What is a Teambox?

A marriage in open exchange for innovation, collaboration, and getting things done.

The start of MPowered Entrepreneurship in March 2007, like many entrepreneurial ventures, occurred on that tiny strip of California dubbed Silicon Valley. Two University of Michigan students realized their campus had a lack of entrepreneurial passion compared to those in the Bay Area. MPowered's founders, Ashwin L. and Israel V., knew quick changes were needed if U of M was to keep up.

Their vision was to foster a culture within the student body that embraced innovation, spoke openly about their ideas and then turned those ideas into something even more. It was decided that this vision could be accomplished by MPowered Entrepreneurship, a student-run organization focused on starting and sustaining an entrepreneurial movement on campus. In three short years they built the MPowered community to over 700 students and a supporting cast of faculty, alumni, and business leaders.

MPowered is composed of a Core team that is responsible for running the projects and mentoring the younger members and a Talent team which consists of the members in the individual projects. When the core team started looking at tools for project management and collaboration, they knew there were 5 core things the system needed to do:

• Be a centralized place for all the todos and files for all of their projects.
• The core team members need to be able to easily manage their individual projects.
• Anyone within MPpowered needs to be able to see all of the projects with enough transparency that they can find any new updates and monitor its progress.
• Provide visibility amongst all levels of management.
• Allow anyone who needs to have a handle on a project to quickly get up to speed.

In the Fall of 2009, MPowered Entrepreneurship began using Basecamp for one of their major projects, 1000 Pitches. After the project was over, the team determined that project management software was not necessary to help manage the individual projects and that email and other forms of communication would work.

After some time, the entire team realized that they needed something to help increase transparency in an evolving organization. The MPowered Entrepreneurship team set out to find a solution better suited to the needs of their diverse group of users. They spent a couple of weeks looking at several online management tools like Basecamp, and the file sharing tool Box.net. Each had its strengths, but what was lacking was that sense that users across their entire organization would adopt the systems into their day-to-day efforts.

Then, someone suggested they look at Teambox. When they looked at Teambox, the group was immediately drawn to its social features. They decided to do a pilot during the spring and summer session. 30 people tested it for two months and decided it was the right offering for their needs. What they discovered was that the entire team used it, and everybody reported that it made managing projects easier, not more cumbersome.

The main takeaways from the testing team were:

• Users love Teambox for its social qualities. The design looks to engage people in the day- to -day of project management and collaboration.
• The Teambox system is something that people are naturally drawn to and it is not a chore to work within.
• Teambox is both fun and easy to use. It is not a burden like other systems and actually helps you with your work.
• The conversations and status updates make sharing information easy. Anyone can quickly communicate with group members and the transparency of the communication makes it easy for all to see.

The staff likes the platform flexibility. Since it is both deployable in- house and as software- as- a- service (SAAS) they can change their system depending on their needs. For now, the control and cost of an opensource platform makes it affordable to implement and get universal adoption. They also like the ability to customize the tool. If and when they can no longer manage the system for themselves, they will migrate to the SAAS model. Then, they will use their installation to add more customizations and share them with the community.

Now MPowered is focusing on their many projects aimed at exposing and supporting entrepreneurship on the University of Michigan’s campus, one of them being the 1000 Pitches Competition. 1000 Pitches is an University of Michigan entrepreneurial competition hosted by MPowered Entrepreneurship. The competition is held during the fall term and is aimed at generating over 1000 innovative business and product ideas from the U-M students that fit into 10 main categories. Last year, they doubled their original total and collected over 2000 pitches The best pitch in each category receives $1000 to help the winner turn their pitch into a reality. MPowered sees Teambox as an instrumental part of managing its projects and aiding them to completion in 2010.

You can learn more about MPowered Entrepreneurship and the numerous projects they host at http://www.mpowered.umich.edu