WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF COLLABORATIVE WORK MANAGEMENT?
Collaborative work management is a set of tools that provides employees a unified and central platform to easily share business data, documents, and discussions. It is the central hub for all conversations about work, and also a place where the work can exist.
Collaborative Work Management helps resolve a problem by enabling employees to maintain professional and effective communication, find successful and relevant resources in a quick manner, and reduce tension and chaos among employees in the workforce.
ANALYST COVERAGE
Forrester
Forrester defines Collaborative Work Management (CWM) tools as: “Software tools that support the confluence of project and process work by allowing users to create personal and team workspaces; invite other users, internal and external to the organization, to collaborate on digital artifacts; identify workload requirements and capacity, and allocate activities to other users to deliver on work items and then track progress (go.forrester.com).”
Learn more at https://go.forrester.com/
Gartner Collaborative Work Management
According to Gartner.com, “The Collaborative Work Management market consists of vendors offering task-driven workspaces that support business users in work planning and execution. They combine task, project, workflow, and automation capabilities with conversations, content publishing, reporting, analytics, and dashboards. Products in this market are defined by their purpose (work planning and execution), by their target users (nontechnical business users rather than professional project managers or business analysts) and by their broad functionality. Collaborative work management technology supports work that can be planned top-down, as far as it is possible to plan it, while at the same time supporting flexible, self-organizing, and open-ended collaboration and re-planning as needed. (https://www.gartner.com/en).”
Learn more at www.gartner.com
ARTICLES
FORBES: Are You Ready For The Collaborative Work Revolution?
Not only are the tools and applications we use at work undergoing a digital revolution, the way people get work done is changing too. It’s a revolution driven by the need to optimize processes and collaboration in a working world of increasing fragmentation—of software and digital tools, of centralized offices, and of traditional hierarchies.
The wholesale transition to new ways of working means that our reliance on long-established, locally deployed software and applications can no longer deliver the digital dexterity and efficiency required in a world where teams are rarely co-located, and where collaborating across functions, disciplines, and regions is the norm.
Forrester WAVE Evaluation of Top Collaborative Work Management Tools
Forrester’s 32-criterion evaluation of collaborative work management (CWM) tool providers has identified the nine most significant ones — Asana, Atlassian, Microsoft, monday.com, ServiceNow, Smartsheet, Workfront, Workplace from Facebook, and Wrike — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals select the right one for their needs.
SOFTWARE
Work-Relay
Work-Relay distills, centralizes, and simplifies Salesforce functionality into a single, unified framework for building work management solutions that shield users from the ever-growing underlying complexity of the Salesforce platform.
Work-Relay consolidates and unifies the core Salesforce.com functionality needed to manage business operations. It provides an advanced starting point for building highly customized solutions to operational challenges. Work-Relay is not a bunch of tools – it is a complete application that includes ready-to-go functionality for planning, executing, and optimizing business operations. This ensures that high-quality, easily maintainable solutions can be built quickly.
Learn more at www.work-relay.com
Monday
monday.com Work OS is an open platform where anyone can create the tools they need to run every aspect of their work.
The easy-to-use, visual interface includes building blocks like Apps and integrations, allowing teams to seamlessly build or customize the work solutions of their dreams. Whether you need to streamline your sales pipeline, want to create a marketing campaign process, run a robust CRM, or build a project management tracker – monday.com provides a collaborative space for your teams to stay aligned, agile and efficient, in everything they do.
Monday.com is manageable, as the apps provided make the ability to succeed in marketing, software development, IT work, and more.
Learn more at www.monday.com
Clickup
ClickUp is one app to replace them all. It’s the future of work. More than just task management – ClickUp offers docs, reminders, goals, calendars, and even an inbox. Fully customizable, ClickUp works for every type of team, so all teams can use the same app to plan, organize, and collaborate. ClickUp’s core mission is to make the world more productive by removing friction caused by using so many different applications.
Built for teams of all sizes and industries, ClickUp’s fully customizable and proprietary features make it a must-have for any team that wants to keep everything from design to development in one place. The platform allows deep modularity in the form of add-ons called ‘ClickApps’, allowing rich customization for each team individually.
ClickUp allows you to create custom views that you can save and share with anyone and is packed full of proprietary features such as Assigned Comments, LineUp™, and Box view for unprecedented management of people.
Learn more at www.clickup.com
Asana
Asana helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Asana has more than 93,000 paying customers and millions of free organizations across 190 countries. Global customers such as Allbirds, Sephora, Sky, Spotify, Viessmann, and Woolworths rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives to digital transformation to product launches and marketing campaigns.
Asana is available to create various various tasks and projects and project management and monitoring tools, including scheduling and creating dashboards.
