Project rooms - Intranet Requirement

Our answer: 

We understand the underlying wishes and goals and consider them central to an intranet. There are however multiple flaws in the language of this feature request:

1. There is no such thing as a “project room"
   
   The requirements of teams to collaborate differ greatly. It does not help to try to consolidate them all into one unified approach and call that “project room”. This is as naive as telling people that every project can be solved in the same way. What we experience with our customers and their teams is, that almost every project has different requirements. Some have a lot of complexity to deal with. The project approach then needs to focus on people and their unique ability to deal with complexity. The toolset needs to adapt to fast communication, quick discussions and lightweight documentation tools. A more standardized project about rolling out a software into 20 countries however may have more guidelines and a bigger reporting element and the need to collect feedback about the approach. Comprehensive documentation, polls and microblogging may be good tools in such an environment.
   
   The main thing is: There is no one “project room” to reign all use cases. There is only an outstanding toolset with easy to use features and people trained and knowledgeable to exploit these features in every project and situation.
   
   
   
2. Altogether “without email” is not the right goal
   
   It is right, that email is the problem. Collaboration with email sucks. People hate it and it’s the one thing that we all want to go away. But email is unfortunately or fortunately (depends on view) part of the solution. Trying to get rid of email altogether is not the goal. There is a good reason why email is the standard fallback for today’s communication. It is ubiquitous. It is fast and easy. And it is also a good enhancement to an intranet. The right approach to email is to take out the time consuming parts and keep the informative elements like notifications that do not need direct action and will sit in the app later as well. Ultimately processing email should be fast and lightweight. Where you take hours today to process a heap of mails, minutes should be sufficient tomorrow, because everything is already “in place”. We can demo this in a personal meeting if you’re interested.

shortlink: http://seibert.biz/rooms