The Best Collaboration Tools For Your Team
When you’re working with a team, communication needs to be transparent. If you’re not clear about directives or what someone wants for the scope of a project, that could be a recipe for a failed project or a lot of extra work.
Collaboration tools are the best way to avoid those lengthy email threads and combat your company silos. Here are a few tools we recommend giving a try to ensure your projects don’t go astray and your teams feel confident about their respective roles:
Trello
Technology teams everywhere have adopted the agile methodology. This method encourages open communication, enabling teams to work in sprints and adapt to change quickly.
One of the best tools to work within the agile framework is Trello, a project board where teammates can see the progress of a job through a series of “cards” which can be moved into channels of To do, In progress, Done, and On Hold.
Slack
What team doesn’t rely on Slack? Slack is the best platform out there for people to talk and connect on projects. Within your workspace, you create private or open channels, and video call or instant message. Whatever the team needs, Slack can make it happen. Share files, gifs, or make individual channels for what’s for lunch. Slack has everything and more. Plus, just about every tool integrates with it.
Google Docs
Seems obvious, but Google Docs is a super easy way for teams to collaborate on documents. Teams can edit files at the same time, or just leave inline comments to make sure everyone knows what needs to be changed.
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is video conferencing software that lets you schedule meetings ahead of time and also share screens. This is helpful for remote employees and expansive teams that live all across the world.
Asana
Asana is another project management tool similar to Trello. Users can assign tasks, add followers to projects, and keep an eye on deadlines. Asana is perfect for strategic planning and cross-functional collaboration.
Canva
If you’re not the best at designing, but need to make something pretty, Canva can help. You can invite your team to collaborate on one design or share a folder with key templates for your team to use. While Photoshop is still industry standard for deep level graphic design, Canva is great because it’s all drag and drop and simple to use.
Box
Box is the perfect way for teams to share data or files. Teams get file sharing, a content management system, and a centralized dashboard, all in one place.
BitBucket
The main rival to GitHub, BitBucket is a software repository platform. BitBucket has a big advantage over GitHub, and that is unlimited private repositories. If you’re writing and pushing code, BitBucket is a great collaboration tool.
Zeplin
Zeplin is a platform for web tool designers and developers. Zeplin enables team members to comment on current designs in real time. The tool also logs updates and changes while documenting brand assets. This is super helpful when looking back at different design versions to compare and contrast updates.
What’s your team using? We love collaboration and believe in the agile methodology, so if you have any tools that can help us tighten up our processes, we’re all ears. As always, be sure to check out the StartLightSoft Blog for more small business tips and tricks.
