You have two options when it comes to team collaboration: you can either read hundreds upon hundreds of management books or studies and still not know what to do, or you can keep the nexus online and let people know you are there so they can get things done. Keep Everyone in the Loop
You can keep the nexus online (through chat rooms, tasks and discussion boards) so it doesn’t matter whether your entire team works in the same office, or remotely. Everyone is equal. Remote workers don’t miss out on any of the latest events, even if they aren’t at the water cooler. All they have to do is log in online to stay up to date. While in the zone, a typical developer keeps a million things in their heads, including variables and loops, utility functions, and API calls. If someone interrupts them every 11 mins, they will need 20 minutes to get back to the zone. This is a huge productivity killer.ActiveCollab was specifically designed to allow people to focus on their work. You don’t have to deal with intrusive notifications. Once you are ready, you can go to My Work or your inbox to deal with the notification. It’s a great opportunity to learn collaboration etiquette from a new member of the team.
Send a message to the chat room for general questions and talk. Or start a discussion so everyone can contribute when they have the time.
If someone is at work and doesn’t want distractions, ActiveCollab and chat windows will be closed.
How to collaborate with your team
The majority of the collaboration is simple. A designer might quickly sketch out several ideas, almost all of which are terrible. After a few days, the team has decided on three of the best. The designer then takes the feedback and selects the best approach. The designer then refines the idea, consults with the client, and has the final design ready to be coded. People will have ideas to improve what you have created. It is important that the initial work conveys the basic idea well enough to allow for a discussion. It’s all about communication and polishing. Spend enough time prototyping to get to the heart of what you’re trying to build. Comps are never finished and won’t look like the final product. Treat them as a throwaway piece of work, an intermediate step towards the final goal. They shouldn’t be included in final deliverables. Project discussions are better for general matters. These discussions are great for sharing status updates, deciding on the sitemap, next steps, color palettes, and even sharing preliminary mockups. You might want your client to know that you are working on a task, but not the final result until it is completed. In this case, you can have a discussion with your client and hide the result from them. You can use this place to share your PSDs and other high-res files that you don’t want your client access before they pay. It is important to ask each side for their reasoning, and then continue asking “Why” until you run out of arguments. Most discussions end once the other side is asked to explain their position. If both sides have strong arguments, the person who can support their argument with data usually wins.