Face it: you may never know the joy of an empty inbox or blank meeting calendar. Not in this career, anyway. But cutting back could be good for you, good for your whole project team, even good for your projects! 

Emails and meetings have their place, but the truth is, your design team could be more productive with less of them. Here are three ways you can replace emails and meetings for faster project delivery. 

1. Store, Access, and Share Your Work in One Place 

If your team is sending too many emails, chances are that you don’t have a communication problem: you have an accessibility problem. After all, communication is simply the exchange of information between people. When your entire project team has access to the right information from the start, there’s less need for active communication – in this case, drafting and replying to emails. 

The key to increasing accessibility is to establish a single source of truth for your project team. Think of this as the mission control center: all your information is sent to this centralized location where specialists can easily collaborate with decision-makers. Projects get done more quickly in this environment because information is readily available and there’s less friction on productivity. 

Working from this type of common data environment can also simplify contractual exchanges by tracking and collating client communications. With all your team’s project data in one place, transmittals, submittals, and RFI’s are easily streamlined into manageable and consistent workflows. The only drawback to this approach is the difficulty of getting set up, but the collaboration platform ProjectWise 365 eliminates that problem too. Cloud-based and purpose-built for work-in-progress, ProjectWise 365 gives your design team better accessibility on a platform that enhances the way you already work. 

2. Collaborate on Drawings with Any Device

Before you choose a single source of truth for your project team, first consider the unique design tasks that you’ll be working on. File storage alone doesn’t cut it for complex design projects. A true “mission control center” is more than a warehouse: it’s also your problem-solving headquarters. In order to cut back on emails and meetings, project teams must be able to access and collaborate on drawings in the same space. 

Ideally, your project team should have the ability to view, edit, and comment on files all from within your single source of truth. 

To accomplish this and clear out your meeting calendar, you’ll need a platform that is compatible with the programs and file formats your project team is already using. ProjectWise 365 is compatible with Bentley’s DGN files, AutoCAD’s DWG and Revit files, IFC, and other formats, so that your engineering workflows won’t be interrupted. What’s more, ProjectWise 365 is a web-based portal that you can access from an internet browser, so your project drawings are always viewable! 

3. Track Tasks on a Project Dashboard 

Greater accessibility and collaboration will go a long way, but if you really want to reduce emails and meetings, everyone on your project team must know what’s expected of them. Visibility is the key term here.  

When individuals on your team can see what they need to do based on priority and when it needs to be finished, inefficient communication will decrease and productivity will skyrocket! 

Effective project dashboards should show each project team member their assigned design tasks, issues, reviews, and deliverables in a clear and simple interface. Color-coded alerts can help keep the team on-task and on schedule without spending time replying to update requests. 

With ProjectWise 365, your project dashboard serves as the portal homepage, ensuring that project teams have full visibility into their tasks and workload. It’s a simple but effective way to keep the design team aligned without emails and meetings. 

Now that you know the three ways your design team can stop wasting time on emails and meetings, try the one solution that makes them all easy and affordable. Start your free trial of ProjectWise 365 today!