Web Worker Daily

Throughout my online career, I’ve been part of several web working teams. On most teams I am just a regular member, but there’s the rare occasion when I find myself the team leader. Like now, for example, when my former graphic design classmates asked me to lead their new studio.

Here’s the problem: we’ve never worked together before. How could we work together and have a united approach to design? What’s so unique about us? Can we figure this out even if we’re working remotely? Read the rest of this entry »

At first peek, web app Teambox looks like another collaboration tool: it’s a Basecamp rival that facilitates collaboration and notifies team members of additions and changes to your projects. Both come with a simple, user-friendly interface. But Teambox has one bonus; it lets teams create unlimited projects for free. Teambox charges for branding, installing it on your own server and subscribing to maintenance plans.

The dashboard has details of all your current projects. Every project consists of messages (discussion forum), lists (tasks), pages (wiki), people (contacts on the project) and chat. In less than 10 minutes, I created two projects and added content for each. Read the rest of this entry »

As more and more companies and teams are going strictly virtual, there are a whole new set of issues to consider and challenges to address. Using my own virtual social media marketing team as an example, I’ve identified a number of needs that require some kind of technology solution, but at the moment, we are “patchwork quilting” our tech infrastructure to accommodate all of our needs.

Here are some needs virtual teams face daily:

Here is a diagram of what we’re currently using as our solutions and which issues and needs each solution addresses. The software we currently use is in orange. Yellow designates the software we are considering.

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I was recently asked to manage a team of graphic designers, all of them fresh graduates with hardly any professional experience. Always eager to help, I accepted the opportunity, knowing that it would be challenging and educational, for both myself and the team.

I soon discovered that working with new freelancers is very different from working with my more accomplished peers. It required me to get back to basics and deal with issues that I hadn’t encountered before. Just as I had expected, there’s a whole new set of opportunities and problems that come from working with “newbies”. Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time, a lone teleworker finds herself working with a team. This could be at the request of the client, or simply because a certain project demands it. In these cases, a strong team dynamic is needed to make the project a success. The ideal team would be highly skilled, efficient, and have complementary working styles. But what are the odds of that? Team members might even have contradictory work processes. At the worst, you might be the only one who is meeting deadlines and sticking to your assigned tasks. What do you do to encourage the same or better efficiency in the other members of your team?

Spend some time discussing the tools and process. Before you get to work, be sure to lay out the process as well as the tools that you will be using. This sets up everyone’s expectations from the outset. Without this discussion, your team might have different ideas about how to tackle the collaborative process. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the age old business question: “Do I want more work?” The question, of course, is actually “Can I handle more work?” or even  “How much more work can I handle?” Do you know how much more work you can handle? Are you at that tipping/breaking point yet? How much more work will get you to that point?

And when you get to that tipping/breaking point, what then? Do you: Read the rest of this entry »

Collaboration is always a challenge for any team, but when that team is virtual, cloud collaboration presents its own set of organizational and tracking problems. GroupSwim is looking to step into the slot between e-mail correspondence and full-featured robust project management systems ala Basecamp. According to the company, GroupSwim is not for the management of a project but for the collaborative exchanges during the creation of deliverables.

While one of the company’s tag lines is “social collaboration for the enterprise,” I always look at software and apps from the standpoint of the lone Web worker who puts together various virtual teams for projects. Can GroupSwim be useful to distributed Web workers?

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