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Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools

Best-of-breed approaches create more confusion than productivity.

  • Organizations’ collaboration toolsets are increasingly disordered and overburdened. Not only do organizations waste money by purchasing tools that overlap with their current toolset, but also employees’ productivity is destroyed by having to spend time switching between multiple tools.
  • Shadow IT is easier than ever. Without suitable onboarding and agreed-upon practices, employees will seek out their own solutions for collaboration. No transparency of what tools are being used means that information shared through shadow IT cannot be coordinated, monitored, or regulated effectively.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Best-of-breed approaches create more confusion than productivity. Collaboration toolsets should be as streamlined as possible.
  • Employee-led initiatives to implement new toolsets are more successful. Focus on what is a suitable fit for employees’ needs.
  • Strategizing toolsets enhances security. File transfers and communication through unmonitored, unapproved tools increases phishing and hacking risks.

Impact and Result

  • Categorize your current collaboration toolset, identifying genuine overlaps and gaps in your collaboration capabilities.
  • Work through our best-practice recommendations to decide which redundant overlapping tools should be phased out.
  • Build business requirements to fill toolset gaps and create an adoption plan for onboarding new tools.
  • Create a collaboration strategy that documents collaboration capabilities, rationalizes them, and states which capability to use when.

Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how to create a collaboration strategy that will improve employee efficiency and save the organization time and money.

Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools – Executive Brief
Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools – Phases 1-3
Collaboration Strategy Template

1. Evaluate current toolset

Identify and categorize current collaboration toolset usage to recognize unnecessary overlaps and legitimate gaps.

Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools – Phase 1: Evaluate Current Toolset
Identifying and Categorizing Shadow Collaboration Tools Survey
Overlaps and Gaps in Current Collaboration Toolset Template

2. Strategize toolset overlaps

Evaluate overlaps to determine which redundant tools should be phased out and explore best practices for how to do so.

Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools – Phase 2: Strategize Toolset Overlaps
Phase-Out Plan Gantt Chart Template
Phase-Out Plan Marketing Materials

3. Fill toolset gaps

Fill your collaboration toolset gaps with best-fit tools, build business requirements for those tools, and create an adoption plan for onboarding.

Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools – Phase 3: Fill Toolset Gaps
Adoption Plan Gantt Chart Template
Adoption Plan Marketing Materials
Collaboration Tools Business Requirements Document Template
Collaboration Platform Evaluation Tool
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Guided Implementation 1: Evaluate the current toolset
  • Call 1: Identify toolset problems.
  • Call 2: Analyze overlaps and gaps.
  • Call 3: Outline rationalizations.

Guided Implementation 2: Strategize toolset overlaps
  • Call 1: Identify redundant overlapping tools.
  • Call 2: Resolve disagreement.
  • Call 3: Outline phase-out plan.

Guided Implementation 3: Fill toolset gaps
  • Call 1: Determine best-fit tool criteria.
  • Call 2: Build business requirements.
  • Call 3: Outline the adoption plan.

Author

Thomas Randall

Contributors

  • Josh Lee, CEO, Swit
  • Dr. Laurence Lock Lee, Co-Founder, SWOOP Analytics
  • James Randall, SEO Executive, The Evergreen Agency
  • Sorell Slaymaker, Principal Consulting Analyst, TechVision Research
  • 16 anonymous contributors

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