Teambot - ITM Platform | Projects Programs Portfolio

What is the only application that all professionals in the world use?

Exactly. It is the email. For years professionals around the world complained about how uncomfortable it can be if it is used as a documentation repository and even claimed that emails are "dead". Even so, it is very clear that mail is still unrivaled in the day to day of any office.

Of course, at ITM Platform we do not want to help your inboxes become messy garbage dumps.

No more unwanted notifications

The problem with email in B2B environments is not so much the channel, but the frequency. Usually, most applications send notifications automatically and, unless they are very well designed, their volume increases rapidly and end up being ignored.

With Teambot the opposite occurs: it is an ally of our users because it only sends a notification when it is requested.

The functioning is very simple:

I write an email to Teambot
I include my request for information on the message subject
Teambot reads mu subject and my email address
Teambot sends me an email with the requested information

This whole process can last less than 6 seconds. And you do not even need to log into ITM Platform. This is the reason why all our customers are adding Teambot to their list of regular contacts.

Semantic searches from the subject

The truly elegant thing about Teambot is that it offers precise and complex information from an absolutely minimalist user interface. We have decided to follow one of the best design maxims: less is more.

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In order to provide users with the highest advantages, we have transformed the email into a search engine... applied to all ITM Platform projects and tasks.

The search engine uses only the metadata fields. Specifically, two fields:

The addressee, who is always teambot@itmplatform.io
The subject, where the user indicated the information they are looking for.

Benefits of Teambot

As a Team Member, you can organize your day without logging into ITM Platform

By simply sending an email to Teambot with the subject “today”, you will receive all the tasks to which you are assigned and all the projects in which you participate.

From there, you can request more details with a simple click.

As a project manager, you can swiftly check the status of critical tasks

Do you have doubts about the status of a task? Ask Teambot and you will find out immediately.

As a PMO administrator, you can quickly check the status of any project

With the access privileges of a Full Access license, PMO managers can use Teambot to gather the most important information about the status of a project. In order to do this, they just have to send an email to Teambot with the name of the project (or a part of it) in the mail subject. If there is more than one option, Teambot will send a clarification email.

With Teambot you can work offline

From now on, users who are in geographical environments with connectivity problems can continue working while they are offline, obtaining the detailed information they need. With Teambot, the email server will send and receive emails even in locations with very low connectivity; and once the information is received, it will be available anywhere in offline mode.

With Teambot you can respond to your boss with precision

Another useful feature is the simplicity of reporting information to anyone, just forward the information offered by Teambot.

How to give Teambot instructions for email

Teambot reads the email subject to find out what you need. The first command you can try with Teambot could be “help”; Teambot will send you instructions on the type of commands available and the answer you will get:

Task lists for a given day: list tasks
Complete lists of tasks: list all tasks
Complete lists of projects: list all projects
Task details: name of the task
Project details: name of the project

Beyond the basic instructions, we wanted Teambot to be able to listen to our users and understand what they want to know. So, for example, if you send Teambot an email with the subject “corporate plan”, it will return a list of tasks and projects whose name resembles the subject.

In the next phases, we hope that Teambot will continue learning new rules of behavior and will become even more useful and helpful, offering proactive reminders when, for example, the delivery date of a critical task approaches; or allowing to report hours and progress by email.

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Even in a specialized world like project management, there are current trends and popular kids (often newcomers), while other issues, skills and areas are relegated to a second row or altogether ignored. Here are ITM Platform’s candidates to those second row components in project management that are worth discussing more in-depth.

1. Project Evaluation

Project Evaluation should be a methodical and un-biased assessment of your projects, both completed and ongoing. Post Project Evaluation completes the project management process once the product is in use. It provides feed-back in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, etc. in order to learn for the future. There are two main stages:

Immediately, evaluation seeks to identify isolate learning moments, transform them into lessons so that they can be applied to the next project – that’s the moment they turn into lessons learned
A longer term review to determine what, if any, adjustments should be made to company policies and procedures

2. Project Integration Management

The objective of Project Integration Management is to co-ordinate the diverse components of the project by quality project planning, execution and change control to achieve the required balance of time, cost and quality.

Project integration management ensures the effective integration of a project into the organization’s total business and co-ordination of the diverse components of the project. This includes setting up the planning and control systems for project selection, planning the total project and co-ordinating the activities in the other eight knowledge areas. It also includes working with everyone in the organization who is involved in the project, not only the immediate stakeholders.

3. Management tools and techniques

The objective of using management tools and techniques is to optimize specific activities in the development of a system. Although much of the attention is paid to the selection of planning tools, some areas that are often neglected from this point of view are:

Growth Management. Beyond the adoption of prediction metrics that can measure the growth of an organization, it is essential to have scalable tools to accompany an organization when it goes through a transition between different maturities. By combining ease of use with the full benefits, ITM Platform is specifically designed to support these processes.

Using Project management tools such as ITM Platform will help automate management processes and make your company more efficient.

Talent development should go beyond measurement and remuneration by objectives, seeking to introduce a learning loop between project performance and work performance of team members.

