The importance of utilising tools for internal processes

by Daemonite Dan Hellings

At most companies, there are a few essential business tools that you depend on. These internal business tools help you to manage day-to-day activities smoothly. Whether it’s for instant messaging, or tasking and tracking, or document management, tools enable you to sift through the noise and get on with what matters.

I’d always argue that internal processes should be confirmed before a tool is introduced. Having a fixed way of doing things makes having the right tools much easier.

I advise businesses to start from the perspective of an employee and understand their user requirements, before mapping out which tools are needed internally. Every business needs an internal tool strategy that identifies which tools are used for what user purpose, to ensure no overlap. This ensures a single point of truth for document storage, tasking, tracking, knowledge base, project artefacts, meeting notes and product requirements.

An issue I see a lot is confusion between tools, for example when companies try to use both G-Suite and Office365. Businesses that try to use both see issues arising in the differences between these products. For example, you might create a PowerPoint document, save it in Google Drive and then open it using the default of Google Slides. This leads to formatting issues, confusion and lack of clarity.

A company’s Intranet is a key tool within a business. The intranet is the single location for vital information such as company news, policies, procedures, an employee directory and useful links. But Intranets have a limited use case, and it’s important to understand what your intranet platform can and cannot do. This will help to understand what other tools you need.

Document management

The best tools centralise complication sets of information, removing silos and making content shared and transparent. This is important in modern, knowledge-based businesses where sets of data need to be standardised. It also means your business isn’t dependent on certain individuals to get things done.

At Daemon Solutions, we have a central document storage system, offering a single point of truth for our company artefacts. This is linked with a number of other business functions — such as email — to enable us to always have clear communication across projects.

Our document management system also means that version control is tightly observed. Instead of producing a series of different documents we have one single master document. This is linked to a single location, which is also far better for security. With everything backed up on Cloud, everyone has peace of mind.

The impact on knowledge sharing

For us, having a central knowledge base is essential to our business. In businesses, there’s often the problem of the core business knowledge being confined to one individual. Team directories become random, meaning when new employees join the training process is laborious.

Having a consistent way of sharing internal knowledge enables us to train people effectively. It also provides a central and up to date source of truth. This prevents anyone implementing outdated processes or losing track of the project progress.

This system also saves time and money by removing the need for people to look for information in numerous email trails, file directories, Slack channels or other instant messaging solutions. By adding content such as information, meeting notes, answers to common problems to a central knowledge base, you can capture all the understanding that would normally be lost. This is why utilising a knowledge management tool such as Atlassian’s Confluence is so important.

Task tracking

As well as sharing information, we use Atlassian’s Jira for tracking many of our internal processes and for tracking project tasks. This enables us to maximise team productivity and keep everyone abreast of progress.

Having a smart task tracking application, that allows you to track, collaborate and report, can make a huge difference on any team or project. For us at Daemon Solutions, this prevents gaps between emails, post-it notes on walls and internal confusion. From this tool, we can also pull out progress metrics to share with clients, which they find really useful.

At Daemon Solutions, we use Atlassian tools to make our internal processes run much easier. Atlassian’s flexible and collaborative approach to their products complements our culture of being open, transparent and encouraging collaboration and teamwork.

If you want to talk about anything I’ve covered or know more about how we use tools at Daemon please get in touch.
My LinkedIn profile