Keeping Everyone on the Same Page

By Robert Ross

If you have ever paid attention to the credits of a film or television show you will notice that a lot of people were involved in production. The amount of expertise and work needed to make a film is on a grand scale, but the projects you and I are involved in, though they may be on a smaller scale perhaps, are no different. We still need the expertise of more than one person to produce an entire project. We work on communications projects from web sites, to video, to print, or all of them together. The size of a team for each project varies, but the average is in a range of five to forty-five people. Keeping everyone on the same page can be difficult but that is exactly what we strive to do.

Email is not the Solution

Email is a great thing. It is difficult to imagine life without it. The best way to collaborate and keep everyone on the same page however, is not email. For example, producing a web site demands a number teams that make up the total team. We will have the copy team, the programming team, the design team, the QA team, and the project management team. On the copy team we may have four individuals, a lead copywriter, two additional copywriters, and a copyeditor/proofreader. The lead copywriter might produce a Word document and send it off to the rest of the team. Each of the copy team members will open the Word document and create changes on their local copy and send them back. The lead copywriter might consolidate those changes and send the changed version off to the entire team, or just the editor. This cycle usually repeats numerous times resulting in multiple versions of the same documents. Not particularly efficient or ideal. Multiple versions of documents scattered across hard drives, file servers and multiple attachements scattered throughout your email will do nothing but create nightmares.

Revisions via email alone, without attachements, get unweildy. For example, we could have a copyeditor and a proofreader sending a web developer messages about updates or changes to the copy on a web site. These might come in steps depending on how each person works. The proofreader might read one page of the site and send off the changes for that page. Then they might move to another page in the site and send off changes for that particular page. When all is said and done, we might have ten to thirty emails with the copy changes for the web developer has to sift through and keep track of. Again, not particularly ideal and blatantly not efficient.

Use the Same Page

Imagine if everyone in the copy team worked with one document. The same document. A shared document. Or the web developer had one place where all the changes to the copy could be viewed at once. Where the copyeditor and proofreader could continue to add to that shared place. This is what we do. It saves time, money and reduces frustration (for the most part). We don't send changes via email. We don't send document after document after document attachements via email. We share the same document(s). We collaborate on tasks, and most importantly know who is responsible for each task. We still use email to inform team members that a share document has been updated, or a task has been created, changed, or completed. Email is great for keeping people informed. When email is asked to perform as a centralized repository that everyone can share, it falls down. Having everyone on the same page eases the path to execute a successful project. We do this by using collaborative software.

Online Collaborative Software

We use applications that allow us to create a single document for the copy for a web site. Everyone works on the same document because it's a document that is accessed online and shared. Everyone can change the same document to update and revert back to previous versions if necessary. We can all view various versions of the same paragraph. The lead copywriter's version may be in black, the second copywriter's in red. The third copywriter might get to that document later in the day or the next and the rest of team would know that they had not yet made their contribution. In the case of copy changes, the proofreader and copyeditor could use the same document to detail changes to Page X, Page Y, and Page Z of the web site. The web developer would use the same document as well and make the appropriate changes rather than hunting through multiple emails that have changes for Page X and then additional changes for Page X four days later.

Beyond that, online collaborative software can be used to manage projects by assigning tasks, setting up milestones, setting up meetings, and sharing documents such as PDFs, images, even Word documents that can be downloaded from one source.

Need to know how to connect to your corporate Intranet and don't want to have to send the same instructions over and over again via email? Set up a standard location for documents of that type so that your staff looks there first rather than asking you to send them the document you sent them last week, and four days before that, and a month before that.

The Catch

Isn't there always a catch? We've identified two of them:

• Buy-in
• Online versus Desktop

Buy-in
It can be difficult for team members to buy-in to using a system. They have to learn it. They have to login. In many cases it's easier to send an email asking someone else to send them the latest version of a document or send them the instructions for procedure Y. This does not make the person responding to the emails life easier of course. Illustrating the benefits is not enough, adequate training is a must.

Online versus Desktop
The other catch is that desktop applications are often more powerful and have more features than online applications. All the features of Word or Excel for example, cannot and have not yet been replicated by substitute online applications. We've found, however, that such features are usually only beneficial for the end product and that once a team uses a shared source, like a shared document, they can port the completed version to Word if necessary, or InDesign for publishing to PDF. You have to adjust your workflow. You may find it benefits greatly.

Other Benefits

There are other benefits to using online collaborative software. You can see the big picture. You can see who worked on a document or a task and when. You can see who was involved. Very quickly you can see what is in progress, what is coming up, what has been completed, and what has been late, very quickly. You can control permission levels. Most of all, you can save time and work more efficiently.

Online Collaborative Applications

There are numerous applications you can use, from open source to free, to subscription based or license based. From self hosted to remotely hosted. For word processing, scheduling, invoicing, etc. We use Google Apps and OpenGoo for shared document and project management but there are others:

Office

• Google Apps
• OpenGoo
• Zoho

Project Management

• OpenGoo
• Basecamp
• Wrike
• projectturf
• ActiveCollab

Accounting/Spreadsheets

• EditGrid
  
• Freshbooks
• Bamboo Invoice

We've helped businesses better organize themselves by getting everyone on the same page.

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