As a virtual company, MCFTech (www.mcftech.com) relies heavily on meetings. We aren’t able to have water cooler chat, swing by a colleague’s office to ask a question, or draw something out on a whiteboard in a conference room. On top of having clients all over the world, we have a global workforce spanning many time zones. Virtual companies need to lean on collaboration software in order to be productive, while minimizing the impact of the added meetings to ensure staff still have time to attend to core work duties.
Collaboration software used by MCFTech
Microsoft Office 365
Using Office365, all of our associates are on Lync regularly as their primary internal communication tool. Lync is used for instant messaging and short/tight-scope meetings. We also leverage Microsoft OneNote 2013 for meeting notes, technical specifications, content gathering, etc. One of the greatest advantages of using the suite of Microsoft Online tools is their tight integration with one another. For example, directly from a calendar event in Outlook, we can create a meeting notes page in OneNote which all attendees can view and collaborate on virtually.
Lucid Chart
Lucid Chart is a great tool for mind mapping, flow charts, BPMN and even mockups. We have been able to consolidate many tools to Lucid Chart, which is also cloud based. Changes made on a Lucid Chart document update live for all people viewing the document, making the collaboration capabilities even more robust.
Fuze
Fuze is our go-to software for client or large-scale meetings. Fuze is a relatively modern meeting platform with a clean user interface, robust features and a forward-thinking product and development team. Our Technical Leads and Project Managers use the Fuze Outlook plugin to schedule meetings which are attended globally from PCs and mobile devices. The first half of every Friday for us is a pretty meeting-heavy day, made easier by Fuze.
The first few hours of the morning are dedicated to operational meetings where technical delivery teams and project managers need to hop on and off the meeting at different times to present status updates on their respective projects. The last company meeting is a weekly staff meeting, which we try to keep light and casual to fill the void of the personal interaction we would have in an office. Our traveling workforce shows “pics from the road”, funny videos, cool technology we have recently discovered, and even the occasional serious company update.
Having a virtual company is a great, innovative way to structure your organization and having the right collaboration tools can help to ensure success.
For information about MCFTech tools that can help you be more productive, complete our Contact Form.