Team Collaboration Tips

Effective project collaboration tips for teams

You’ve analyzed the various methodologies, chosen the frameworks most suited to your project, your team, and your objectives, and found a project management tool that fits your needs. Throughout the entire project life cycle, working together with each team member will ensure you all function as a cohesive unit.

But just because you’ve selected the right people to accomplish the work doesn’t mean they will always collaborate in the best way. Different work habits, communication styles, and short-term and long-term goals can throw your entire team (and the project) off track.

Clarifying the behaviors you want your team to practice and establishing key values from the beginning starts everyone on the right foot.

We’ve assembled several best practices for setting up and managing your project team to encourage collaboration for optimal performance.

The importance of collaboration in project management

Before we get into building a collaborative team environment, let’s discuss why collaboration is important. Without collaboration, your company will stagnate. It takes a team’s combined ideas and work to pull off a complex project, to innovate, and to come up with products that beat the competition.

Collaboration is important for two main reasons:

When internal teams use remote collaboration tools and work processes that make communication and collaboration more efficient, they can meet goals faster and produce better quality work. Internal productivity increases with smoother collaboration.

A study of 1,100 companies carried out by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) and Professor Rob Cross of Babson College in Massachusetts found companies that promoted collaborative working were five times more likely to be high-performing .

Using UDN Task Manager ’s collaborative tools, California technology innovation company Tactus was able to centralize its product information and shorten Scrum periods by 80% .

When you seek feedback from your customers, partners, and vendors — aka your external stakeholders — and are able to use their feedback to improve your product or service, the customer’s actual wants and needs will better align with your product’s features.

Today, companies who try to do everything in-house are limited — it’s impossible to be good at everything all the time. They need outside ideas and feedback to grow. The same goes for your project team. When teams work together, they achieve amazing things .

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How to set up a project team

Now that we’re on the same page about the value of collaboration, let’s take a step back and discuss what makes a project team. Merely assigning tasks is not the same as building a strong and collaborative team.

A project team is a group of people who are all working towards a common goal by bringing valuable and unique skills to the table. Identifying your project team members, defining your team’s identity, and standardizing its operating practices are all critical to a successful project.

So what should you consider when assembling your project team?

What makes a successful project team

Your project team can vary depending on the project scope and skills needed, but the elements of a successful project team are more or less consistent across the board.

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How to make the project kickoff meeting a success

Before project work formally begins, hold a project kickoff meeting to get everyone on the same page. This is a crucial first step that sets the tone for the work that follows. It’s typically the main chance to share the project’s objectives and overall plan with every stakeholder.

Successful kickoff meetings require preparation. Here are eight steps to make your kickoff meeting a success:

1. Establish vision and deliverables: Set a common goal for everyone. Lay out what needs to be done and when.

2. Identify team and set roles: Create a list detailing who’s responsible for which task and include contact info for easy communication.

3. Develop initial project plan: Present your initial project plan, but understand that details may shift during discussions with your team at the kickoff. Know how you want to approach the project, but be flexible.

4. Define metrics for success: How will the project be measured? What will make it successful? Set expectations and goals early.

5. Identify potential risks and bottlenecks: Prepare the team for potential roadblocks and have a process in place to handle them quickly should they arise.

6. Establish logistics for team communication: What is the best way to provide status updates? Establish a consistent process (such as weekly meetings) and determine the technology needed to facilitate it .

7. Choose work process or project management methodology: Establish which methodologies and frameworks the team will follow to align work styles and expectations.

8. Decide which tools to use: Ensure everyone has the tools they need to accomplish their tasks.

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Tips for effective team management

Now that the project is underway, it’s your job to keep everyone motivated, on track, and working together. Motivational speaker Brian Tracy said it best: successful people are simply those with successful habits. Your team’s productivity habits are the magic ingredients to your project’s success. If you have the right team habits in place, your team will complete the project on time and collaborate without much friction.

Even if your team doesn’t have the right work habits now, you can help them build new, more productive behaviors. Just remember that it takes anywhere from 66 days to eight months to cement a new habit. Be sure to proceed with sensitivity — after all, we humans are quite resistant to change.

