Features

As you've probably discovered by now, topics and comments in the Review area of ProtoShare can be assigned multiple statuses: Open, Closed and To-do. This is a great way to track the progress of your project. But what exactly does closing a topic mean? And when should you close a topic? What's the point of marking something as "To-do"? Well, there are no hard and fast rules on how this should work, we leave it up to the individual user. But, I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss how I've been using the statuses on internal projects at Site9/ProtoShare.

When I finish a new wireframe for a page, I create a topic to announce there is something new to review. Then I sit back and watch as new topics and comments trickle in from the other members of the ProtoShare team.

Once the topic has been thoroughly discussed, and the team has reached a conclusion, I do one of two things. If there is no action to be taken, I'll mark the topic as "Closed". But if there is an action associated with a topic, I'll mark it as "To-do".

There's a very handy way to see how many "To-do's" you have on the project. Just click on the Site Map tab in Review, and use the "View Topics" dropdown box to display the number of Closed, Open, or To-do topics on each page. A tip: it's a good idea to assign a status to all your topics at some point, or the "View Topics" display isn't that effective - especially if every ticket is marked as "Open". Learned that one the hard way.

When I, or someone on the team, takes care of the action associated with a To-do topic, I go back into ProtoShare and close it. Once every topic is closed on a page, we consider that page "done" and are ready to move onto the next step of the project - which is usually creating and posting comps. Then we start the process all over again with the comps.

We've found this method saves us a great deal of time on new projects. When we can't resolve everything in ProtoShare, we call an actual meeting. It's almost become a novelty. But if we do have a meeting, they take less time and are more efficient because everyone is already informed of opinions. Again, this is just my way of doing it. I'm sure you will find your own ProtoShare path to success.

I was recently selected for a trial that went on for four days. On the fourth day, about halfway through the deliberation process, it occurred to me that a jury is a perfect example of a successful collaboration. Here you have 12 people, with 12 different viewpoints, working together to reach a common goal: agreeing on a fair and impartial verdict. This reminded me that collaboration is nothing new, as a society we've been doing it for hundreds of years. But what is new is how online collaboration is becoming standard operating procedure for all forward-thinking businesses. And a lot of it is happening online. Which is where we come in.

Recently we spent a day at Portland's InnoTech conference. The first event of the day was a breakfast speech by Don Tapscott, the co-author of Wikinomics. This popular and insightful book has the industry buzzing. And the buzz we heard from him and other speakers all day long was...online collaboration. You can imagine that we felt pretty good about this as ProtoShare™ is all about better results through online collaboration.

It's become pretty clear that online collaboration will soon change business as we know it. As Tapscott says, "In the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, teams numbering in the thousands, or even millions, are creating encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success."

There are many voices saying similar things. Take, for an example, Evan Rosen's The Culture of Collaboration, which was a Gold Medal winner at the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards. In the book, he describes "the trend towards real-time, spontaneous collaboration" and how "collaborative culture is changing business models and the nature of work".

And then, of course, there is James Surowiecki’s 2004 classic “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations.” Surowiecki essentially formulated the philosophy behind Web 2.0 and online collaboration when he wrote "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

You may be asking yourself, well, what does this mean to me? Well, from our own experience, and from the many people we've talked to in the interactive industry, there is a lot of pain out there associated with keeping a website project on track and under budget. We've all struggled keeping up with multiple partners on a project - whether they're in the next cube or in another country, communication is disjointed. The frustrating email chains. The endless meetings with notes scrawled on stickies or in the margins of yet another paper document. The dreaded phone conference and summary. Well, we want to end all of that unnecessary stress.

We're not selling a project management tool, but ProtoShare™ will help you better manage an interactive project. And not just with your team, but with the folks on the stakeholder and client side as well. The Review section of the tool allows you, your team, and your clients to create topics, add comments, and drag out pins to mark the specific area(s) under discussion. Review collects all comments and ideas; it tracks revisions, and keeps a complete record - all in real time.

We all know that one of the biggest difficulties in successfully prototyping a website is getting client buy in. Using Review in ProtoShare™ engages clients at an early stage in the process. They can click through the interactive wireframe, experience the layout and navigation, and make comments along the way. This tends to get them excited. And when you are finished with the project, ProtoShare™ is not a dead-end. You can export into a Word document as much or as little of the project as you want, and that puts you pretty far down the path to having a complete requirements document for the development team. Now it’s your turn to be on the online collaboration jury. Check out our 30-day free trial and judge for yourself if online collaboration works.