Although most businesses are organized around functional lines (and optimized so that information flows top to down along functional lines), project execution almost always requires cross functional team collaboration. The diagram below illustrates major communication relationships (high-level view of how information flows..not all communication paths are shown) across teams or groups within a software company.  Some variation of this is true for all companies.

This cross team communication and collaboration today largely happens over email or at in-person team meetings.  In a typical organization a project manager or a product manager becomes the collector and dispenser of information (gatekeeper) and the rest of the team becomes directly or indirectly dependent on this person to get information to do their jobs in a timely manner.  This creates a single point of failure. Making matters worse, even in small companies these functional teams are spread out in different parts of the same building or in different buildings, cities and or countries. With a structure like this, no wonder over 80% of the projects are late and over budget and over 2/3rds of the projects never ship.

As knowledge workers, we exist in an information economy. And just like the manufacturing world, where materials, parts and inventory requirements are optimized for efficiency and minimizing costs, information delivery processes need to be optimized for greater efficiencies.

The new generation of platform centric open collaborative software tools do just that. Instead of creating a gatekeeper of information and keeping useful information trapped in individual’s inboxes, they make this information available to all the members in real-time, in a format that is easy to digest and discuss.  They enable a pull-based communication model where information is automatically delivered to every team member in a manner they find useful without creating an email tree (a term we typically use to describe when you are part of a long email chain that branches into multiple threads. For e.g. someone blasts an email to 10 people, a few respond, a few more respond to the responders, soon you don’t have a thread, but a tree and you don’t know which of them you need to read). Because collaborative software are pull-based, they are designed to solve this tree-mail problem by creating a true linear conversation thread and effortlessly keeping the entire team on the same page.

There are multiple other benefits of these new collaborative software tools.  One benefit is the ability to bring new project team members up to speed as they go in and out of the project.  Whether they are joining to support various phases of the project, or will be working on it for the long term, all the information they need is readily available and chronicled on the project wall.  But that is leading to a whole other topic for another post…