Sync It!

We live in a world full of specialists. The times, when one person accompanied a development process of a product from A to Z are over. Today, from a small gadget like a MP3 music player to bigger projects like a car, everything must be perfect, functional, cheap and reliable.

But how can we deliver this high quality and still be competitive? How can we minimize the costs and hold the quality level on top? We divide the product development process into multiple parts and give it to specialists. The more people are involved the more we need a collaboration system to coordinate all the work.

There are lots of different software tools available for project management. But what is important? Which features should you take care of, when you look for a groupware?

One important thing is: Every function should be easy and intuitive to use. You can’t waste your time, learning how the new software works. You have to push the project forward. Therefore a modern and team capable platform must be easy to use. When everyone understands how things work, he will use it.

You should have all your important tasks, notes, emails appointments and contacts available in one single system. Everything should be easy accessible and now comes the important thing: it should be shareable and adapted to synchronization! This ensures that everyone of your team has access to all important information of the current project and doesn’t need to spend hours of running after it or waiting for others to give him the information he needs.

Don’t put everything online. Yes, there are a couple of online services which offer a rich set of functions and you don’t have to set up a system within your company. But what happens, when you get to work and the web service is not there anymore? Are you still able to work, when you don’t have an internet connection? And – do you trust these guys to send them all your data? It’s safer to have everything local within your company and modern groupware and personal information managing systems offer access via the internet, too. So you don’t have to stop working, when you’re on the way.

Dominik Sapinski is lead tech developer at soft-evolution, an innovative provider of team management software Pimero.