Everyone who has ever done a group project knows that teamwork can get messy. That is especially true for student initiatives, in which students participate next to their studies. It is easy for members to get caught up in university work and neglect their responsibilities to the initiative. Apart from effective communication and conflict resolution, some digital platforms can also help you manage this better. It is possible that your team will work perfectly well without using any specific platform. But we do recommend them for projects in which you have to keep a continuous overview of tasks and responsibilities, associations with different committees, as well as simply to ensure a work-life balance and prevent burnout. No one appreciates a Whatsapp group spam about the upcoming event at 11 in the evening.
There is a variety of platforms available to teams, we provide an overview of the platforms we use in our teams and organisations:
Notion is a very intuitive and easy program to use. Lots of organisations use Notion as an internal wiki where they store company-wide information that is relevant to all team members. Notion starts with a blank page and is easily customisable to suit your own needs. The downside is that you need to have an internet connection to use it as it doesn’t support offline mode. We’ve seen a lot of different uses of Notion over the last few years and are always amazed by how organisations or individuals customise it and make it a quality of life upgrade. To get started we recommend checking some videos on Youtube. You can get a free pro-account if you sign up with your university email.
Slack is an helpful tool for you and your team to communicate effectively. You can think of it as instant messaging on steroids. You can create a workspace for your startup/organisation and then create different channels to keep the conversation centered around a certain topic. People can join channels automatically, or you can restrict access to some channels that are only relevant to some people. It combines the strengths of forums, such as Reddit, and instant messaging, such as Whatsapp. You can directly message team members, include attachments, integrate Google Drive, etc. Our experience so far has been that it works really well if you implement it as the primary way of communication (so you don’t have a Whatsapp group on top of it). We recommend using this for internal communication as it can replace endless email conversations. For contact to the outside world our recommendation would be email, seeing that not everyone will be familiar with Slack or have an account. However, there is the option of inviting guests to your workspace, or individual channels should you decide to collaborate with outsiders. The free account option gives you access to most functions needed for small work teams.
Asana is less focused on communication and more on keeping track of projects, tasks and deadlines. It is essentially a way of creating clear and straightforward to-do lists, in collaboration with others. You can write down tasks in different categories and different projects, assign them to specific people, set deadlines and mark tasks by priority. You can choose to receive an overview of your daily tasks by email, or simply see them as an overview when you log in. The calendar function of this platform is especially nice for people who have to juggle many different responsibilities and want to plan their time in advance. The free version gives you access to most of the features you need and allows collaboration up to 15 people.
If you are looking a programme which visualises tasks for your team in an organised manner, Trello can be a useful tool. Trello is a programme for project management in teams, and looks similar to a board with sticky notes. It is very easy to use, as you start with a blank canvas and add categories in which you place items. These can be the virtual sticky notes, but you can also add individual tasks or deadlines, and additional comments or attachments (such as documents or images). You can also integrate your Google Drive and Calendar, Slack, or Evernote.
