Meet Christine, she is a project manager for an IT company. Every time she runs a project, her team creates lots of emails, documents, schedules, and files. Despite all her best efforts, she noticed her team have their own versions of these files. These lead to poor collaboration and miscommunications on her team. All this pain was relieved when their organization used Sharepoint.
What is Sharepoint?
Sharepoint is an online platform that allows organizations to create their own repository for files, documents, and schedules. The platform is powered by Microsoft. Organizations can create project team sites, so members can easily access and edit files. It is designed to improve collaboration.
Benefits of Sharepoint
We will take the case of Christine’s IT company as an example:
* One File Version– before, every time there are changes in schedule, Christine had to email her updated Gantt chart to everyone. There are cases wherein her team hasn’t read the email and update their local copy. These lead to confusions on the schedules and deliverables. With Sharepoint, she just updated the file and everyone can see a new version. Everyone is aligned to the expectation of their project manager and stakeholders.
* Single Calendar– before, every time Christine tries to create her capacity plan, she has to email everyone one by one for their available schedules. Using Sharepoint, she doesn’t have to do this anymore. All her team members can share their calendar so she can view their schedules. This help saves her time and effort.
* Easy Sharing– in the past, her IT company was operating on separate islands. All the teams had difficulty getting synchronizing all their files and data since they rely on email. When Sharepoint came in, sharing updated files was easy as login, find folder upload. Everyone can now get information from different teams.
They can upload budget documents, minutes of the meeting, marketing spreadsheets etc. They can easily search and view the files. Team collaboration has increased. People are now motivated at looking information at a bigger picture
* Easy Sourcing– Sharepoint can be configured to store employee information within the company. Every time Christine needs to source team members, she can simply scan Sharepoint for employees that have skills sets required for her project. She is able to effectively source talents within the IT company.
* Connect to Company Database/Information– aside from documents and files, Sharepoint can be configured to connect to databases and networks within the company. It can connect to the sales data, inventory data and customer information of the IT company. These increase the efficiency and organization of their company.
Conclusion
If your company having problems with coordination, we recommend you explore this platform. Communication is essential to achieving success in any organization. Reducing and even eliminating miscommunication can yield huge good results.
Sharepoint is an extremely powerful tool that can drive this target. It helps organizations become more agile and competitive. The tool helps promote teamwork and collaboration throughout your organization. Allowing employees to get the big picture through information makes it more mission driven.
