BRIDGETON, Mo. -
Instead, the best tools for collaborating on business projects at Vantage CU here are web-based and free: Basecamp, for online communication; Writeboard, for online written conversations; and Mindmeister, for online mind-mapping.
"We were spending too much time in meetings and not enough time working," said Matt Fagala, director of customer relationship management (CRM) at the $500-million CU.
"After using Basecamp, Writeboard and Mindmeister to participate in online discussions for about a year now, we've eliminated those meetings that we don't need to have," he said.
In the early stages of Vantage's CRM project, for example, the credit union teamed up with four partners across North America, Fagala explained. As they worked, everyone signed onto Basecamp, where they could post and respond to ideas on a centralized message board. The team could share files in one spot, as well.
But if the team had used e-mail, instant messaging (IM) or phone calls instead, some members could have been inadvertently forgotten, or the string of ideas might have become jumbled, he said.
Phone calls result in a lot of voice-mail tag, added Cam Minges, chief innovation officer at Indianapolis, Ind.-based FORUM Solutions. The FORUM CU subsidiary provided consulting services to Vantage during the CRM project.
Hitting the road for face-to-face meetings at Vantage was often a waste, according to Minges.
"I was traveling to St. Louis every week and spending a lot of money on travel and hotels," he said. "With Basecamp, I'm starting to get my life back.
"With Basecamp, you don't necessarily have to have all the players there at the same time," Minges continued. "People can respond at their own convenience but still view the messages everyone else has posted. You can read the threads and then come to consensus. It's almost addictive from the standpoint that we can have conversations and revert back to stored conversations."
Project teams can keep a no-frills timeline and to-do list at Basecamp, which is easy to learn to use, unlike a full-blown project management tool, Fagala said.
"And Basecamp is different from a project management tool because it's focused on collaboration," Minges said. "It's not a system that dictates what you need to do today."
Basecamp has infiltrated Vantage, both internally, where business units draw on the tool, and externally, as Vantage works with FORUM now on a new lending system, Fagala said.
"I probably spend at least two to three hours per week using Basecamp versus calling or e-mailing," Fagala said.
Writeboard and Mindmeister supplement Basecamp. Vantage uses Mindmeister to brainstorm before entering Basecamp for the more formal planning stages of a project.
"Mindmeister is a visual representation of all your thoughts-it's really neat," Fagala said.
Fagala also likes Writeboard, which allows members to share and edit web-based text documents-and recover previous versions, sort of like an online Microsoft Word.
"We use Writeboard for each new phase or release of a project; when we get requests for new features in software; or if people tell us about small bugs in software," Fagala said. "Previously, we did a lot of e-mailing and attaching Word documents."
The tools are helping Vantage put its ducks in a row, Fagala said. "I feel that we're getting more organized. Basecamp makes it easy to categorize and search for messages and files. We've even built a Basecamp project template for a few of the projects that we do annually."
Basecamp and Writeboard are provided by Chicago-based 37signals, offering web-based collaboration tools.
Mindmeister is provided by Codemart, a programming services firm in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
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Read more about marketing tools at cujournal.com and search the following terms in the archive:
Credit Unions Wiki Online
Six CUs Use Wiki Platform As Means Of Peer Collaboration
For Info On The Story:
* www.vcu.com
* www.forumsolutions.com
* www.37signals.com
* www.codemart.de
