Social engagement is an essential part of project management, it brings about a boost to an organization’s productivity as they could find ways to socialize project management tasks. This is made possible by integrating social features to the available project management tools.
It is a big help for distributed organizations and inter-departmental employees as it enables them to share information and work in collaboration with each other. This helps them keep all the ideas, files and conversations related to a project at a single place so that anyone associated with that project can easily find them.
Social collaboration features in project management tools
A number of project management tools have been able to combine collaborative features with project management effectively. Some examples are:
Project Management tool Wrike has some intuitive and easy-to-use collaboration features. It integrates with email and combines your email conversations with the online project you’re working on. It provides a social network-like experience which can be used by teams to collaboratively organize data, share files and comment on different projects. It has a dashboard where employees can receive a real-time update of whatever they’re working on from their colleagues. It allows the team leaders to track the project’s progress effectively and get different workers in sync with each other. It has a customizable follow feature where employees can receive all updates related to a particular activity, or can choose not to follow an activity if they don’t want to receive the notifications.
Project Management tool Clarizon version 6 also offers a social user interface. It allows different teams to have real-time discussions. Project Managers can assign tasks using a drag and drop functionality, based on the availabile information of employees. The people engaged with the project can get a centralized view about it and all the discussions following it. This tool also allows third parties and end users to view the projects.
Social features are included in Zoho Projects too. It has news feeds that allow you to stay updated with your projects. The timeline gives it a social network like feel where you can find and revisit important posts. Its collaboration software allows employees, customers or consultants situated remotely to work together and make spontaneous decisions. It has Project Chat where you can maintain conversations with individuals or a group of people. Employees can discuss about a topic and exchange opinions on project forums. Also, you can maintain a centralized searchable repository on Project Pages which can be used as an intranet to publish documents, links and announcements.
The Bottom Line
Including social features increases the value and efficiency of project management tools. People like to be involved in activities to familiarize, comment on some content, receive news feeds and share stuff with each other. Social project management tools will enable project managers to have greater visibility into the project and let them understand the way of working, strengths and weaknesses of different employees. These tools will bring even more value to the employees as they get to have a clearer idea about their tasks and can get their queries answered immediately. It is time, project management tools start evolving according to the needs of people using them