Project Collaboration: 5 Ways to Use Project Collaboration

Project collaboration is a business methodology that encourages teamwork amongst employees of unique perspectives, departments, and skills to complete project tasks. The term also refers to how team leaders and members map out a project's lifecycle to create a collaborative environment and ensure streamlined task management to meet necessary team needs and milestones.

Project management and project collaboration are systems for managing workflows and achieving stakeholders’ goals, but the templates for each kind of task-completing vary:

• Decision-making: Project management speaks to a more traditional, top-down form of project planning. Supervisors and higher-ups will employ various project management tools to define employees’ tasks clearly. Project collaboration is more horizontally-minded, meaning effective collaboration engenders more teamwork and democratic decision-making.
• Teamwork: Team leaders and managers may still operate at the head, but project collaboration involves many people of different skill sets coming together to collaborate on the same project, each person fulfilling specific needs.
• Process: Project management software can help the campaign avoid bottlenecks, as do routine check-ins with managers to provide real-time feedback. Collaborative teams will jot ideas down on whiteboards during brainstorming sessions, utilize distinct project collaboration software and apps to communicate more fluidly, and share files and relay notifications or status updates to the entire team instead of to a single team leader.
• Tasks: Project management streamlines task completion, but team collaboration is less common—instead, leaders give each worker tasks based on their specialties, working in spreadsheets, or on smaller tasks that add up to a completed sum.

Collaborative project teams are essential in the workspace for several distinct reasons. Consider the following advantages of project collaboration:

• Instills creativity: Brainstorming and time for dedicated thinking allow teams to bond and come up with innovative ideas instead of only completing day-to-day monotonous tasks.
• Connects remote teams: Many workers operate in different states and time zones. Project collaboration invites the possibility of bringing disparate employees together for a common purpose, increasing camaraderie alongside collaboration.
• Gives a stronger sense of purpose: When employees know they are working together, fulfilling specific needs, and seeing those dependencies link up to create a larger whole, it can give teams a greater sense of purpose, drive, and accomplishment.

Leaders can execute project collaboration in the following ways:

1. 1. Get everyone involved. Find each team member’s strengths, and use them to reach a shared goal.
2. 2. Increase team communication. Encourage collaboration and conversation via communication tools and apps so employees can tease out new ideas.
3. 3. Encourage initiative. Teams members should feel comfortable putting their ideas forward.
4. 4. Share information. Inform team members by sharing new details and information as it comes in; slow sharing can lead to a silo mentality and hamper productivity.
5. 5. Work in open concept floor plans. You can remove barriers literally and figuratively by stripping down walls in your office to more easily bring people together and create a workspace more conducive to brainstorming.

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