Chris Writes.

My fellow alumni and friend Thomas Purves beat me to the punch on this one.  So I’ll call special attention to his post, because he already wrote most of what I’d have said anyways. I’ll add a slight extention to the ideas, but the most important parts he covered nicely. 

The short of it is that I started using a tool called SmartSheet at work this past week.  And while the task I was using it for was, admittedly, a bit simple, it proved to be very, very effective.  It’s an online spreadsheet.  Simple enough concept – one spreadsheet sheet, and different people can edit it once you send them a username and password.  I had a simple web form that I needed translated for our website.  Name, address, a few contextualized survey questions…nothing heavy.  So those form field names became the first column, and then I created blank columns for the other languages.  Here’s the key points:

1. I could send this spreadsheet to 12 people to cover 5 languages.  Some people knew multiple languages.  Some people saw their language was already completed, and just checked it to be sure it was done right.  This would never happen if I’d emailed everyone an excel file. 

2. There was almost a race to complete this.  Everyone can see the efforts that others are putting forth, and this transparency became something I jokingly called “ClearPressure”. 

It seems like when you have a group of talented people, no one likes to be the last one in a group to have completed a required task.  This of course presupposes that those collaborating on the project have agreed to the value of the outcome, and that you’re not asking them to do something that is horribly difficult or time consuming.  So the simple task I had to complete – get a web form translated into 5 languages by my colleagues overseas – would have normally taken a week or two.  Using Smartsheet, it took 2 days.  And that’s the first time we’ve used this system, so the learning curve isn’t too daunting either. 

I am now wondering what other examples of ClearPressure are out there?  Where else can increased transparency increase the motivations of groups to collaborate more quickly and effectively?