4. End-customer orientation

Although this is the fundamental focus of agile philosophy, putting yourself in the place of the end user is a form of empathy that is always lacking and which there are few formative options. Here are some strategies that demonstrate customer orientation:

Work in startup mode beyond the initial phase of creating an organization: the business orientation is to respond to what the customer is looking for.
Responding swiftly to customer complaints and questions.
Dealing respectfully with community issues.

5. Creativity

Essential to conceive solutions for customer problems, they are typical of engineers and product owners, but obviously extend to project managers. In one way or another, creativity is an essential skill in project management. As opposed to the regular and standardized world of operations, there is no one-size-fits-all for projects.

But creativity in project management is not a voiced desired for the extremely original or the never-seen-before. It’s, put simply, the ability to identify what’s should be happening when placed under a new situation.

Project managers require a taste for recalling their past experiences, and those of the projects they interact with, to come up with a combinatorial solution that applies to the current context. That’s creative project management.

6. Coaching and Development

By employing their coaching skills, supervisors assess the training and professional development of team members with the aim of offering them opportunities for improvement, such as new experiences that allow them to develop new competencies. Although project management certification is a recognized goal, it is often important to be able to identify intermediate training and experience objectives.

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You don’t even need to be able to measure the value.

But imagine if you could.

Imagine that you could quantify the value that collaboration contributes to your projects. If you could add a few cents (or a few dollars) to your "collaborative balance" every time someone makes a constructive comment, warns of a problem in time, makes an innovative proposal outside the scope of their responsibilities, share experiences of other Projects that can save hours of misguided execution.

Try ITM Platform and start integrating PPM capabilities and powerful communication across projects.

You could show the results to top executives, including shareholders and customers, and defend the profitability of investing in strong internal communication policies.

In reality, you don’t need to measure the value at every instant. It is enough to make sure that in your organization there are solid channels for communication to flow. You may need more than one technological solution to support the entire flow. Oh, and remember that email stopped counting as collaborative technology back in 2006.

Collaborative tools

It is convenient to distinguish between channels for internal communication (within the team of each project) and external communication, or between projects.

Communication between projects

The business chat or intranet services are excellent for removing watertight drawers, but they live far from the technical planning of the projects, so they are difficult to integrate with the daily management of them. They are excellent for cross-cutting issues affecting all departments.

Internal communication

By contrast, internal communication to a project team will be better supported through management software such as ITM Platform, which integrates social networking features within each project.

Creating the Right Portfolio

No tool can communicate between projects and connect to the equipment of each project without generating noise. Therefore, it is essential to be able to find a good internal technology portfolio that maintains governance criteria.

The combination of ITM Platform with Slack is a great example of a portfolio of communication tools. Within each project, the owner is ITM Platform, while Slack is unbeatable as a business chat between teams. Thanks to the ITM Platform Teambot app, you can also connect both tools so that the members of your teams can work with the ITM Platform from Slack.

This way you can get all the benefits of a communication policy as well as improving the quality of your projects and learning between teams.

Do you still want to measure your ROI of collaboration? Subscribe to this blog and you will get the answer.

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One of the great challenges facing CEOs is improving internal communication. The challenge of this type of policy is to proceed with communication without restricting it; Or, in other words, get the information that:

is sufficient but does not generate noise;
leave traces that allow recovery;
distributed in a differentiated way, without generating gaps.

The importance of internal communication policies is proportional to the size of the organization. However, finding this balance can be especially difficult if you do not have a team where members are accustomed to collaborative work. To reinforce this interconnection, it is necessary to engage its members with strategies that foster the pooling of their skills and allow them to evolve as part of a whole.

When working in project management, it is vital to strengthen communication channels among the members of the initiative. If we think of our team as a coordinated body, they all bring their inventiveness and talent to achieve a common result by assembling their different functions. However, in designing internal communication policies, different procedures and channels will have to be designed:

communication between the team of a project
communication between projects and teams other than the same organization(external)

While in the first case the communication tends to have a tactical dimension, because it is oriented to improve the quality of the project and the effectiveness of the execution, in the case of communication between projects can have a strategic dimension, oriented to generate synergies and create Shared knowledge that can raise the value of the organization and its capacity for innovation. It is at this point that the management of internal communication may require an expert to coordinate and direct it.

Perhaps a line of work is not as efficient as it may be because its resources are unlinked, that is: employees, technology and processes work in an uncoordinated way. An integrated vision of the tasks assigned to the team members, allows the manager to guide the goals of each one and propose synergies aimed at encouraging reciprocal learning.

Here are some factors that you should take into account to improve the collaboration in your projects and we present the definitive tool to optimize the communications between the members of your team.

Synchronize your computer

A good internal communication plan allows the company that deploys it to save resources and avoid deviations in cost planning. This is because errors have a greater monitoring by all the collaborators, so that corrections not only come from the management of the project, but are generated once they are publicly shared. The added value of promoting self-help among peers increases the sense of authorship that the employee professes towards the object of his work.

