Collaboration Tools

Collaboration tools: a spotlight on collaboration in the digital age.

Tech // Lilli Ahner-Wetzel // Jan 24, 2019
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Digital transformation has many facets and one aspect is that it can never be an isolated solution, but that it is always about enabling digital interaction between everyone in the company and the organisation. Collaboration tools are used to make this collaboration work well. In this article you can read about the practical experiences we have had with this on the user side at Tallence AG and what our favourite tools are.

Grafische Darstellung eines Collaboration Tools

Even in the age of digitalisation, the following situation occurs from time to time: an employee or even a team stores important documents in a separate directory on the drive, other colleagues need information from this document, but don’t have access to it. In short, you are working in silos again. It is obvious that a lot of time can be saved here and that better results can be achieved.

Slack

When it comes to clarifying a point quickly and without much effort, our colleagues love to resort to Slack .The exchange here is more direct and faster than via e-mail. Slack does this very cleverly, with a little trick: there is simply less space in the text field (simply/just a chat) and communication is more focused and direct than via email. Topics can be clarified very quickly in this way. Documents can be integrated into the chat. In addition, it makes sense to set up a specific Slack channel for topics that are not immediately settled but have a project character.

Confluence

As a company wiki we use Tallence AG Confluence.This is where the exchange of knowledge takes place, and external parties, i.e., our partners and customers, can easily participate in this knowledge transfer. Confluence is used for organisation and communication on more extensive topics, including project and team rooms that are intuitively understandable and easy to work with, for both internal and external colleagues.

Jira

From Confluence it’s literally just a leap to Jira: both tools belong to the Australian company Atlassian. Jira supports daily work in agile teams with its Kanban Boards. On the Kanban Boards the whole Agile project is visible with the core elements User Stories, which are either in progress, finished or backlogged by a team member. As you can see, Jira focuses on progress monitoring in the Agile environment. Jira can also be excellently used in the range of error management as a ticketing system of error management as a ticketing system.

Conclusion

Even this brief overview makes it clear how the tools for digital collaboration interact in practice. Many of our customers also find it an advantage that they can use these tools for our joint projects. It is therefore not even necessary to purchase a complete stack of collaboration tools in the first step. What’s more important is that the employees in the company become familiar with the tools for digital collaboration. This is how they begin to leverage the potential of digital transformation.

Would you like to exchange ideas on collaboration in the digital age? Feel free to contact us!