Call for Advice on Effective Remote Collaboration

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Permalink Reply by Kendra Von Achen on February 4, 2010 at 2:45pm

I think finding the right tools to assist your remote collaboration is a big help. Skype, Huddle, Zoho and the like are great tools to get everyone on the same page, share conversations together, collaborate on documents etc. I think a big key is having everyone agree to the flow of information and how often they will check on it. It's also proper training on the tools to make sure they know when to alert everyone (or certain users) of a change and when to just post information. Also devising checkpoints of when to check back with each other throughout a project.

I'm working on a project right now with a subcontractor, and we created specific checkpoints and we are discussing via email and phone what's been completed, any questions that came up, I'm testing his work, and then coming back with questions/issues. I then relay information back to the client, creating a seamless flow of information to the client without creating too much confusion. I've been in front of the client twice now for a 4-month process.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Dalgarno on February 7, 2010 at 10:42am

Yes, keeping everyone on the same page is key. Skype, email, Twitter, Google Groups, Google Docs, Vault and, of course the phone, all make things a lot more straightforward.

Depending on the nature and amount of trust built up in the relationship you can be more or less flexible in agreeing terms up front. We've worked successfully with a couple of (remote) subcontractors for 3 years now and are in a position where we can outline their work and then largely leave them to it. They know we'll have more work for them in the future if they continue to do a good job.

We were able to organise a new overseas conference with a couple of local organisations without having met any of the people involved. In this case we found the people through personal recommendation, mapped out the concept by email, and then had regular Skype conference calls to monitor progress and outline new actions.

For new subcontractors we have a tighter definition of work to be done and monitor this quite closely.

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Permalink Reply by Glenn Engstrand on February 7, 2010 at 2:53pm

Thanks for these tool suggestions, Kendra and Mark. When working with customers, I find a lot of abandonment when it comes to using collaboration tools. They all just want to go back to email. I know how to keep the contractor on the collaboration tool. Willingness to work in the collaboration tool is part of the job description. How do I keep the customer on the tool?

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Permalink Reply by Bahadir Cambel on February 7, 2010 at 8:58pm

I think being very specific about what is going to be achieved ; is a key point when using any collaboration tools.

People often asked to use a lot of different tools which they don't know , and probably don't want to, so they continue with good old e-mail.

What we try to do most of the time, prepare an email to outline everything we will do during collaboration ( send the questions we have , topics , bottlenecks, etc ) so let them prepare , and then do the session. For us, it worked so far.

We also realized that , keeping the session shorter works better..

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