Concept Marketing Group Inc.

In either case, the media world relies more than any other industry on personal networks. As a result we can see project teams with people from different backgrounds, professions and sometimes even different native languages (speaking of off-shoring). New communication trends and technologies emerging every day (just remember the introduction of social media) very specialized and always new skills are constantly needed. Therefore today, the task for project managers is not only to know a lot of qualified freelancers from the latest technologies, but to get them together and make sure they collaborate like one single well lubricated machine. To deliver projects on time and on budget, the team needs to communicate well, since the somewhat binding corporate culture does not exist.

But the question remains up to which point the cost reduction through outsourcing and hiring professionals on demand, is compensating the increasing cost for communication in such projects or how to constrain the rising cost of communication. But we suggest not worrying too much, since there are some nice tools for online collaboration especially for the media guys.

Collaborative software solutions aim to transform the way ideas, documents and rich media are shared from distributed locations in order to enable more effective team collaboration. In other words: these tools help you to communicate better, off-site and with many visual support tools thus reducing travelling and meeting expenses immensely. The latest web-based solutions even enable teams to access important data (or tools) from any location as long as they have internet access and a web browser.

But in addition to the web 2.0 usual suspects like slideshare, mindmeister and all the millions of web conferencing tools, we found a new interesting collaboration tool especially for interface designers and media agencies: Pidocos wireframing and media collaboration tool (www.pidoco.com).

This completely web-based tool helps interaction designers to communicate the work-flow concepts and specs (as interactive interface mockups) of a new website to developers, customers and other stake holders in the extended project team. All communication takes place online (just a web browser is needed) and all team members can collaborate in real-time (or asynchronously) on the same wireframes, tracking and influencing the different stages of development. What makes it special for screen designers; it’s not just collaboration, but also a great wireframing and usability testing tool. It basically transfers the idea of rapid paper prototyping to the web and adds a lot of helpful testing, communication and collaboration features.

Visual collaboration tools like this really help us project managers keeping our teams on track and reduce communication cost across boundaries – boundaries in the head, location and language. Because a picture says more than a thousand words!