Creating a great team is no easy task. There are many books on the subject and plenty of team building challenges you can do. But what about tools? What tools can you use to ensure your team really performs.
First, lets look at the problem of team building in the modern workplace. Teams traditionally go through a process of “forming – storming – norming and performing”. Each time you add or subtract people from the team, this process restarts. Good team cultures get to the “performing” stage fast, while others can never pass the storming stage.
In many projects, the team is composed of a multi-disciplinary mix of stakeholders from more than one department and organisation. This group of people must get together to deliver results. They must get to the performing stage quickly to deliver the project required.
These “fast teams” typically exhibit strong communication skills – checking, rechecking and reviewing each aspect of the project to ensure quality and match to requirements. This high communication approach, while effective at creating quality in a short space of time, comes at a cost: many managers can get caught into a communication overload where emails and text messages threaten to overwhelm them. In these periods, it is all too easy to drop the ball.
This is where Pailz comes in. Pailz helps teams by putting tasks into a central task management system. Groups of coworkers can pick up tasks from shared repositories called “pails”. Every task goes through a process flow, a chain, which is both repeatable and auditable. This prepares the way for improving your team processes for future work, whenever you find delays or problems today.
Pailz has the facility to map many different team process in one system. This is known as a “BPM” or Business Process Management system. Right now, Pailz supports two team processes:
- Ad-hoc tasks – giving ourselves or our coworkers a task and then tracking the task through readiness, completion until sign off.
- Meeting actions – tracking a group of tasks, such as those arising from a meeting, through circulation to all attendees to sign off of the completed tasks
We’ve chosen these two processes to get started with because they are the building blocks of any team task management system. From here users will be able to see Pailz grow with them by integrating with other systems and mapping other processes within the tool. Future processes might include Budget Approvals, Fulfilling a customer request from order to cash or even simply Holiday booking.
Great teams use Pailz because no task gets dropped, work is shared and visible to all and it all happens fast and online. Start using Pailz today!
