Recently I found myself looking into the world of ‘enterprise collaboration’ tools. The key thing I love about such applications is the amount of transparency they offer. Suddenly, discussions, thoughts, suggestions and documents become a lot more visible and accessible.

In a previous role I had worked a lot with tools like Jive and Basecamp and I’ve recently been ‘collaborating’ a lot through Asana and Yammer. It made me realise that even though a lot of these tools set out to provide a similar value or proposition, there are nevertheless some differences worth looking into:

1. Online collaboration vs online project management (1) – People can collaborate around ideas or specific projects, or both. Yammer is great as a tool to collaborate around ideas whereas Basecamp and Asana are more geared towards project management. As my ex-colleague Daniel Siddle – who specialises in this area – put it: “real-time collaboration is a hard one to get right since the concrete end goal can be much harder to define and less tangible compared to using online project management software.” With project management software the tangible outcome is that you can deliver a project faster but with social collaboration software things can be a lot less tangible.
2. Online collaboration vs online project management (2) – What I like most about using tools such as Yammer, Jive, Chatter (Salesforce) and Confluence is that they enable full transparency, keeping all relevant communications in a single place. When working on specific projects, tools such as Podio (see Fig. 2 below) and Basecamp (see Fig. 3 below) can provide visibility on project progress and on who’s doing what. One thing I learned from having another play with some of these tools is that most online collaboration tools also seem to have at least some project management functionality. Good examples in this respect are Yammer, Tibbr and IBM Connections. Employees can have lengthy discussions on these platforms but are able to switch into a more project management related part of the system if required. In contrast, some of the online project management tools that I’ve looked at seem less geared towards open collaboration.
3. Some tools in the online collaboration space and what to look out for – Tools that come to mind are: Chatter, Socialtext, Igloo, Jive, Yammer, Confluence, MangoApps and daPulse (see Fig. 1 below). As with any digital application, key things to look out for are (1) ease of use and clean interface design and (2) management of information. With some of the tools that I mentioned above there’s a risk of information overload, with the application becoming one long activity stream. Also, I’ve learned from implementing some of these tools with clients that the more intuitive it is to share and comment on ideas, the higher the uptake of these tools. I like tools such as Yammer and Jive because they are so intuitive and easy to use.
4. Some tools in the online project management space and what to look out for – When managing projects of any scale and with a number of different people involved, Gantt charts or emails are no longer sufficient in my view. Tools like Asana, Basecamp, Podio, Trello and SocialCast provide private workspaces dedicated to specific projects and make it easier to keep track of project progress and outstanding tasks. Whereas a tool like Yammer is continually strengthening the project management aspect of its application (see Fig. 4 below), I find that Asana, Podio and Basecamp (see Fig. 2/3 below) can really help in assigning tasks as well as understanding the status of a project and its individual milestones. Another aspect to look out for is the secure sharing of documents. Most of the applications I mentioned above do have that capability, but there also platforms out there such as Dropbox and Box that do just that: securing storing and sharing of documents.

Main learning point: having used social and project management tools for a while now, it’s interesting to see an overlap in functionality and in proposition arising between the different tools. Like with most products the main challenge to the user is to be clear what they want get out of a specific tool and to establish whether it can deliver on that expectation. For instance, if one’s end goal is to deliver projects faster, some of the open collaboration solutions might not be appropriate. In contrast, if one likes to collaborate around ideas then the more traditional project management software might not be the way to go.

Fig. 1 – An introduction to daPulse by daPulse

Fig. 2 – How Podio can be used for Project Management by Podio

Fig. 3 – A review of the Basecamp project management functionality by Joel Milne

Fig. 4 – An overview of new Yammer features by Yammer

Related links for further learning:

1. http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/22/jive-yammer-competitor-shows-its-moxie-by-making-paid-service-free/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software
3. http://www.ombud.com/product/compare/yammer
4. http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-competitors-to-Microsofts-Yammer
5. http://www.cio.com/article/598122/15_Free_Enterprise_Collaboration_Tools