Collaboration software

One of the most important aspects in project management is coordinating and getting the collaboration of work teams. For this, it is essential that each individual knows what to do, when to do it, and having a way to report the progress of the work.  In order to help in this task, there are a several collaboration and teamwork tools that can be easily integrated into any organization and project. These are designed to facilitate teamwork and achieve better results.

Best team management and collaboration tools

Within the wide variety of existing teamwork programs and tools today, we highlight some of them; which we believe stand out from the rest due to their relationship between cost and benefits.

Product name	Description	Free trial link
	All-in-one online collaboration tool for projects and team management	Free trial

Advantages of collaboration software?

Any project is based on the joint work of a team of people, so getting these people to work efficiently and effectively is essential for achieving its objectives.

This need for coordination becomes more evident when working with geographically distributed teams, or when you want to use AGILE-type methodologies, which require a greater relationship between the members of the work team.

It is at this point where having a collaboration and team management tool makes a big difference and helps. Among the main advantages obtained from its use, we can highlight the following:

• Facilitate the distribution of tasks, since they allow them to be assigned directly to team members, informing them, and in many cases including information on the expected scope, the hours available, and the completion date.
• Improves team coordination by allowing the documentation generated or necessary to execute tasks to be shared and stored in an orderly manner.
• Improve the supervision of the project manager by being able to see the execution status of the different tasks, which ones are completed, and which ones can start next. In the most complete programs this is integrated with the ability to assign costs or dates to tasks, thus integrating cost and deadline control.

This ends up in a greater productivity of the company, a significant reduction in delivery times, and an improvement in results through more precise control of dedication.

How to use a team management software?

Although team management tools have their greatest application in IT or technological projects managed by AGILE methodologies, they are also applicable and highly recommended in traditional projects.

In this second case, these tools do not replace planning programs due to their limited capacity in this regard but can mainly be used as a digitized WBS dictionary. In this way, it is proposed to use these tools when we have the approved project plan, including the WBS, and we want to assign resources.

For the execution phase, we will take advantage of the ability of team management tools to assign tasks, include documents and relevant information to execute them, and inform the person who must execute them.

In this sense, it is interesting that the project manager can control when the information is sent, since in this way he controls the rate of progress and avoids starting tasks when all the information is not yet available, a common reason for reworks.

During execution we can also take advantage of the functionalities of these programs as communication tools; since they usually include communication systems and document sharing .

Another functionality of the team management programs that we can use to control the project is the possibility of allocating the hours spent on each task, the associated expenses, and reporting when it has been completed.

This allows the project manager to have an objective view of the progress of the project and facilitates the collection of documents or costs resulting from the tasks.

Price of collaboration and teamwork programs

The price of a program to work in teams can vary from the free options to a few dollars per month and user.

The most common today are online collaboration tools, which are marketed under the concept of software as a service. This means that we rent the tool, paying a monthly price that usually varies based on the number of users we want and the benefits.

Another important factor in determining the price of a collaboration tool, although not decisive, is the type of client it is intended for. In this way we can meet programs intended for freelancers or small companies and programs intended for large companies .

The latter usually include communication and team management tools as functionality within a package focused on comprehensive project management. For this reason, they are usually more expensive alternatives, especially when we want to use all the features they offer.