There is a huge wealth of on-line tools that can help your team to ‘meet’ without physically being in the same place at the same time, and the picture is changing all the time – everyday brings a new tool or an interesting (and sometimes commercial) variation on an old one.
To get an ‘up-to-date’ picture, just search for ‘online collaboration tools‘, or ‘online tools for group decisions‘ and take a look at some of the lists, reviews and actual tools that are available.
A few tools that we would recommend you take a look at are:
- Google Docs, in general, and in particular
- Google draw which you can share in real-time and which can act like a giant section of wall for you to add a template, and people to contribute their ideas and thoughts
- Google_sheets which enables you to explore analyses and run simulations, and to capture plans and track progress
- Google slides which enable you to embed iFrames as backgrounds to particular slides, and capture a series of different inputs, and of course to present those inputs
- Trello, which enables you to set up advanced todo lists across your team, and keep track of progress – it is excellent for understanding real-time progress on actions
- Tricider, which enables asynchronous debate on a decision and the criteria and information put forward by others to support different outcomes
- AnswerGarden, which collates inputs into a wordcloud as a basis for brainstorming and for identifying themes and furthering discussions
- DirectPoll, which is a very simple polling tool to enable on-line voting on a number of predefined options
- GetSatisfaction, which is a community Q&A tool which builds up a easily accessible and maintainable knowledgebase
To explore the latest options for these tools, put the following topics into Google and see what shows up:
- Polling software
- Decision Making Tools
- Collaborative Wordclouds
- Shared documents
- KanBan Software
- Shared Spreadsheets
Feel free to capture resources which you feel may be useful to others using this clinic below:
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