I want to share with you here some thoughts about one of my latest discoveries regarding one Enterprise 2.0 tool, TeamLab.
A few months ago we started organizing the 2011 innovation conference of TEDx in Toulouse. As part of a very mobile but collaborative team, we looked for an efficient but cheap solution to help us organize better.
The Quest
We brainstormed a little about what we needed in our teams and everybody came up with his own needs and it turned out we had lots of ideas: Google or Yahoo Groups, Forums, Emails Aliases, Email Labels, Wikis, Online Documents, Dropbox, Newletters….And, as we all receive lots of mails daily, some of us didn’t care about the details of a topic, while others wanted to have only the big picture.
The dream choice was of course Basecamp, but the high price proved to be a little prohibitive for a small association like ours.
After a little online searching I discovered TeamLab, a similar collaborative project management tool, built by a start-up in Latvia.
The great advantage for us, besides the price, was the fact that we could host it on our servers by downloading it from SourceForge or we could very well create a project account on their website and start using immediately Teamlab.
After a little more research I’ve found here a very good review about the TeamLab vs Basecamp advantages that convinced us that we had found everything we needed.
The Cruise
A few months gone by and we are all pleased to work with TeamLab.
For the less “social addicts” of us, it proved to be easy to adopt and friendly to use. It helped us to avoid the messy emails exchanges, increase visibility on certain topics, assign our tasks in an efficient way, and brainstorm ideas.
The daily notifications from the TeamLab postman proved also to be very useful to make a point about everything new in the projects without having to connect yourself to the project space.
The bad news is that starting July, TeamLab will no longer be totaly free, but we’ll have to pay for some sophisticated features.
Project management web tools in an Enterprise 2.0?
Ever since then I first started using online project management tool, I wondered how it could be used in the actual enterprise and if it could totally replace the e-mail.
Employees still rely heavily on emails to communicate:
1. With their team members
2. With their client
3. With the hierarchy in their own enterprise and their client’s enterprise
One of the good points in adopting such tool would be to better increase collaboration between the team members (1), the client team members (2) and thus increase productivity and customer satisfaction.
However emails seem to be more adapted for the hierarchy (3) type of actors.