Likewise, a project manager who relies on the values of cooperation and emphasizes the role of collective work will be able to propose more agile solutions, since it will have real-time information on the specific availability of each member, and scope of specialization. It can also use the creation of subgroups that, because of the special affinity of their members, are able to solve problems that another conjugation of employees would be unable to address.

Mission impossible without the right tools

Improving the relationships between the different segments that make up a human team can be supported by software that integrates their tasks, documentary contributions and specific annotations into a single conversion platform. Relying on these types of applications often means that project coordinators have a greater capacity to intervene on the overall stage, since they have a global perspective on all operations.

Slack is a great example of business communication that manages to retain the user, retrieve shared information more easily than email, and add features through apps. There are many reasons why you should start using Slack in your office.

For example, the ITM Platform Teambot application allows you to use ITM Platform from Slack, query tasks and projects and navigate to the planning environment without having the Slack chat.

If you are not an ITM Platform customer, you can now try Teambot with a free environment from this trial:

Try ITM Platform Teambot

Little by little

It often happens that employees perceive these types of measures as restrictive, since they involve the obligatory adaptation of all those affected to be implemented. However, once that initial phase of mistrust in the new protocols is overcome, they themselves discover the advantages of working with project management tools.

One of the most common points of friction between employees and a new working methodology is related to the learning challenges involved in using an unknown platform. In this sense, ITM Platform Teambot relies on the leadership of the Slack network within the world of corporate messaging and leverages its infrastructure to offer a more intuitive work experience. Moving to an environment where the user feels comfortable reduces the general rejection associated with technical progress.

To counteract this proven trend that evokes the technological evolution in teams already formed, it is appropriate to devote the time that is necessary to show the benefits derived from working with state-of-the-art solutions. Creating a tutorial for all collaborators, starting a shared video conference presentation or disseminating a written manual, are initiatives that can reduce the step and increase the confidence of the staff in the new methodology.

As you have seen, many factors are involved in the definition of an internal communication plan. Therefore, we must spare no effort in enabling new channels of interaction that ensure corporate synergy and increase the degree of commitment of our employees or subordinates.

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business man shake hand puzzle background agreement concept flat vector illustration

Although collaboration is an essential principle for a modern and innovative organization, it is worth remembering that it is not recommendable to embrace collaboration at all costs. The definition of a collaborative culture will have to be oriented to different parameters specific to each organization.

Collaboration for PMOs: advantages and disadvantages

If you are convinced that your organization needs to improve project collaboration, you must make sure collaboration is properly oriented and directed towards the goals of the organization.

For example, collaboration is a priority in innovation intensive organizations dedicated to the design of new products and services: the more ideas are gained, the greater the innovative potential. In these cases it may be important to collect inputs from all interested parties and even to determine a iterative procedure, whereby each design phase is subject to an open round of discussions.

However, in organizations with more predictive projects, a culture of open and uncontrolled collaboration can be pernicious. Even destructive:

Hierarchical validation procedures are proportionately related to deadline compliance
Informal communication relies on people, not processes. That is why large organizations and teams with high turnover suffer especially when they fail to combine collaborative elements with standardized procedures.

1. Project Management

Despite the risks of open collaboration, the risks of not collaborating are also high. A project manager who does not delegate, share information, or accept comments beyond the established channels becomes a bottleneck that can choke the entire organization.

On the contrary, among the collaborative responsibilities of the project manager is the habit of sharing knowledge with all stakeholders: team members and executives, clients, suppliers, or public entities in the case of tenders.To avoid being lost in this web, it is very important from a certain complexity to determine what tools, documents and processes are right for each stage.

2. Project collaboration

Another advantage of a collaborative controlled culture is that team members can benefit from cross-pollinization. Again, this is a very important aspect when the project presents unknowns or new problems to solve.

Some practices to make ideas flow:

Use open spaces
Use equally open chat tools: instead of email, a chat service for channels such as Slack, for example
Adopt SaaS tools, so that your computer's hard drives do not become black boxes

3. How to combine closed communication and standardized procedures

Unfortunately, these days it is not enough to be productive and execute a list of tasks within a project. Actually, we have many applications based on a timeless distribution of activities or the check-list approach , which, although they are very valid for certain functions, do not serve for the execution and planning of professional projects. The most difficult in these cases is to get the right balance between collaboration and controlled information.

ITM Platform Teambot is an application for Slack that allows, precisely, to speed collaboration through the messaging chat that has taken a robot to Mars while incorporating the strengths of an ITM Platform capacity planning tool. Where Slack adds the collaborative dimension, ITM Platform adds the control.

In fact, ITM Platform Teambot, created for all team members, is the most convenient way to use ITM Platform:

It allows to recall tasks and projects
facilitates reporting processes
Links seamlessly to ITM Platform

Advantages of ITM Platform Teambot:

Teambot is the only project management application in Slack that, besides allowing to recall information, offers the possibility to use agile and predictive methodology in the same integrated portfolio
Share knowledge and cooperate with organizations that integrate different hierarchies or open teams
Check projects and tasks in seconds
Report your progress from Slack and without ever having to log in to ITM Platform

Request a demo of ITM Platform and we will tell you how to establish successful collaborative practices for your projects.

Request a demo