Penn State's Ag Sciences Department chooses Teambox for Collaboration
Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences need for a collaboration tool like Teambox surfaced and a project was initiated to solve several issues. Through our college strategic planning sessions with academic leaders, it was determined that the college needed to focus around five key areas. It was also decided that these areas would function like centers that pull faculty from multiple disciplines into a common team.
The story
In 2009 Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences had a problem. When they began planning and development for Strategic Initiatives the inefficiency of email, and the high overhead costs and logistical challenge of gathering cross-departmental teams together in person was limiting their capacity to collaborate.
“We realized they needed platform that would foster teamwork and centralize file sharing and task assignment. We also needed members to be able to participate both internally and externally,” explained Chris More, the College’s Associate Director of Web Communications."
Tasked with solving this problem, More’s team installed and reviewed many platforms, including Sharepoint, which they found to be unnecessarily complicated, and the lack of cross-browser compatibility proved to be another significant drawback. By comparison, Teambox offered a straight forward and intuitive interface, and the social media style conversations made collaborating fun and effective. More’s team ultimately selected Teambox because “it satisfied all of Penn State’s business requirements and was the easiest application to use.”
“Our first case for Teambox was to cut down on the amount of emails between teams and committees in our unit,” More explained. “Most of us are part of multiple committees and collaboration between meetings was all done by email. With Teambox we were able to create a project for each committee, and use Conversations to replace emails. The effect was dramatic. It took us much less time to discuss a topic, and threaded messages helped us efficiently keep conversations on topic and in context.”
Teambox made it possible for Moore’s team to almost entirely eliminate email. “Emails became mainly notifications to check out conversations in Teambox, which was a much more efficient and pleasant use of my time,” said More.
The success of using Teambox within More’s division prompted the entire College of Agricultural Science to adopt Teambox for it’s strategic initiatives, and for planning and project management across all the College’s divisions, including use by the Dean. The results were immediate and significant: Teambox transformed the way the College communicated and collaborated with internal and external team members and contractors.
“We became more agile” said More.
Since then “Teambox has gone viral within the University and beyond the walls of the College,” More noted. “We configured Teambox to be behind Penn State's main web portal for authentication. Anyone with a Penn State ID (internal or external) now has the ability to log in to Teambox and invite others.”
Teambox has become so ubiquitous for planning and project at Penn State that it has taken on new meaning as a verb. When people want to discuss a new initiative or work on a project they start by saying, “Let’s Teambox it.”
About Penn State and Chris More:
The first of the colleges established at Penn State, the College of Agricultural Sciences awarded the nation’s first baccalaureate degrees in agriculture in 1861. With 12 academic units and 67 cooperative extension offices, one in each of Pennsylvania’s counties, the college is widely recognized as one of the nation’s premier institutions for agricultural research and education programs. Chris More managed Penn State University’s Web Services team that is part of the College of Agricultural Science's Communications and Marketing unit from 2008 until the spring of 2011. More now works for Mozilla, where he is eager to introduce Teambox to his team.