What are Workspaces and what they are for?
We are witnessing a constant transformation of the work market. While the workload seems to increase and many workers claim they are working more than ever, jobs are becoming nearly 100% digital in many cases. Companies face the challenge of organizing and distributing work reasonably while balancing demands with their employees’ capacity.
The term “workspace” was first used in the branches of engineering and economic development. However, nowadays it’s even more popular in the software industry, as a cloud-based solution that works like a project directory, in project management tools. In other words, Workspaces are a virtual place where companies can organize their projects.
Why are they so important? Because they help companies order their large amount of work, making it look pretty friendly and motivating for their teams. Besides, they are usually offered in a smart project management tool. Its features allow the team to collaborate, interact, accomplish tasks and goals, monitor projects and much more. GitScrum was created as a competitive option to hold your Workspaces.
How to Organize Workspaces in Industries and Service Businesses?
As we said, Workspaces are directories in your management tools, where you will place your projects. Here are some examples of the options you have to define the categories they represent.
Sort Workspaces by Product Lines
When you have a large product portfolio, you can choose to sort your Workspaces this way. It means that the teams that work specifically for each product line will use their own separate workspaces. For instance, a cosmetic industry sets a workspace for the Hair division, another one for Skincare, and so on. You will be able to allow cross-functional teams to interact in each other’s workspaces, according to your settings. Inside each Workspace, then you can create the projects that concerns each specific team (product 1, product 2, product 3…).
Order Workspaces by Clients
If you are a law firm or a marketing agency, you can order your Workspaces from clients, besides creating one for your own company. There, you will create projects for each client, and invite them to interact with you, making them guest users, or simply sharing your projects. This will help you keep work fully organized and encourage your team to create more, once they will be able to get an overview of all clients’ evolution.
Create Workspaces for Company Departments
Many companies prefer to create a separate Workspace for each of their departments, so teams can work independently and create their own projects. Then you will see workspace names like Financial, Marketing, HR, Sales, Legal, IT and others. It’s a very interesting option for service companies. In the beginning, you can share your project management capacity equally among the teams. With GitScrum, as long as your business expands, you can go up to unlimited workspaces and users.
Create Workspaces for Branches, Offices or Units
If your industry or company already has a wide structure with several addresses, you can create different Workspaces for each one of them. Thus, they can create their own projects and work on them independently, while you can eventually monitor all of them and interact with the local manager. Some nonprofit organizations call working units chapters, which also applies to our suggestion.
Organize Franchised Units
If you want to offer support on project management for franchised units, you can offer workspaces for your franchisees. As long as their business grows robust, it’s recommendable that they sign up for their own project management tool account.
Guide Study Groups
If you run a school or any educational institution, you can create Workspaces for student groups. Each teacher can create their own project and tasks, and create common and individual challenges.
How to Make Workspaces the Ideal Environment for Team Collaboration
Your project management must offer you the features for your team to adapt to your environment, create projects, tasks and interact daily about them. GitScrum offers all this and more. Here are some of the steps to prepare your Workspace for collaboration:
1. Customize your Workflow
Within your workspaces, you must be able to use Kanban boards to manage your projects, on your project management tool. Gitscrum offers you this, and also a range of free workflow templates you can use to adapt them to your working area and projects.
Invite your team members and enable them to start working.
Your teams can choose to download a free template from GitScrum Marketplace and use different templates for each one of their projects or use a standard template for all projects in their workspaces. What matters is that they find an option that fits them, among the hundreds of free alternatives, and are free to customize them.
Workflow templates help teams save time, apply knowledge from the authors to your company and improve your work processes.
2. Create Motivating Workspaces and Projects
Encourage and train your team to create GitScrum workspaces and projects with personality and genuinely relate to your brand. Use design resources for this, applying a different design logo and background image for each workspace and project, following your corporate visual ID. The idea is to break the monotony and transform your virtual platform into a cozy environment, where people interact.
3. Delegate Tasks
Projects will only gain interaction in your workspaces when you create tasks and delegate them to your team members, so they start working and managing their own assignments. The task cards on GitScrum Board in every workspace will have a place (text box) for your team to make comments and post content on each other’s tasks, like videos, images, quotes and encouragement. To make discussions more agreeable and express emotions, you can use emojis.
4. Promote Team Discussions
In your GitScrum Workspaces, you also have a forum feature to promote discussions on important topics. Use it to ask for suggestions and allow the team to release their creativity, besides talking about ideas.
Example: “What could be the name of our brand mascot? Please post your suggestions!”
5. Encourage Creativity and Collaboration
Another interesting feature teams can use inside Workspaces, to make plans and organize project ideas is GitScrum Mind Mapping. This is a very helpful visual technique that became popular worldwide for facilitating ideas output and team brainstorms. Mind mapping works just like our minds, and your teams can build their ideas maps to design plans, portfolios, content calendars, lists and charts.
6. Create Challenges with Sprints
Teams can set independent Sprints in their workspaces to engage workers towards individual and common goals. Each team member focuses on the particular assignments, but all team members see the macro goals that include the individual contribution. When necessary, they help each other.
Driving Innovation with User Stories
the first thing you must consider, when thinking about it, is that innovation must be relevant to your customers. Otherwise, they would be just waste. To guide valuable innovation, you need to make your Workspaces customer-centric. How to do that? Managing GitScrum User Stories. These are concise reports that tell you about end-users and employees’ needs, expectations, and requirements for product and services improvements.
In your project management tool, there are User Stories forms, so that any collaborator can write them. They do that based on experience with customers, contacts received by phone/emails, your website and any other means. Your product manager and product owner work together to define priority criteria on how these requests will be forwarded to the development/design department to be implemented.
The tip is: collect customer data and write user stories constantly, so your teams have rich information to work on innovative ideas and relevant product increments. That will lead your business to release value often, be ahead of competitors and develop customer loyalty. If you don’t have many messages from customers so far, you can take action in several ways to research about your target personas – segmented social media groups, polls, interviews at events and strategic salespoints, or searching for available published surveys on the web.