It is an era that which everything is about speed. High-speed railway has to be speeded up, 4G has to be upgraded to 5G, express delivery has to be delivered a little earlier… Similarly for projects, going live a day earlier can save costs on various resources in different dimensions, while gaining a certain lead on the competition in the industry.
In recent years, the ability to work together efficiently has become an important measure of a team’s excellence as the transfer of information has accelerated and innovations in various application areas have proliferated. Teamwork tools are proliferating and are increasingly popular with SMEs both domestically and overseas.
Can team collaboration tools achieve a rapid product launch? We researched in-depth users of the mainstream team collaboration tools, hoping to find answers from them, as well as documenting some objective problems to provide some help to the developers of team collaboration tools.
How to judge a good team collaboration tool?
Mr. Jeff 丨32 years old, product manager of an internet company
I graduated as a developer and then switched to product manager. After a successful transition, I started to use teamwork tools to build a “fighting position” for our small team. I think if we are compared to soldiers, then the teamwork tools are our fighting positions, and our battles all revolve around the positions, if someone leaves their position, he is at risk of being lost. Similarly, if I didn’t set up the position properly, there is also a risk of losing it. How to construct a competent position has become an urgent priority.
How to judge a good or bad teamwork tool? Essentially, I think it’s the core need of the team. The requirements can be countless, but the core requirement is still projected task management. No matter people communication, program review, document information sharing, approval, task assignment, or schedule management, they are all established around one project task. At Tracup, excellent design and great experience are indispensable tools for developers to be effective. The overview of the project and the details of each member are essential to achieving team collaboration. You can view or edit the information in task folders to accomplish the project. Below this part, you can also create a new subtask or upload files from a local or file-sharing library. It is more convenient for our work. Compared to other tools, Tracup’s excellence makes it more unique.
Don’t use collaboration tools with fancy features and complex operations
Mr. Smith 丨25 years old, programmer of a software development company
In the beginning, the team was small and the projects were also small. There were only three or four people on the team, we could just talk to each other or take notes in a book if there were some problems with the project. Later on, as the team continued to expand, three or four team collaboration tools came online one after another, but I felt that they were not as good as the WhatsApp group experience, and if the company had not forced me to use them, I would not consider them at all.
Firstly, some teamwork tools are very cumbersome and complex when it comes to filling out project tasks, with many time points and mandatory notes. I had to spend a lot of time and effort in addition to knocking out code and filling out the project task management, which significantly increased the workload for me and my colleagues.
In addition, teamwork software with too many fancy features is also loaded with bugs. There was one tool that didn’t lag or respond slowly for a week out of the six months we used it. Even flashbacks when filling out task reports are also a common occurrence.
High cost of customization
Mrs. Ball 丨38 years old, owner of an information technology company
It’s been almost ten years since I started my business and three or four years since I supervised a team using collaboration tools. The biggest lesson learned is that collaboration tools are too expensive to customize. The generic version is suitable for the development of mature products, while for us, as a custom development team for a niche industry with a small customer group, it’s a bit of a disadvantage.
Apart from domestic collaboration tools, foreign collaboration tools were also tried, which are not as good as the domestic ones. Compared to small companies, large companies tend to establish their collaborative systems.
Small and medium-sized companies need non-standardized and personalized customization services more than large enterprises, and there are no well-developed domestic customization services for collaboration tools currently. At least for our company, the collaboration tools that work for most companies are limited help for our R&D team.
It can be noted that, although there are still many problems, the application of collaboration tools is still at an explosive stage, while more and more small and medium-sized teams have started to use collaboration tools to achieve efficient product development and launch.
For us, Tracup is a collaborative tool that could better satisfy the needs of SME development teams. Efficient communication and real-time project tracking are achieved through multiple modules such as issue system, project management, file sharing, plug-in system, and team collaboration system.
For project teams with complex projects and customized needs, Tracup offers a highly personalized solution. Helping project managers to keep track of the overall context through visual charts such as trends in new issue types, distribution of people by issue type, statistics on each priority issue, Gantt charts, and more; summarising project progress through global project management, individual task management, and other sections. Furthermore, personalized management features such as task calendars, role management, and version management are also available.
Currently, more and more project teams from SMEs and even large manufacturers are using Tracup, which effectively pushes the Tracup team to respond quickly to new and personalized requests from users and to actively optimize and iterate on them without increasing the learning costs for new and existing users. We hope in the future, Tracup can become a real “painkiller” for all project teams.
Read more: http://tracup.com/blog/The-unspeakable-pain-of-project-teams-1
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Company Name: Tracup
Contact Person: Jon W
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Country: Singapore
Website: www.tracup.com