Requirements for Project Management—Team Collaboration in the Cloud



No matter how project decisions get made, leaders in Collaboration say that success and ongoing progress requires engaged executive leadership.

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Create rewards

Cloud-based collaborative project management requires more open stakeholders that share often. Knowledge workers, stakeholders and other team members—do not readily share their work and may consider such efforts threatening and a risk to their existence in the organization. Getting beyond such concerns requires building a reward system that encourages project collaboration. It’s important to set achievable goals, with milestone and to measure performance using metrics.


Appoint advocates

Every organization has many leaders in positions of authority with strong affinity towards effective project team collaboration. Some of these executives are already experienced users of social media, video, message boards, wikis, newsfeeds or other business-oriented collaboration tools. Prominent and leading organizations set up a support network of executives to give encouragement, engagement, evangelism, and recognition as a means of motivating, and inspiring people in the organization to adopt, accept and embrace positive collaborative methods for executing and achieving project delivery.


Measure progress

Savings is often the push behind some cloud-based collaboration initiatives, but don't make this the core focus. Most projects fail due to poor communication and when elevated collaboration and engagement exists, project communication improves dramatically among stakeholders—“when team members create the solution together, they're more likely to own it and tell others”. The primary emphasis for many organizations’ is the drive towards increased collaboration, customer involvement, transparency, team member engagement, or something else. Not everything gets measured, but it’s very important to try.


Continuous improvement

Technology is rapidly advancing in the areas of mobile, cloud-computing, social, and collaboration—all of which give project knowledge workers new tools to get work done better, faster, and cheaper. What might be the right fit today, will be obsolete tomorrow. It’s important to stay current with changing technologies, project methods and to continuously refine cloud, and collaboration strategies considering advancement of technology, practice, and user adoption. Effective collaboration is a competitive advantage, and it behooves every organization to build a sustainable approach to stay on top of such advances, or they risk being left in the dust.