Here are five ways you can help your team build new habits:

Learn more about these tactics to increase team effectiveness in our free eBook: 5 Strategies for Forming Team Productivity Habits .

Proceed with sensitivity

A word of caution — when people are faced with change, their reaction pattern mimics that of grief. Your team will spiral from denial to anger, confusion, depression, and crisis, before finally settling into acceptance, and new confidence. If you’re going to build new team habits, the new behavior will take time to develop roots, so reactions will be varied. Proceed with sensitivity and empathy for your team's concerns while still motivating the team to forge better, more productive behavioral patterns. For more on this topic, read our free eBook: Accelerating Change Management: Getting 7 Personalities On Board .

How to create a collaborative work environment

A collaborative work environment isn’t just about having collaborative tools, processes, and workflows in place. It’s also about striving for common goals, despite differences in work styles, personal priorities, or cultural backgrounds. A collaborative work environment should be a safe space where everyone feels supported and able to voice their opinions.

As organizations grow and become increasingly dispersed , more workers are collaborating across great distances. As a result, cultural intelligence — the ability to embrace different mindsets in challenging situations — is becoming more and more important.

In order to lead a multi-cultural (and increasingly multi-regional) team to success, you must be able to bridge cultural differences with sensitivity and sincerity. Here are some best practices:

Ask questions

The common themes for working with different cultures are respect and knowledge. Respect the different cultures and backgrounds on your team. If you don’t know something, ask a question to better understand where your team member is coming from.

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Project management collaboration tips and techniques

It can be easy to lose sight of collaboration best practices with deadlines looming overhead, but implementing them throughout the entire project will help optimize team performance.

While meetings can be a valuable time for collaboration, unnecessarily long meetings can be a productivity killer. With the global rise of remote working , organizing efficient and effective virtual meetings can be especially difficult. When scheduling a meeting, remember these tips:

Brainstorming meetings can help spark collaborative thinking and great new ideas. But when brainstorming goes wrong, it can discourage team members from contributing — or even worse, make them feel like their opinions aren’t valued.

When embarking on a brainstorming session, try these techniques to make it more effective and empowering:

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Conflicts are inevitable when collaborating on group projects. They’re emotional, sometimes dramatic, and often exhausting. But when conflicts get resolved, they lead to stronger relationships within the team, a better understanding of how to collaborate, and opportunities for growth.

Here are some pointers for resolving conflict quickly:

While effective collaboration will ultimately stem from the willingness of your project team, there are several tips and techniques you can use to encourage them:

Build a collaborative work environment. Organize an open work area away from personal workspaces where team members can meet and work together for the project’s duration.

Encourage effective remote collaboration. Have an always-on video conference system in place so that remote team members can be reached any time while they work.

Use tools for sharing. Effective collaboration requires the right tools and technology. At the bare minimum, you will need a real-time chat tool, a project management/task management tool, a knowledge base tool, and a file-sharing tool. One tool that can do all of the above is even better.

Encourage engagement everywhere. Line the hallway and meeting rooms with whiteboards and encourage team members to draft plans and brainstorm ideas on them. Reward those who contribute.

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Tips for remote collaboration and virtual meetings

Remote collaboration is becoming more and more common, and is now seen as the norm in thousands of businesses worldwide. Modern workers and workplaces need to adapt to accommodate remote working and encourage collaboration, no matter where they are or what time zone they’re in.

When project managing a distributed team in a variety of locations, a collaboration software (or project management) tool is an effective way to keep everyone on the same page and all of your project information in one place. However, using a great tool doesn’t magically make collaboration happen. Here are 10 best practices when using a collaboration software tool:

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Communicating with team members is always a bit more challenging when you’re not face-to-face, but new technologies are helping to make virtual meetings easier. At your next remote meeting, keep these best practices in mind:

Without a doubt, collaboration is important — not just for the success of your projects, but for the continued growth of your organization. It’s an essential ingredient for day-to-day project work, but more importantly, it’s the X factor that defines your organization’s culture and attracts the top performers to your company.

To learn more about virtual collaboration, check out our video:

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