Learn more at www.asana.com
Workfront
Workfront is the leader in enterprise work management. Workfront connects strategy to delivery, integrating people and data across the enterprise, and manages work from start to finish for the delivery of measurable outcomes, all in one collaborative platform. At every stage of planning and executing work, Workfront enables the business capabilities companies need to scale and win in the market.
Workfront puts your strategy into action so you know what to work on and when. A single view of work streamlines intake and demand management with automated workflows, custom forms, and reporting.
Learn more at www.workfront.com
Core
BQE CORE is an integrated, native cloud-based solution designed specifically for professional service firms. CORE offers business and project accounting, time and expense tracking, invoicing, project and human resource management and client relationship management (CRM).
BQE CORE utilizes state-of-the-art technologies delivering actionable business intelligence and award winning artificial intelligence including natural language processing and speech recognition. BQE CORE supports a wide range of industries, including accounting, architect firms, engineering, legal services and many more. You can access BQE CORE from any browser or mobile device and experience full functionality. The native mobile app includes iPhone and Android devices. CORE also has over 200 report and invoice templates. Invoices for every contract type conceivable.
Learn more at www.bqe.com
Microsoft Teams
Teams by Microsoft is a communication and collaboration tool that allows employees in a company to message each other, organise departments into different chat rooms, create threaded conversations, and even video call other users.
The biggest benefit of using Microsoft Teams is that it integrates well with other Microsoft applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Planner. For companies that already use Microsoft tools, Teams can be a great addition. Although, if you don’t use Microsoft tools in your office, then Teams can introduce more problems than it solves because of its limited third party integration.
Learn more at www.microsoftteams.com
Targetprocess
Targetprocess is an Enterprise visual platform which connects Portfolio, Products and Teams. The tool perfectly reflects the agile methodology and can help any company to adopt and scale agile across the enterprise. To achieve business agility and see the value flow through the entire organization one can use out-of-the-box templates for SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, Scrum of Scrums and other frameworks. The solution is highly customizable to support your own project management approach and organization structure.
Many companies using Targetprocess successfully implement both project portfolio management and application lifecycle management within this single tool, which makes Targetprocess a unique holistic enterprise agile. Targetprocess has been recognized in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Agile Enterprise Planning Tools. Targetprocess has a modern & slick user interface and offers visibility into multi-level portfolios and company strategic goals.
Learn more at www.targetprocess.com
Clarizen One
Clarizen One is enterprise project and portfolio management software that helps you get work done. Clarizen connects work across the enterprise by bringing together project management discipline, workflow automation and collaboration to turn ideas into strategies, plans, and action.
With Clarizen, organizations can work the way they want to work and have real time-visibility into all their workstreams. Clarizen helps keep teams focused on the things that matter and deliver results faster so they can exceed their company goals and customers’ expectations. Thousands of global customers, such as Box, Dell, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) London, Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), and Shaw Industries, across a wide range of industries in 124 countries rely on Clarizen to help them achieve their business goals.
Learn more at www.clarizen.com
TaskRay
Customer Onboarding Success TaskRay helps organizations onboard customers faster and more efficiently, getting the relationship off to a good start and providing ongoing metrics for customer success.
By using TaskRay’s templating and automation functions, high tech, SaaS, Wealth Management, Manufacturing, Franchising businesses and more can build systems that scale whether you have 100 customers or 10,000 customers. -TaskRay is built on the Salesforce Platform to enable seamless customer onboarding right in Salesforce Sales Cloud® as well as other Salesforce Clouds such as FSC, Service Cloud, HSC, and more -Track key business metrics like customer onboarding health scores, time tracking, and more with robust reporting and dashboards -Utilize built-in templates and automation tools to onboard customers/clients more quickly and efficiently and consistently -Decrease your customer’s time to implement your solution and increase your retention and customer satisfaction.
Learn more at Taskray.com
WiseTeam
WiseTeam is a flexible solution for your company’s work and project management. The system combines all tools necessary for providing professional services. It presents these tools in one convenient place and continuously provides relevant information that empowers you to make the right decisions.
WiseTeam enables users to plan, track and execute all business related activities in one place and make important decisions on the fly. Crucial business activities like: employees’ time management, project management, process management, customer relationship management, billing and invoicing, quality management and others are tracked effortlessly with the help of this intuitive system.
Learn more at www.wiseteam.eu
Coschedule Marketing Suite
CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite is a family of agile marketing products that helps you coordinate your process, projects, and teams.
Marketing Suite gives you the tools to:
- Complete more work.
- Publish more content to generate a higher ROI by increasing your team’s productive work capacity.
- Eliminate endless email threads, unnecessary meetings, desk drop-bys to complete 125% more work.
- Deliver projects on time.
- Develop a high-performance team that completes projects on time by balancing the predictability and flexibility of your work.
- Maintain on-time task completion rates greater than 90%.
- Get full visibility into your marketing to prioritize, plan, and manage a reliable pipeline of upcoming & in-flight projects.
