As companies continue to adopt remote and hybrid work models, the need to keep everyone in sync becomes a vital challenge. We're no longer huddled together in the same space and seeing each other every day. That fact makes it harder to make sure that work is properly coordinated. This is where cloud-based technology and automation can keep us all on the same page.
Thanks to COVID, we now know very well how audiovisual conferencing solutions (such as Zoom and Google Meet) allow us to work remotely, allowing us to stay connected with each other through our computers and our devices. We’ve become accustomed to seeing and hearing each other in a landscape screen format. But there is a whole other side to working well together remotely, and that includes getting the actual work done.
We still need to complete projects quickly, efficiently and effectively in a distributed manner. And when I say projects, I mean almost any kind of work that has to be accomplished in a systematic way. This can include anything from engaging with a customer, to running a project, to signing an important agreement.
There are plenty of “work management” and “project management” tools on the market today. When these tools are cloud-based, all participants have access to real-time content at all times. This cuts down on the time wasted in endless email threads and documents being sent around that get lost in the shuffle. But there's another step that we can introduce, and the best tools out there are already doing this. These cloud-based technologies can function as a virtual assistant.
When we collect all of the tasks in an intelligent way, with proper access rights and privileges, the system can shepherd the process and provide the right information to the right people at the right time. It acts as a smart assistant in the cloud. This assistant might remind you of a task that's overdue, it might confirm that something important has been completed, and it might provide relevant statistics that tell you how all of your projects are performing. This smart assistant can also include standard templates and methods for doing things in a reliable way so that you're not constantly having to reinvent the wheel.
This kind of intelligence becomes increasingly important for projects where multiple organizations operate in different locations. All parties need to coordinate their efforts to get something done. Nowhere is this more true than in the investment banking market with high-stakes projects with multiple, distributed parties. These projects have significant impacts on the personal and business outcomes for all parties involved.
There is a new kind of intelligence emerging, a cloud-based intelligence, and a new breed of productivity applications is helping us get our work done. We spend less time doing busy work, and we waste less energy trying to track down information that should just be readily available.
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