Empowering Global Collaboration among Teams
Collaboration continues to be one of the major parameters in enabling successful project execution in organizations across domains—more specifically the IT industry where multiple disciplines work closely to deliver a comprehensive product or service to the end user. In the last decade, global delivery and support centers that are set up across organizations have increased the need for collaboration.
Investing in collaborative tools is becoming an important line item in budget planning. Global teams are even participating in agile delivery, which requires very high levels of collaboration, thanks to these tools and technologies.
Collaborative tools have become an interesting area for corporate acquisitions and mergers with sales as expensive as the one of Skype for $8.5 billion. These range from simple VoIP calls to varied levels of Skype calls, inclusive of group calls; conferencing platforms from Citrix, Cisco, and Microsoft; and enterprise-level social networking tools such as Yammer.
There is a lot of buzz around enterprise social networking promoting strong internal communication along with features to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. Microsoft recently released data points on the boost in Yammer sales since acquisition (growth of 259 percent in the third fiscal quarter) and the number of new customers that have been added (312 in the current quarter).
Adoption of these tools continues to rise not only due to the need but also due to how very affordable they have become. For instance, a GoToMeeting license is available for as low as $49 a month, which enables up to twenty-five people to communicate at the same time 24/7. Yammer’s Enterprise edition is available for as low as $3 per user per month. Similarly, global teams are taking on corporate training sessions virtually through live streaming, which makes interactive learning possible in the absence of a physical tutor.
Looking into the future, companies are making promising investments and research in video-based collaboration and hi-tech conference rooms to support collaboration—not only from a communication angle but also to make it as effective as almost being physically present with the person or group we're talking to. We may be years away from some of these seeing the light of day, but such ideas are already being actively thought through and researched. The potential for a unified collaborative platform should also be looked into.
Although these options have become a boon to promote global collaboration virtually, the need for physical presence cannot be completely eliminated. Some areas where such physical sessions continue to be leveraged include executive reviews and offsite team planning meetings. This has an important side benefit of promoting team bonding, which is more effective in physical meetings than in virtual sessions.
It is here that the management team plays an important role in choosing the teams' work components such that they are logical, do not pose major collaboration challenges, and draw the right balance between physical and virtual sessions.