- Focus 100% of your efforts on work that aligns with strategic business goals.
Learn more at www.coschedule.com
Operwall, Inc
Operwell is online software to run a business 100% remotely. We are your company’s infrastructure to perform all of your core business functions, such as: your team’s internal messaging, collaboration, and project management; your HR and employee performance management; and, your sales and customer success.
We make it easy to share information, synchronize your entire team, automate your routine tasks, and help ensure that your team is always employing the same operating tools as the world’s most powerful companies. No downloads, no guess work, no paying for multiple subscriptions, simply go to Operwell.com and you’re ready to run your entire business within seconds.
Learn more at www.operwell.com
Screendragon
Screendragon is a leading cloud-based project, resource and workflow management solution designed for the needs of marketing, agency and professional services teams.
We help companies to reduce complexity and increase productivity, cost-savings and speed-to-market. Our out-of-box software is proven to scale for the needs of global Fortune 100 companies, helping them to solve big complex challenges. Customers of Screendragon include The International Olympic Committee, Kellogg’s, BP, Sky, TBWA and McCann World Group.
Learn more at www.screendragon.com
Smartsheet
The Smartsheet platform allows you to collaborate, manage, and report on work in real time, automate workflows, and deploy new processes at scale.
Smartsheet is more than a productivity or task app, it’s the end-to-end work execution platform with the proven power to help your organization achieve more. Recognized as a leader and innovator by industry analysts — and our customers — Smartsheet combines the best of enterprise-grade security and capabilities with an intuitive user interface. Smartsheet enables organizations to eliminate silos, make better decisions based on real-time data, automate workflows, and execute at scale.
Learn more at www.smartsheet.com
Trello
Trello is a visual collaboration tool that enables you to organize and prioritize projects in a fun, flexible, and rewarding way. A Trello board is a series of lists, with a bunch of cards attached and packed full with powerful features and automation.
It is one of a variety of collaborative work management tools that have grown in popularity in recent years. Trello draws on the principles of Kanban, a method of visualizing workflows to provide an overview of a project from start to finish. This is done using Trello’s boards, lists and cards. A board will typically focus on a specific project such as launching a new website, or more process-based tasks such as on-boarding an employee. Each board contains lists which may, for example, indicate the progress of a project. Lastly, cards within the lists hold information on a specific task, and can be moved from list to list when completed.
Learn more at www.trello.com
Atlassian Confluence
Confluence is a collaboration wiki tool used to help teams to collaborate and share knowledge efficiently. With confluence, we can capture project requirements, assign tasks to specific users, and manage several calendars at once with the help of Team Calendars add-on. Below are few resources that will be helpful to get a better idea of how Confluence can fit into your company:
- Confluence product guides
- Confluence Demo video – A walkthrough of Confluence feature set
- Confluence features list
These resources all help gain a better understanding of this wiki tool that helps businesses share and collaborate information with the input of different features and feedback incorporations.
Learn more at www.atlassian.com
Netcom Additions
Through a number of intuitive input screens, Additions offers a variety of planning, monitoring, executing functions, including design review, contract administration and budgeting. It also offers a timesheet management system and integration with your existing core Financials. Additions meanwhile also delivers Project Management Collaboration functionality to assist project managers to organise and find project information, including email, for all ongoing projects, share published project information and track approvals with external team members, as well as produce project reports by contract or programme.
Additions helps design, engineering, construction and facilities management firms best manage costs, time, resources, cash and risk in real time – whether in just the UK or internationally.
Additions can be installed as a client application installed on each desktop and two server applications or accessed over the Web. This software for projects has been developed on the industry leading Microsoft .NET platform to take full advantage of the very latest Microsoft technologies.
Learn more at www.netcomsoftware.com
RaveTree
Ravetree is a work management software platform that empowers teams to deliver work faster, be more informed, and spend less time searching for information. Project-driven organizations around the world use Ravetree to manage their projects, resources, and client information—all in one place.
Companies love Ravetree’s elegant and clean user interface, which makes it easy to communicate and collaborate with colleagues and clients. Ravetree eliminates the pain of moving between different applications, relying on cumbersome spreadsheets, and entering the same data in multiple places. Other tools are geared towards either project managers or team members, but not both. Ravetree has solved this problem by providing the powerful features needed by project managers, while offering the usability and intuitiveness needed by team members who just want to get work done. Ultimately, companies benefit from having a single source of truth from which they can optimize their operations and easily see the big picture. Ravetree has a 5-star customer support rating, and takes pride in being a customer focused company.
Learn more at www.ravetree.com
Glass Factory
Glass Factor is a visual resource planning and time tracking platform – easily schedule people, plan a project budget, track and manage actuals, and identify resource utilization challenges and opportunities.
