Supporting an interdisciplinary project

Let us imagine a project in which people from many different parts of an organization are involved.

Now, let us think what features should a tool have that will facilitate an adequate performance of an interdisciplinary team.

Technological progress has a significant impact on the functioning of organizations and vice versa. Currently, companies are switching to a different organizational model – a model which eschews a hierarchical structure and independent departments, instead embracing an integrated network of teams, which we might call “interdisciplinary”.

A new reality

Nowadays, employees often form one-off teams to work on a particular project. After the it is completed, teams disband and their members form new teams that work on new projects.

“[Companies] can thus become more flexible, foster a culture of co-operation, and focus on clients more efficiently. Even though the recent changes on the labour market have sparked a lot of interest, only 21 percent of the participants [of the “Global Human Capital Trends 2016” study] feel that their organizations are proficient at building integrated teams.”

– says Magdalena Jończak, Partner at Deloitte

Requesting support

The process of non-financial reporting embraces a similar model of co-operation to the one outlined above. The information vital for the creation of the report comes from many different sources, which means that the people who have this information are scattered around different divisions and departments of a given company. Analogically to networks of teams, the people who possess the information crucial for the report will need tools that will facilitate the reporting process and enable efficient communication among all people involved in the project.

Key features

An efficient tool for the facilitation of non-financial report should:

1. Be simple and intuitive to use, because the people involved in the project are quite unlikely to be able, nor will they be willing, to spend much time on mastering a complicated platform whose primary aim should be to simplify the process in the first place.
2. Be available at a click of a button – the app should be accessible from any device with an Internet access and must adapt the way it displays content to the size of the screen of the device it is being accessed from (Responsive Web Design). The app must be just as usable on a desktop computer and a smartphone screen.
3. Monitor the progress of the project – the success of a complex project will ultimately depend on whether the people who work on it keep their deadlines. On the one hand, an efficient app supporting the process must guide each user through all the stages of the project. On the other hand, however, it must also monitor the status of the project in real time.

To sum up, a company embracing modern business models must seek tools that would facilitate the processes which take place in the organisation. It is crucial that those tools are available to all people working on a given project. Also, the tools must make their users feel that they really help them do their work and increase their productivity.