily provide you with a 10% improvement of each of these seven multiplicative business factors, which means that your total business efficiency improvement would be 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 = 1.94 = 194%. So, this is the result stated in the title of this article.

Nicholas Kabarow is a senior designer and software architect at CuteReminder Labs (http://www.CuteReminder.com). His innovative ideas were implemented in the personal information management software called Cute Reminder. Nicholas main concept of software aimed for personal use is the quick and unobtrusive user interface able to spare your efforts daily. Comments can be sent via the contact form at http://www.CuteReminder.com/contacts.php.

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