Glass Factory gives teams the ability to manage where your business is going, where it is today, and where it’s been to date – balancing the macro needs of executives who need business reporting with the micro needs of project teams that are focused on delivery and actuals. In a services business, your people are your business. By combining planning and forecasting with real time actuals tracking, Glass Factory provides unmatched control over the levers of your profitability. No other solution provides the ability to manage where your business is going, where it is today, and where it’s been to date.
Learn more at www.glassfactory.io
Roll
Roll is simple, intuitive workflow management software for small service businesses. With Roll you can manage your entire workflow in one simple application; capture leads, manage sales, send quotes, manage projects and invoice clients – all while getting full visibility of how the business is performing.
Roll is the perfect tool for creative agencies, architects, interior designers, consulting businesses, freelancers and many more.
Learn more at www.rollhq.com
System Integrator (SI)
D-Tools System Integrator (SI) software is a comprehensive, on-premises solution catering to the diverse needs of sophisticated residential av, commercial av, and security integrators, as well as universities, corporations, and governmental entities.
D-Tools helps AV, electronic security, and HVAC controls integration companies substantially improve operating efficiencies by streamlining the entire project workflow – from estimating and proposals through system design and documentation, procurement, project management, installation, and on-going service.
Learn more at www.d-tools.com/system_integrator
Toggl Plan
Toggl Plan is a simple project planning and collaboration tool. It comes with drag and drop timelines to plan projects and manage team workloads. It also has boards to manage agile projects, capture ideas, and track task progress.
What differentiates Toggl Plan from other project management tools is its “hands-off” approach. Where other tools focus on closely observing work, Toggl Plan favors macro-management. Toggl Plan’s fun, intuitive interface makes it easy to get started with. It’s a tool that your team will enjoy using every day.
Learn more at www.toggl.com
WorkflowMax
WorkflowMax is the project management tool for mid-sized client service firms. Think of WorkflowMax as a hub for various services such as accounting, billing, project management, lead management, creating quotes, and a whole host of other services required to run a client service business.
With WorkflowMax, you generate beautiful and robust reports that will allow you to make sure your projects, from start to finish, are delivered on time and under budget so that you can ensure each one of your clients is profitable for your business.
Learn more at www.workflowmax.com
SwiftKanban
SwiftKanban is a web-based visual tool for project management based on Kanban best suited for software development teams, IT Operations and DevOps teams, project managers or business functions. It offers easy visualization to manage team’s processes and works well for both co-located and distributed teams.
SwiftKanban offers support for Scrum, Iterative and other software development methods and also integrates well with existing Agile tools. With a highly visual Kanban board, projects teams can access a wide range of Kanban metrics and manage the flow of work and identify bottlenecks through visual cues.
Learn more at www.digite.com/swiftkanban/
GanttPro
GanttPRO is a Web-based project planning tool based on Gantt charts. Thanks to its intuitive UX/UI design, the software allows becoming an advanced user of it in 5-10 minutes. This Gantt chart software divides even large projects into clearly defined tasks with start and end dates along a timeline.
The tool allows users to create tasks and assign them to team members, create dependencies between tasks, track progress, and collaborate with project participants, get notifications, browse the whole history of a project, and simply be aware of all the processes in a plan.
Learn more at www.ganttpro.com
Stormboard
Create a plan or project, hold a meeting, assign tasks to your team, and set deadlines, goals, and milestones. Using Stormboard‘s digital workspace will cut down the number of meetings by seamlessly tracking the progress of your project to make sure your plan is on target, no matter where your team members are located.
There are hundreds of built-in templates for business processes like Agile, Design Thinking, and SWOT, and a smart reporting function which compiles all the information that is in your Storm (what they call the digital workspace) into a document in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or another format that can be edited and used as meeting minutes or presentations. Enterprise teams in more than 181 countries use Stormboard’s digital workspace to make their meetings better.
Learn more at www.stormboard.com
Celoxis
Celoxis is an award-winning all-in-one pm tool. It helps organizations to plan and track their portfolios, projects, tasks, resources, timesheets, issues and risks from one place.
It has extensive collaboration features including a customizable free client portal. Its dashboards and reporting capabilities are superb and one of the best in the market. It is feature rich, intuitive and highly customizable. If you are comfortable with the Microsoft Project scheduling paradigm, Celoxis is one of the best alternatives to Microsoft Project. Celoxis comes with all the necessary features so your team can focus on being productive rather than switching between different tools.
Learn more at www.celoxis.com
Bitbucket
Bitbucket is another large software repository platform and is brought to you by Atlassian, the same folks who own the JIRA and Hipchat brands.
Unlike Github, Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories. Where Github focuses on Open Source, Bitbucket is designed to help developers within enterprises to collaborate on projects. Bitbucket is more than just Git code management. Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test, and deploy.
Learn more www.bitbucket.org
