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4 WAYS TO IMPROVE COLLABORATION WITH AUTOMATION

Reading time: about 7 min

On the surface, it may seem that automation and collaboration don’t belong
together. After all, collaboration is about connecting people to achieve a
common goal and automation is about removing people from processes to be more
efficient. 

However, like many other daily job activities, collaboration has become weighed
down by manual, repetitive tasks. Tasks like creating and maintaining
documentation, organizing ideas, and updating stakeholders, while necessary, are
time-consuming and detract from high-value collaborative work. 

Automation isn’t intended to replace the rich discussion and ideation that
collaboration fosters. Quite the opposite, actually: Automation bolsters
collaboration by removing mundane activities and freeing up time for more
connection, deeper thinking, and collective problem-solving.


BENEFITS OF AUTOMATION IN COLLABORATION 

Organizations are already recognizing the benefits of applying automation to
other business functions like triggering email marketing campaigns, sending
invoice reminders, or running automated software tests. When organizations
extend automation to collaboration, they can further increase their competitive
positioning with these benefits:

 

 * Spend more time on strategic collaborative work. According to research by
   Smartsheet, over 40% of workers spend at least one-quarter of their work week
   on manual, repetitive tasks, with email, data collection, and data entry as
   the primary time sinks. By automating these activities, teams will have more
   time (and energy) for creative brainstorming and strategic planning. 
 * Make confident decisions together. As businesses grow increasingly complex,
   making sense of disconnected data, systems, and workflows can be overwhelming
   and stall decision-making. In fact, a McKinsey study found that most workers
   spend 37% of their time making decisions, and more than half of this time was
   thought to be spent ineffectively. Automation can clarify this complexity,
   providing teams with the context needed to make smart decisions and pivot
   course when needed. 
 * Improve business agility. An organization’s ability to respond quickly to
   customer or market changes requires continuous collaboration and team
   alignment. By eliminating time-consuming work and making insights more
   readily accessible, automation can streamline collaboration and knowledge
   sharing so teams across the business can collectively adapt plans and
   strategies as conditions change. 
 * Increase and scale innovation. Innovation is often romanticized as a
   lightbulb moment, but by automating the repetitive parts of collaboration,
   you can make innovation a predictable, repeatable, and common occurrence. And
   when the path to innovation is transparent, employees will naturally be more
   engaged as they understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. 


4 COLLABORATION USE CASES TO AUTOMATE

Deciding what to automate in any given scenario can be a difficult undertaking.
We’ve identified some of the most time-consuming parts of collaboration that,
when automated, boost your team’s creativity, productivity, and agility. 


1: SYNTHESIZING IDEAS AFTER A BRAINSTORMING SESSION

It’s a familiar scenario: You and your team are planning an upcoming project and
generate tons of creative ideas together—none of which see the light of day.
Oftentimes, innovative ideas and unique perspectives fall to the wayside because
teams have no way to organize, analyze, or prioritize these ideas. And
attempting to make sense of ideas manually can be a laborious process,
especially for large brainstorms. 

What to automate: To ensure the best ideas are brought to life, you can
automatically categorize and sort ideas. This type of automation identifies
common themes across ideas in seconds, making it a great way to quickly spot
trends among large brainstorms. 

Plus, you can enhance the machine learning used to sort ideas by further
refining the categories so that each time you brainstorm ideas, they’ll be
sorted more accurately than they were before. This means that the more you use
this automation, the quicker you’ll be able to move into action after
ideation.  


2. BUILDING DIAGRAMS TO COMMUNICATE COMPLEX INFORMATION 

Whether you’re building org charts, account maps, or ERDs, diagrams are an
effective way to collectively visualize systems, processes, and connections.
They’re often a launching point for discussion, helping teams and stakeholders
reach a shared understanding of the current state and identify areas for
improvement. 

But the process of creating these diagrams isn’t always easy. It often requires
manual data input, which is time-consuming and prone to error. Not to mention,
you have to regularly update and maintain these diagrams for them to stay
useful.

What to automate: Automation can be a huge time-saver when it comes to building
out data-driven diagrams. By automatically importing data directly from where it
lives—whether that’s Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Salesforce, BambooHR, or
another system of record—into the platform you collaborate in, you can create
diagrams nearly instantaneously.

Best yet, when the data is linked between your collaboration platform and the
original source, you can ensure your diagrams always reflect the most up-to-date
information. No upkeep needed!  


3. INTERPRETING DATA TO MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS

Creating diagrams is only half the battle—next comes the challenge of
interpreting the information in the diagrams. To make informed decisions, it’s
important to be able to glean insights from a diagram at a glance, whether
that’s understanding the status or progress of a project, organization reporting
structures, or what types of instances exist in a network. 

Interpreting diagrams manually is not only inefficient but also leaves room for
misinterpretation, increasing the risk of misalignment in teams and delayed
decision-making.

What to automate: To quickly identify priority information, you can apply custom
rules to your diagrams. This type of automation could mean triggering a certain
color, shape, or icon when data meets predetermined criteria. For example, if
you want to quickly see in your org chart which employees are up for
compensation review, you may decide to apply a rule to your diagram that
automatically triggers a warning icon if an employee has been in a role longer
than a specified time frame. 

By applying automated conditional formatting to your diagrams in this way,
you’ll have the information at your fingertips to alert stakeholders to priority
items and make key decisions around hiring, budgeting, or strategy. 


4. KEEPING TEAMS ALIGNED ON PROJECT PLANS 

Staying aligned with cross-functional team members throughout the course of a
project can be tricky, especially as timelines and priorities shift. And if
teams are working remotely, it’s even more difficult to ensure everyone is
heading towards the same deadlines and goals. 

Many teams are already collaboratively building out project plans, determining
timelines, and assigning accountabilities. The problems occur in reflecting this
information accurately in all the different tools teams use. Manually
transferring this information between tools and keeping it updated as projects
progress is inefficient and can lead to miscommunication.  

What to automate: To keep momentum and stay aligned, teams need a way to
automatically transfer project information from a collaborative platform into
the project management tool of their choice, like Smartsheet, Jira, or Asana.
Teams can stay aligned continuously with a two-way integration between the tools
so that if the information is updated in one source, it automatically reflects
the updated information in the other source. 


HOW TO MAKE COLLABORATION AUTOMATION A REALITY

In order to effectively automate collaboration’s repetitive activities, you’ll
need the right technology. One of the most efficient ways to automate these
tasks is through a comprehensive visual collaboration platform that already
includes this built-in intelligence. 

And when all visual collaboration activities take place in the same
platform—from the highly-collaborative brainstorming, workshopping, and planning
to the automated synthesis, data analysis, and status updates—you’ll organically
create a living blueprint of how your business works. 

Be sure to evaluate visual collaboration solutions carefully, as many lack the
robust automation capabilities needed to synthesize ideas or visualize data. By
choosing a visual collaboration platform that prioritizes both connection and
efficiency, you’ll be able to boost your team’s collaboration across use cases
and set your organization apart from the competition.

Learn what to look for in a visual collaboration platform. 

Get the guide


LEARN WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A VISUAL COLLABORATION PLATFORM.

Get the guide


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