In today’s interconnected business landscape, the ability to collaborate on documents with external stakeholders is not just an advantage—it’s a necessity. As organizations engage with a diverse array of partners, clients, and vendors, the traditional boundaries of the workplace are being redrawn. Effective document collaboration extends the capabilities of a company, enabling the integration of a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and perspective from across these boundaries. While choosing the right collaboration platforms is critical, it’s not the only factor in your success. For organizations or teams who wish to improve how they collaborate with external stakeholders, we have these ten recommendations.
1. Understand Your Needs:
Before diving into a collaborative project with external parties, it’s crucial to pinpoint the nature of the collaboration. Are you brainstorming, creating a document from scratch, reviewing, or getting approvals? The objective guides the choice of tools and the level of access needed. Unlike internal collaborations, working with external stakeholders often requires a more formal and structured approach to ensure clarity and alignment.
It’s also vital to identify the right mode of collaboration. Will it be real-time or asynchronous? External collaborations often lean towards asynchronous interactions due to differing schedules and time zones. Understanding these aspects will help in setting the right expectations, choosing appropriate collaboration tools, and establishing clear communication channels, ensuring a smooth and productive collaboration experience with external stakeholders.
2. Create Mutual Document Collaboration Policy
Having a clear document collaboration policy is crucial when engaging with outside entities. This policy should outline the standards, processes, and expectations for collaborating on documents. It can cover everything from the use of tools to communication protocols and data security measures. A well-structured policy helps in ensuring consistency, clarity, and adherence to organizational norms, even when collaborating with external associates.
As part of that mutual document collaboration policy, agree upon a naming convention with your external stakeholder. A consistent naming convention helps in keeping documents organized and easily identifiable, which is especially crucial when dealing with versions. It’s even more important in external collaborations with external teams where the risk of confusion could be higher due to different organizational practices. If your collaboration tool supports automatic versioning, utilizing that feature can ensure a systematic and error-free naming convention, making it easier for all parties to track and retrieve documents.
3. Set Clear Permissions:
Defining precise permissions is fundamental when collaborating with external parties. It ensures that only authorized individuals can view, edit, or comment on documents. Unlike internal collaborations, those with external entities might require more rigid permission settings to protect sensitive information. Ensuring that every participant has the appropriate level of access based on their role in the collaboration is key to maintaining document integrity and security.
4. Encourage Open Communication:
Fostering an environment of open communication is vital when collaborating with people outside your organization. Encourage team members and external stakeholders to share their thoughts, feedback, and concerns freely. Having regular check-ins and updates can help in addressing issues timely, ensuring that the collaboration stays on track and goals are met.
5. Choose the Right Tool:
Today, collaborations with third parties are often managed through a combination of email and a mix of various internal tools. Unfortunately, many organizations treat collaborations with counterparties as an afterthought, which significantly contributes to the challenges often encountered in these collaborations.
For a more streamlined and effective external document collaboration, it’s advisable for organizations to invest in a tool designed to support the unique needs of external stakeholders. Such a tool can simplify the collaboration process for both parties involved, minimizing the common hurdles seen with a disjointed set of tools.
Selecting the right collaboration tool is critical for the success of collaborations with external teams. A tool like TakeTurns, designed for asynchronous collaboration, or other platforms tailored for real-time collaboration can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the collaboration process. The chosen tool should be user-friendly, secure, and aligned with the unique needs of your collaboration with external stakeholders, ensuring that all parties can work together seamlessly regardless of different organizational practices or geographical locations. This dedicated approach towards choosing the right tool reflects a proactive step towards improving external document collaborations, moving away from the reactive and disjointed practices commonly seen today.
6. Train Team Members:
Training is essential to ensure that both your team and the external parties are on the same page regarding the collaboration tools and processes. Providing training on the selected collaboration platform, communication channels, and security protocols can help in minimizing misunderstandings and maximizing productivity during the collaboration with external entities. If you plan on combining several internal tools to handle your external collaboration, you will definitely need to document how these tools should be used by everyone internal and external. Make sure you distribute the training materials ahead of time to avoid friction.
7. Maintain Version Control:
Version control is vital, especially when multiple parties are involved in document editing. It helps track the evolution of the document and can be a lifesaver in case of conflicting edits or the need to revert to a previous version. For collaborations with counterparties, focusing on key versions or milestones, rather than every minor change, can help in keeping the version history organized and less overwhelming. Utilize automatic versioning if your tool supports it, as it’s less error-prone and can save time.
8. Communicate Clearly:
Clear communication is crucial for successful collaboration with people outside your organization. It’s essential to establish robust channels of communication, whether via email, chat, or within the collaboration tool itself. Employ a mix of real-time and asynchronous communication tools based on the needs of the project. Ensuring that there’s a clear record of discussions and decisions, especially when working with third parties, promotes transparency and helps in avoiding misunderstandings or misinterpretations. If you’re using a tool that helps integrate communications with collaboration management there’s not much to do. However, if you plan on using a combination of internal tools (e.g., email + microsoft 365) make sure how you plan on communicating is well documented in your mutual document collaboration policy.
9. Stay Organized:
Keep documents, feedback, and communication well-organized to ensure everyone can easily find what they need. Utilize folders, labels, and other organizational features of the collaboration tools you plan on using to keep everything tidy and accessible.
10. Wrap Up Properly:
At the conclusion of the collaboration, archive all documents, discussions, and related materials in accordance with internal policies and applicable regulations. Providing a summary or a wrap-up report outlining the accomplishments, challenges, and lessons learned can promote continuous improvement and readiness for future collaborations.
Concluding Thoughts
In conclusion, if you want to work well with people from other groups or companies on shared documents, remember these tips: know what you need, make clear rules everyone agrees on, decide who can do what, talk openly and often, teach everyone how to use them, keep track of document changes, communicate clearly, stay neat and organized, wrap things up neatly when you’re done, and pick the best tools for working together. We have found that tool choice, especially tools that can support document collaboration tool for working with external parties, is one of the critical success factors. We hope these recommendations provide a roadmap to enhance how your organization collaborates with external parties on key documents.
