From the course: Project Management for Creative Projects

Using online project management tools

From the course: Project Management for Creative Projects

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Using online project management tools

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- While face-to-face communication is always ideal, it's more and more likely that you're going to use an online tool for project collaboration. This collaboration is very critical, because it allows you to save time and money. People can communicate around the clock, in different timezones, and you don't have to keep making physical copies and paying for things like shipping or postage. This will reduce stress and risk because it allows for frequent communication, and it can make it much easier to meet any obligations that you have in the contract. Additionally, online collaboration leads to more record-keeping, because you have all of the communication related to the project, and this make more accurate billing and creates historical data the next time you get around to planning a similar project. So why should you use online collaboration? The biggest is delivery speed. It saves time and this will speed up the lifecycle of the project. It's always important to remember that time is money, and if you can get the job done faster, there's likely more money for you to keep. It also allows you to deliver to multiple people simultaneously. Instead of a copy that has to get handed around, or a conference call that has to be set up with multiple people, people can look at things on their own and post their comments. This leads to a great infrastructure that can be scaled across organizations or multiple sites, and it really allows for the review of content. Ideally, these tools are going to allow for collaboration as well, where people can see each other's comments and react to them. However there are some areas where online collaboration can be problematic. One, it typically involves learning new skills or new software, and these may require some financial investment. Most online project management tools cost money, sometimes by user or sometimes by platform. There's also the potential of failure. When you send somebody a physical print, they just have to open the envelope and look at it, but now you could have missed emails or people not having the software that they need, or perhaps their IT Department blocked the attachment and they never got it. We can run into issues too with the operating system or other variables that can cause technical hiccups. What's important here is that we try to avoid frustration and people waiting for large downloads or not getting the files they expected. When you're using these online tools for digital delivery, still rely upon traditional communication techniques. Pick up the phone and call when it's important. Follow up and make sure that people were able to see things. Send a separate note after you send a large attachment, saying "I just sent you some files to review, "please make sure that you got them "and communicate with me that they were received." This sort of follow-up is critical because technology fails all the time.

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