What is a Teambox?

Who is Strategic Sense?

Their Mission Statement says it all, "It’s our mission is to bring positive change to companies resulting in Happy Workplaces – busting down barriers to success."

As happy as their own teams are, at Strategic Sense they redefine the concept of busy. They are a small team and a diverse group of workers with different subjects of expertise. What they all have in common is their need to work remotely and share information virtually. From Web design to Leadership Consulting to Online publishing, the projects and tasks are never ending. What was once a challenge, getting people on the same page has become a simple part of how the people at Strategic Sense get things done.

Patti Blackstaffe, Strategic Sense's president and founder, was referred to Teambox by her Virtual Assistant, Susan Poirier of Ace Concierge, who had started using it to track client work. In a matter of minutes Patti realized that the simplicity offered by the online system was exactly what they were looking for. Her executive team opted to implement Teambox as their primary project management tool.

Why Teambox?

It will become more apparent as you read on that Teambox's unique approach to online collaboration is an ever growing benefit to the Strategic Sense teams. By joining the Procial Network (The productivity layer on top of the social network), Strategic Sense now has the power to get more done. It is now easier to collaborate. Let's explore how.

Day to day

When asked to explain what her teams like most about Teambox, Patti started by explaining how much she likes the social aspect of task management. The combining of social tools with the productivity of structures task management made completing projects on time easier. Strategic sense is now on the Procial Network and benefiting from the changes in process.

"Tasks and conversations can be tracked, assigned, provided deadlines; they map to a project management timeline, they can be put on hold and are pretty much flexible. The nice thing about them is priorities can be moved to the top and they offer instant view from the initial project page - you can see everything in a snapshot right from the get-go when you open that project. I know when someone has worked on a project or not, by viewing an easy to follow stream of actions."

This is the future of professional collaboration, as it has already been embedded into our online social collaborating. With work efforts it is even more valuable as people are able to escape the mire of the inbox and work from activity streams that are relevant to a specific goal.

Strategic Sense has a number of projects that require collaboration - both internally in the product development side as well as products and services for clients. This requires a great deal of organization to keep tabs on all of it.

So how do they do it?

The day starts by logging into Teambox in the morning and managing what needs to be done.

For Patti, it is mostly a task assignment and project tracking. For other members of the team it is updating task statues, initiating conversations on ideas, asking questions and getting a myriad of responses and tracking other people's efforts.

"If you want the technical side, it is much more than that," Patti explains, "our workers are ALL virtual. Our company does not have a physical office so being able to communicate and collaborate on a continual basis is vital. We teach other companies about collaborative co-creation and how to take what neuroscience has taught us about where great ideas come from and apply it to their organizations. Teambox opens doors in teamwork that people using other methods never could have imagined. We have recommended this tool to over 60 other organizations because we believe in it so much."

So what did they do before Teambox?

It is a long road from how they were managing efforts. Their main system and logs were all managed through basic file sharing - time was and is still tracked in a time management tool called Paymo, but otherwise they loaded and sync'd files from portable drives occasionally - Accordng to Patti, "not the best solution at all."

Project Management

One of the greatest challenges with new software is adoption. If your teammates do not subscribe to a new system or process, it will surely not become part of their everyday. Patti comes from an extensive IT background running global teams ranging from telecommunications to outsourcing and computer and technology companies. She knows first hand how much money is wasted on systems that never get used. Her initial testing team had to figure out how to best make projects and tasks better serve their internal projects. Patti and the team played around with the projects, trying to define the actual "project" work and the "tasks" as they would work best for each team. It was only after building a plan that they began assigning folks to projects based on their own specific areas.

In the end, they chose to manage "projects" not as each individual project, but areas of work. They manage an internal project named "Clients", one called "Corporate" and several others for various internal initiatives. Finally they had a separate project for each contractor.

"The "client" file is actually multiple clients all separated by tasks. This works beautifully," Patti explains, "because the entire team needs access to the full client database. Not everyone has access to corporate or varied internal initiatives, so we keep those separate."

This has saved them countless hours per project as they can now quickly get to what they need without a dependency on others to send it via email or share it through a file server.

Collaboration

"The communication and collaboration were less of a concern at first than keeping everything in a single location accessed by many. What we discovered, however, is that multiple folks would offer input in areas where we were surprised they had the knowledge or expertise."

This is the power of the Procial Network. Getting feedback and answers from the community. It is often a surprise who has the knowledge needed to achieve our goals, and by delivering the transparency that a tool like Teambox offers, you find the answers faster.

Patti always felt like her teams were using too many tools, too many servers and had files living in too many different universes. The end result was messy as people struggled to determine what was the latest file, content or status. This made it difficult to keep updated on projects, on top of the lastest status or file version, and near impossible to control.

"What makes Teambox so great is the way everything is kept in one single location and how it connects to other tools we use, such as google docs. It makes it both convenient for the user and efficient for the team."

Conclusion

Strategic Sense has now committed to the change made possible by using the Procial Network. With Teambox as their core collaboration tool, they are now able to get more done and with less effort. It is in this that they see their mission continue to work both for their clients and their own teams.