Speaker 1: Hello, I'm Jennifer Whitt, Director of ProjectManager.com. Well welcome to our whiteboard session today on how to collaborate on projects. I love this question because I guess I love the tools and techniques that are available today to do so and I just love collaborating with others because I always find that I can get more information, more better ideas than I could have possibly come up with myself. It took me a long time to admit it as a project manager but I think I can finally admit I don't know everything so it's great to be able to leverage the intelligence and experience of others. So let's look up the word collaborate and see what it means. It means it's a verb and it means work jointly on an activity to produce or create something. So in the project world what would that something be? So we could be producing or creating ideas, solutions, points of views, proposals, reports, art, science, anything. So anything is an opportunity in this setup. So if we look at who we're collaborating with, these could be different team members and if this is a team member they could be collaborating with other team members and their team members could be collaborating with other team members. They bring information in to these different areas and look at all of the different points of views or things that could be brought and generated to our project. So if you think of Steve Jobs he was all about thinking differently and he did so successfully and he leveraged collaborating a lot. And then also I'm not sure if you know who Helen Keller is but she was blind and she had a quote that alone we can do so little but together we can do so much. So what would this look like? So how do we do it? So a lot of times we collaborate either offline or online. So what does offline mean? So offline means we can do so personally, face to face in meetings or work sessions or work groups or conferences where people get together face to face versus online. So online available now there's different social media. Many of you are very active in some of the social media groups where you collaborate on different issues. There are webinars, webinar technology, tele-seminars, there's software, there are even apps now. So there's so many different opportunities available for us to collaborate and again bring more information, more ideas, being able to think differently to our projects. So some of the best practices that we found in collaborating are these. Number one, make it easy. Make it easy for people to be able to collaborate with you by providing tools and techniques and easy access. Number two, respect. So when you're soliciting information from others or getting them to play with you or collaborate with you, you want to respect them, respect their ideas, respect what they bring. Again, we're purposely trying to think differently. So when you bring different ideas, something different to you, you want to be able to respect that and encourage people to participate. Otherwise they'll shut down or they won't want to collaborate with you. You want to challenge the status quo. This is an opportunity where you're just collaborating, so you're throwing things out, you're trying to think differently, so you're challenging what's working, what's not working. You want to listen. Listen to others. Really listen to what they're saying. Again, you're bringing different people together for their experience, their expertise, their training, something they've done before maybe that you haven't done, so you want to listen. You want to seek to understand. Seek to understand what they're trying to tell you. The idea that they generate may not be the one idea that you use, but it could spark other information, so seek to understand what they're trying to relay. And then try things. This is a great opportunity to be able to try things, pilot it, test it, see what works, what doesn't work, what have you got to lose. And then look at the approach. Are we going to start from scratch? So if we collaborate, are we trying to generate something new where we're starting with a blank canvas, or are we starting from an example, something existing? So if you think about building a house, are you building a house from scratch where you get to design the architecture and the blueprints, or are you starting with a renovation project, renovating a house where there's something existing there? So you start with what's there and you redesign. Then you provide to the team members, the people who are collaborating with you. You want to be able to provide tools. You want to be able to provide data, templates, supplies, anything that you need in order to make this session very productive. So these are some ideas, again, and best practices on how to collaborate. We find it very helpful. We think that it helps us think differently, and we do for sure see that we can do so much more by collaborating with others than we can doing alone. And I hope this helps you too. If you're looking for a tool, or better yet, an app, to help you collaborate on your projects, then sign up for our software now at ProjectManager.com.