Projects have their own life. Typically, a project is born and started to launch a new business or develop something great. A team of experts is gathered, and they take responsibilities. An objective is set, divided into tasks and milestones, delegated to team members - who are doing the job. Each expert contributes data from their Evernote and Dropbox accounts into the project. Once running, a project develops a life of its own. Refinder is here to manage the life of a project.
While cloud apps like Dropbox and Google Docs have been around for some time to easily gather data and collaborate in a project, a layer beyond was missing. Experts do their work in apps, the communciation between team members about new information, deadlines and milestones, is often spread over with e-mails, phone calls, or private discussions - complicated!
Refinder opens a new possibility. Now with Refinder, you can integrate your favorite apps into one place, invite your team members, get an overview of activities in the project and communicate easier than ever before.
Here's how to organize your projects!
Lets give an example. Recently, we ran a marketing campaign where we gathered user stories and gave away one GoPro camera as a thank-you.
Here is how we organized this project with Refinder:
1. I created a collection "Go Pro Contest" and invited my colleagues as well as our graphic designer and marketing consultant.
2. Then I connected a Dropbox folder to the collection since this is where we planned to store incoming submissions and pictures, as well as PDFs related to the contest.
3. Everyone from the team joined the collection. They can all now see the data from the Dropbox folder and talk to each other. No more emails of different projects are mixing in my inbox - all about one project is in one place.
4. Leo, our CEO, joined the collection and began to
distribute tasks among us. For me, this meant that I was responsible for getting the text for the contest page together as well as for organizing the deadlines and basic criteria for the submissions. The status of the task was then set onto "Open". With this status I would then always get a red message of "open" when I log into my dashboard. This gives me a good overview over open tasks to do. Moreover, while I am working on the task, the others in the collection can see that this job is still in progress and not finished yet.
(this is not published yet for all users, if you want to try it,
contact me!)
5. Questions we received about the contest were posted and the team members then commented their data. I clearly saw who said what and when. Great, all communication together in one place. All decisions documented. Newcomers can read all project-related information. People coming back from holiday are on track in a minute.
6. At a later date, when the submissions had come in, there was again a task for me. We decided to put all the submissions together into a document on Google Docs file. In one document, we can easily get a good overview of all submissions. On Google Docs, I created the "Go Pro Contest" folder, and then created the document in it.
In Refinder, I connected that folder with the collection.
7. Then the file was indexed and shows up in Refinder. I opened it to give it a better description when it would be shown in the collection. Moreover, I could better describe it with tags or relate it to other things if I wanted to. Good to know, the file remains unchanged in Google Docs, and people can continue editing it there. I always get the latest version in Refinder.
When the file was done and I connected GoogleDocs to the collection, then I changed the status of the task and also the status of the file to "completed". 3 minutes later, my colleague came over and said "Great, so you are done? Now who do you think should be the winner?"
...and that's how fast your teamwork can go if you manage your projects with Refinder.
Therefore, sign up for Refinder today.
Chris Brand on Wed, 07/18/2012 - 13:39 
