Collaborative project planning: 6 best practices

Whether you aim to build a new residential complex, update software, or redesign a brand, you can always benefit from collaboration early on in your projects. Teamwork facilitates the exchange of ideas in the planning process and helps identify potential roadblocks before they jeopardize your project timeline, budget, or quality.

There are proven strategies for collaborative project planning that lay the groundwork for your next kickoff. They involve setting a foundation with best practices and tools that support open communication, efficiency, and knowledge sharing among team members. Let’s explore these tactics and how they benefit your business across multiple projects and teams.

​​What does it mean to collaborate on a project plan?

Collaborating on a project plan means sharing responsibility for a project’s success. It involves bringing teams together to gather information, create strategies, and align on goals, scope, deliverables, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Compared to traditional approaches, which have a more hierarchical communication structure and well-defined roles and responsibilities, collaborative planning empowers project team members, clients, and other relevant parties to provide input, encouraging a sense of shared ownership.

Here’s a breakdown of the main differences.

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The importance of a project collaboration plan

A project collaboration plan can take many forms, from addressing the specific needs of a marketing team for a campaign to meeting the automation requirements at a retail chain. But regardless of your industry, project objectives, or budget constraints, you can benefit from effective teamwork.

Collaborative project management allows you to:

• Improve communication and transparency: According to Grammarly’s State of Business Communication, workers spend an average of 10.45 hours per week in meetings and 5.94 hours on emails. Aligning goals and priorities in the planning process gives your team a clearer view of the project in advance. It cuts down on confusion and saves time on clarifications down the line.
• Increase efficiency and engagement: A survey by Howspace shows that only one out of ten employees strongly agree that their voice is heard within the workplace. Fostering a culture of collaboration in your projects lets workers contribute with their ideas, keeping them motivated. Teamwork also minimizes delays by addressing potential risks from the start, making projects more efficient and cost effective.
• Share resources and information easily: In traditional planning, a project manager typically organizes and distributes all the necessary documents and materials to the team as needed. While this centralized format can slow down the flow of information, a collaborative approach ensures all members can create new content and share enterprise videos, images, and other assets, streamlining access to relevant data.

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Best practices for collaborative planning in project management

We can say that collaborative project planning requires its own planning — especially if your business has communication or information silos. A Box-sponsored IDC white paper points out that 90% of content that companies generate is unstructured, making it difficult to locate, reuse, or share it across multiple departments and teams.

To integrate collective efforts into your strategy, follow these six collaborative project planning best practices:

1. Assess how teams collaborate in the workplace

Understanding the current state of collaboration helps you identify communication gaps and the skills needed for effective project management. Create a roadmap based on questions like:

• Is there space for collaborative communication in the workplace?
• Are there any recurring challenges or conflicts related to teamwork?
• Can you identify workflows to adapt for collaborative planning?
• Does the company have the necessary technology infrastructure to support collaboration with a distributed workforce?

If possible, conduct surveys, interviews, or observations to gather insights into team communication styles, preferences, and challenges. Consider your current collaboration status to set up strategies based on your team’s strengths and opportunities.

2. Make data accessible

Imagine you run a hospital that needs strategies to increase collaboration in healthcare so it can improve the quality of patient care. You have a large amount of assets, guidelines, and references to start planning, and you assign a team to discuss ideas. But your content is lost somewhere within cloud storage — and locating files is a time-consuming task.

By centralizing your resources in a document management system, you can:

• Curate content: Organize and tag your documents, guidelines, and references to ensure that relevant content is easily accessible to the team members when they need it
• Involve the team in data analysis: Engage the group in analyzing content, allowing them to collect insights and select content that matters to the project
• Enhance search of information: Integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tools into your platform so you can locate files easily and ask questions across multiple documents

Getting started with artificial intelligence? Learn how to use AI for business.

3. Use collaborative project planning tools

You might be wondering: How can collaboration tools help in project development and planning? Platforms for real-time communication, task management, and project progress tracking create a more organized and transparent planning process. Project collaboration software provides a shared platform where tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities are visible to all team members.

Start by looking for secure collaborative project planning tools that comply with your industry standards and data security requirements. For example, financial services need to meet strict regulations like the GDPR and PCI DSS to ensure data privacy and protect sensitive files. Keep in mind that project planning requires frequent exchange of information, so choose a platform that supports encrypted document sharing, preventing the risk of unauthorized users accessing confidential documents.

Check out the top features and capabilities of cloud collaboration tools.

4. Leave room for creativity

Your planning sessions might be in person, hybrid or remote, but regardless, they need visual collaboration tools to inspire interaction and creativity among participants. Even if your project isn’t a creative advertising campaign or a new entertainment show, you can always use brainstorming tools to discuss solutions for common roadblocks.

For example, a construction company facing delays due to material shortages could brainstorm ways to optimize its supply chain. By visualizing the timeline on collaborative project planning software, the team might discover opportunities for just-in-time delivery that could help mitigate the impact of shortages and keep the project on track.

5. Automate workflows

Manual tasks are more likely to cause delays, errors, and miscommunication. Picture how challenging the content review process would be for your team if you couldn’t edit a sales plan simultaneously. There would be dozens of versions in your email inbox, and someone could easily share the wrong version with leadership or other project stakeholders.

Automating workflows frees up time from repetitive tasks to focus on the quality of deliverables. Make sure you:

• Establish clear workflows to ensure efficient task execution and prevent bottlenecks
• Identify the right processes to automate— such as assigning tasks and tracking project progress — and ensure that they align with team needs
• Take advantage of AI for tasks like drafting documents and summarizing information

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6. Promote open communication and trust

Collaboration and compromise in project planning require clear alignment from day one. Encouraging open communication through meetings and virtual collaboration tools fosters an environment where each member feels valued and heard, building a strong sense of trust.

According to PwC, 93% of business executives agree that building and maintaining trust improves the bottom line. To address issues and work toward common goals:

• Hold regular check-ins
• Establish feedback loops
• Maintain transparent communication
• Offer constant project updates

Plan, create, and streamline your collaborative projects with Box

Looking to encourage team efforts in your projects? Box is an all-in-one content management platform to create, store, organize, and collaborate on project plans with ease. The Intelligent Content Cloud powers over 100K businesses of all sizes to brainstorm solutions, share documents, and acceleratethe approval of your most valuable projects.

Create a secure environment for collaboration in the workplace with:

• Virtual white boarding: Improve your meeting engagement with Box Canvas. Facilitate planning, creation, and problem solving from anywhere with templates and interactive features.
• Real-time co-editing: Box Notes lets everyone work simultaneously on documents tostreamline your projects. Our security features protect your content with zero-trust controls, so you don’t need to worry about sharing files with internal or external partners.
• Enterprise-grade AI :Generate content in seconds, locate critical files, summarize text instantly, and get quick answers based on your documents
• Content curation: With Box Hubs, you can create content portals for every project and leverage integrated Box AI to ask questions across notes, briefs, scopes, reports, and meeting summaries
• Project management software: Set deadlines, assign new tasks, and automate repetitive activities to improve teamwork and boost productivity
• Integrations: Connect Box with +1,500 applications to keep your content secure and accessible; centralize your project management tools, communication platforms, and productivity suites to increase efficiency from planning to execution

Contact us to discuss solutions to power your collaborative project planning.

While we maintain our steadfast commitment to offering products and services with best-in-class privacy, security, and compliance, the information provided in this blog post is not intended to constitute legal advice. We strongly encourage prospective and current customers to perform their own due diligence when assessing compliance with applicable laws.