Creative Collaboration, Collaborative Compliance

It’s official, workplace emails are an ineffective tool for managing projects.

Don’t confuse Emailing a link to your team as collaboration - that’s ping-pong! And sending your team an email and asking them to either comment or provide input on a file, an idea, a suggestion is like trying to push a wet string. Although email allows users to move files back and forth. And the ideas, they contain are frozen in place. Only one user can deal with it at a time. It's more like a pipeline where you have to wait for the next person before being able to contribute to the creative process. It's pretty simple, emails are not interactive.

It's rare that only 2 people are working on a project. Designs are done by teams, and in this situation having multiple people review and comment on the same file separately and sequentially through email. Simply it does not work as it’s a singular viewpoint that strips the creative potential of sharing ideas as they develop. If staff members receive multiple versions of documents from different sources such as HR, supervisors, or group heads, they are likely to get confused about the final goal. Teamwork is about creating understanding and agreement when working on the same topic, an exercise in sharing ideas from many perspectives, it's an interactive process.

And if it's not interactive, it's not collaboration.

Compliance, however, is not seen as part of the creative process but as a damper on creativity, a barrier to overcome. To most teams, documentation is the polar opposite of creativity which begs the question; “can creativity and compliance even co-exist?

Compliance is seen as a management responsibility rather than a team responsibility. As such, the typical management solution is to set up separate compliance teams to shadow the creative teams – a paper chase.

Yet, nobody is better positioned to ensure compliance than the team. As such it remains a team responsibility where regulatory and standards compliances are required. This is where the design and creative process meet.

Organizations must break functional and business silos, and promote communication around compliance matters across various departments. This allows employees to understand the organization’s compliance efforts, the reasons behind them, and their place and role in the larger picture.

Integrating compliance into the creative process, especially at the team level is no small hurdle. Yet, small actions by every team member can make for bigger results… i.e. ants working cooperatively, make scaling that wall not only possible but easier for all.

A large number of simple interactions by the creative team can bring about greater compliance.

This is the aim of collaborative compliance.

Now, if only there were a way of capturing the creative interaction activity for compliance purposes, a collaborative compliance approach.  

Choosing the right collaboration tools is the first step. But collaboration usually also involves aspects of project management, document management and quality management. Although many different kinds of software exist, getting them to work together can be not only tricky but fickle. Sure they have APIs but someone has to put them together and more importantly keep them together – its software, it breaks, it gets upgraded, its windows based. qmsWrapper™ unifies all these different functionalities into one software by its built-in abilities. It harmonizes all controls, processes, regulations, projects and other elements in centralized libraries. It also delivers a superior user experience through intuitive navigation tools, visualized issue tracking, simplified information sharing and collaboration capabilities.

One aspect of qmsWrapper™ is as a communication tool that is ideal for fostering creative collaboration that in turn helps support collaborative compliance. Conversations are easily saved to the right project, automatically flagged for QMS, and saved in Document management. A centralized repository is maintained for the latest versions of documents, procedures, projects, and standards.
QMS Wrapper solution enables organizations to achieve a high level of efficiency, agility, accountability, transparency, and sustainability by embedding consistent and relevant policies and documents for meeting compliance, which contributes to increased employee awareness. At any given time, managers can view the company’s overall compliance awareness level.

It does not detract from the creative process, but rather “captures” it, making it easy for teams to take greater responsibility for their own compliance. It’s a simple formula really, small actions by every team member brings about a greater compliance result.

Notwithstanding, Email still has its place, its too ingrained into company cultures to entirely eliminate. If all you want to do is CYA, stick to email. Collaboration is a process that favors creativity and compliance.