Successful companies rely on coordinating the efforts of their employees. And effective team collaboration pays huge dividends: more projects are completed on time and on budget, morale increases, customers are more satisfied (as is the business), and trust is built and shared among groups and departments.

Best practices models for team collaboration have been widely and successfully implemented. Team collaboration skills and processes can broadly be broken down into a few simple steps^1:

1. Define the problem
2. Describe all the various collaboration stages that a team goes through to solve the problem
3. Document the processes (learning, assessing, adjusting) that guide team collaboration
4. Define and describe the information processing components that the team needs to perform to achieve each collaboration stage.
5. Clarify the knowledge required to achieve each information-processing component.
6. Define the communication mechanisms used by the team to build the necessary knowledge, as well as support the information processing.

Sounds easy, right? But often, team collaboration isn’t as simple as it sounds. Issues can arise that can limit team collaboration. Information can be contained within data silos (or within people’s heads), making it difficult to find knowledge or determine what others are working on. Meetings can eat up valuable time, without adding much value. Many project management tools are simply too complex and cumbersome for managing largely informal projects. Post-It notes on the sides of computers don’t get the job done either. There’s sometimes confusion about decisions, action items and deliverables, so people wind up reinventing the wheel by creating numerous spreadsheets or even to-do lists scribbled on paper.

Online team collaboration

• Thankfully, team collaboration can be streamlined if many key processes and important content are managed online
• With Huddle, you can keep everyone coordinated thanks to its online project workspaces in the cloud for team collaboration. With Huddle, your project content is located in one easy-to-manage, shared online workspace that on-site or remote offices and telecommuters can easily access, enriching extended team collaboration.

Team collaboration software

• Effective team collaboration software like Huddle ensures that all documentation is in a centralized repository, making it easily accessible anytime and anywhere. If you need team collaboration software, you need more than just storage. You need the ability to quickly search for and edit the right files and keep teams on task.
• Tracking document versions and keeping everyone in sync via reminders and notifications are important as well. Huddle enables team collaboration with ease. That’s why we confidently offer a 100% user adoption guarantee.  

Team collaboration tools

• Team collaboration software should allow extended teams to get their ideas across effectively. They need online team collaboration tools, easy, permission-based document sharing, whiteboards, notifications, assigned tasks and more.
• Team collaboration tools should also include:
• Encrypted online file storage
• Folder and sub-folder structures to make sure team members know where everything is.
• The ability to sort files and folders by title, size, date modified and approval status.
• Powerful search that looks within the text of uploaded files so that team collaboration is spurred by the ability to find what’s needed immediately
• A media viewer to view large files without having to download them. With Huddle’s media viewer, you can view, create, and edit Word and Excel files directly in the browser without needing to download them or install software
• The ability to request and review approvals, and have a full audit trail of every action that takes place against each file. Approvals? New versions? Downloads? You can track it all.

Remote team collaboration

• Huddle makes it easy to organize, manage, and track projects from a central location to facilitate team collaboration. No matter where your teams are or what time it is, Huddle keeps your team on the same page as other teams, optimizing productivity and keeping your business fast and nimble.

Mobile team collaboration

• With Huddle, your teams can securely work on content from anywhere, anytime, and on any device. All team collaboration stakeholders on any device have access to their own personalized project information, providing real-time, accurate information exchange.

Teams need to cross-collaborate with other teams, too

• Successful team collaboration can involve numerous interfaces and handoffs among multiple practitioners and many teams, with varying levels of educational and occupational training. Critical information must be accurately communicated, making cross-team collaboration absolutely essential
• Huddle gives you cross-team collaboration. It’s easy to exchange critical information, interpret it correctly, and understand instructions and status changes.  

Team collaboration benefits

• The ability to coordinate the efforts of employees is a competitive imperative for any organization and it comes with many benefits.
• At one large state university, the use of Huddle for team collaboration cut costs in terms of hardware purchases, IT management costs and worker inefficiencies. At a small business banking company, workers became more efficient and employees saved about two hours per week by using Huddle for content and team collaboration, as well asproject management.²

Team collaboration across the firewall

• Huddle enables team collaboration across the firewall, so you can securely share files internally and externally with colleagues, clients, partners, and suppliers. Multiple teams can come together, without the worry of VPN and firewall configurations.

¹ http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/navy/model_of_team_collab.doc

² http://www.techvalidate.com/product-research/huddle