Garage Gamers

A bunch of entrepreneurs working in a garage to start a firm of their dreams. Sounds familiar??? Well in this blog, we are going to introduce you to one similar yet exciting story – Duxter. Duxter is a social network for gamers. It is a small company (8 employees) with a network of contractors on the west coast of the USA and in the UK. It has recently started working with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration platform – Teambox. In this blog we will explore why Duxter chose Teambox and how SMEs can reap the benefits of SaaS-based collaboration for consolidating project management and collaboration.

Why collaboration???

Duxter started as a group of four entrepreneurs in a garage. Initially it was a little bit easier with everybody in charge of their own staff. But as the team grown, things started to get complex as lot of work was outsourced to freelancers, so some team members were working remotely as well as most of them were working on very small part of the project not knowing the complete details of the project. Adding the extra layer of process, in terms of Teambox collaboration framework, has been helpful to keep track of all the details for these entrepreneurs. That level of process has made them more efficient as a team because there's less time spent communicating. For companies of Duxter's size, having one tool that everybody can be on is very valuable. It's a better workflow, and better synergy, for the entire company now that everybody is on one system.

Why Teambox???

Teambox was easy to use and easy to understand. Other tools they looked at might have been more powerful and robust, but there would be a huge learning curve, or the product was non-intuitive and not easy to use. Main focus of Teambox is on following areas:

Creating and managing tasks:

It is based on tasks – which was the modus operandi of Duxter on day to day basis dealing with lot of partners and third parties. There were no fundamental changes in Duxter's business when they moved to Teambox, there were process changes. Now when someone reports a bug on the site, a task is created in Teambox, which is assigned to a PM. The task ends up getting resolved and communicated to the user.

Task reporting

It is very simple to track the progress of the task and view the status of various milestones with the help of calendars, workload views and Gantt charts.

File and content management

Today’s start-ups extensively use free cloud solutions (like Google Docs and Dropbox) and many of Duxter's corporate documents were already in the cloud, which made migration to Teambox rather simpler. Teambox integrates with both, so it didn't require them to on board documents. In fact, the biggest things they had to migrate over were tasks and projects from previous project management tools. To resolve this, Duxter team used Teambox API for migration. After that they just built a bridge from Duxter’s site and Teambox using the Teambox API. Then they were able to transfer all the bugs from their custom system to the Teambox system and all in a single day’s work only.

Team communication & Mobility

The most simple aspect of Teambox is that one can convert discussion items into tasks directly. Also all its tools are available on mobile as well providing instant access almost anywhere.

To sum up, simple collaborative tools are now transforming the way SMEs approach their work. Also these tools are not very capital intensive which also makes them attractive to deploy in early phase of the company’s life. We will see more and more adoption of such simple and innovative tools in our upcoming blog posts!!!



References

Kelly, W. 2013. Case study: Duxter uses Teambox to streamline collaboration and project management | ZDNet. [online] Available at: http://www.zdnet.com/case-study-duxter-uses-teambox-to-streamline-collaboration-and-project-management-7000017408/ [Accessed: 21 Aug 2013].