By Teresa Meek
When companies take stock of the communication and project management software they’ve adopted over the years, many will find a patchwork quilt — individual solutions sewn together piece by piece as needs and priorities changed across departments.
What can result is a mishmash of messaging apps, business platforms and cloud storage services that don’t necessarily play nicely together.
But best practices in enterprise software are evolving, and the latest technologies are looking more like threads that business leaders can weave through organizations, providing connections between technologies that unlock the full potential of collaboration in the process.
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Too Many Tools
Companies must innovate faster than their rivals to compete in today’s digital world. To help do that, over recent years they’ve been ditching clunky project management tools designed for top-down control and giving teams more freedom to collaborate.
In theory, empowering teams to manage their own work should speed progress and improve results. In reality, it doesn’t always happen that way.
One problem is that different groups use different apps, and the information generated by them becomes isolated. Software developers, for example, might be hooked on team messaging apps, while marketers who don’t use the same platform miss product milestones they should be publicizing. Finance managers might be updating Excel spreadsheets regularly, but operations people who rely on that data may be working off outdated versions.
Some employees take time from their jobs to monitor other teams’ apps. Others are constantly interrupted by emails. Even within work groups, people aren’t getting the information they need. In a 451 Research study commissioned by Smartsheet, 45 percent of respondents said their primary work execution tool lacked critical capabilities and had to be supplemented with other apps.
This profusion of siloed tools isn’t helping productivity. Workers must switch among a host of apps, emails and spreadsheets to keep up. Studies show people lose focus each time they’re interrupted. A recent survey by Udemy found 70 percent of workers are distracted, and 16 percent are constantly distracted.
The result is wasted time, stress, missed communications and project failure. An October 2018 commissioned study, Deliver On Top Business Objectives With Collaborative Work Management, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Smartsheet found that more than a third of projects fail to meet their original business objectives. Thirty-eight percent miss deadlines and 34 percent don’t make budget. Only 22 percent of project management leaders are very satisfied with their organization’s ability to plan and deliver on top objectives.
The consequences can be serious. When a project fails, 50 percent of companies experience revenue loss and 42 percent receive lower customer satisfaction scores, according to the study.
Nearly 80 percent of companies in the Forrester study agreed that collaboration is critical to successfully planning and delivering projects related to top business objectives. But for collaboration to be effective, organizations need tools that work across silos and provide clear, actionable feedback.
Making Collaboration Work
For enterprises, collaboration often means coordinating large teams and outside partners. Few sharing apps have the reach or the security controls to make it work.
Ryan McLaughlin, a senior manager at oil and gas company Sunoco LP, leveraged Smartsheet, a work execution platform, to help his M&A team manage a complex portfolio of more than 1,000 merger and acquisition opportunities. Organizing them in a traditional spreadsheet and emailing the many companies involved used to be repetitive, inefficient and exhausting.
After moving the pipeline to Smartsheet, Sunoco’s managers began automatically sending requests and receiving updates from multiple companies on the same platform where project worksheets are kept. Companies receive only the specific data that Sunoco’s managers choose to share, and don’t see any information about one another. The platform also lets Sunoco’s teams focus on deal analysis by automating additional work processes as deals progress. Leaders can examine the pipeline in different views that allow them to home in on specific aspects of deals and see only the details that matter. It’s easier for Sunoco’s leaders to make evidence-based decisions, and the M&A team is moving deals through the pipeline faster.
As collaboration tools continue to evolve, some are adding powerful automation functionality that create real efficiency at scale. David Bright, a manager in Cisco’s global sales training organization, delivers courses created by 200 authors to 185,000 company associates and partners. Bright used Smartsheet to automate the submissions process and the team no longer needs to regularly contact individual creators about submitting and renewing their content.
The platform also enabled Bright to track which materials salespeople were actually using, and found out the team was spending thousands of dollars on content nobody used. This year, the team has culled 136 sales courses. Learning which content is useful and which is not will guide the team to produce more effective courses in the future.
When it’s done right, collaboration can speed progress, save money and keep projects from veering out of control. But too often, collaboration tools separate workers instead of bringing them together. They can also be hard to use, don’t provide enough visibility to keep projects on track and can’t operate at scale.
To make collaboration more than a buzzword, businesses need to choose tools that eliminate chaos and distraction while providing insights that lead to better decisions and products. Increasingly, companies are choosing work execution platforms such as Smartsheet to connect people and unlock the power of collaborative work.
Teresa Meek lives and works in Seattle. With over 15 years of experience in communications, she has also written for the Miami Herald and Newsday.
