Business continuity: assignments, projects, communication
Communication (from corporate chats to shared calendar, via email and document management); Assignments and projects (time and workload management, visual project planning, work groups); CRM (quotes, invoices, email marketing, customer service, payments); Contact center (social networks, live chat, contact forms); Websites (hosting, online store, domains). In light of this conceptual structure, Bitrix24 has developed a suite of tools that allows companies to respond to each of these needs to leverage on a single platform and have distributed office management in a fully integrated way (and therefore with maximum efficiency, maximum order, maximum organization). But what is Bitrix24?
It is an online collaboration platform that contains a large arsenal of tools for remote working for an unlimited number of users, including: assignments, project management, personal calendars and shared, events and reminders, chats, video conferences, online agenda, document management, activity flow, automatic time tracking, deadline control, 5GB of free online storage and much more.
Available on cloud and online premise, both on desktop and on mobile, with free access to basic functions to understand what may be the characteristics and qualities of the offer.
The integration of the various components within what becomes a unique tool represents the value that the company can draw on when it relies on Bitrix24: let's see its characteristics in detail, since it is only by declining one's own reality to the peculiarities of the instrument that one can imagine what it is possible to achieve in the remote management of the key elements of the widespread office.
Business continuity according to Bitrix24
Before pandemic, the concept of business continuity was mostly linked to the need to guarantee company workflows in the face of any hitch: disaster recovery protocols were all based on this type of horizon. The pandemic has opened a new front, highlighting a vulnerability in the way of thinking about the company: the office is no longer the navel of operations by virtue of the fact that social distancing suggests a different approach.Ne we spoke to Dmitry Valyanov, President and co-founder of Bitrix24.
How has the job changed for your clients during these pandemic months?
We are living in a historic moment. The world is changing and so is the job market. While it is still too early to determine which changes are destined to be part of the new normal and which are only temporary, we must prepare for a period of extreme uncertainty. In times like these, the only competitive strategy is to maintain maximum flexibility and be able to adapt to changes that may occur. Many companies are rushing to implement and combine various tools to create an environment in which they can work from home as if they were in the office, thinking of returning to their original office-centered style of work once the pandemic is over. However, assuming the second wave, the third wave and even a new pandemic, it appears that permanent installation of the remote work system will become a general trend, to varying degrees.
What new customers are looking for in Bitrix24 ? What do they especially need?
On the main trend in Western companies, there is a rapid increase in requests for tools related to communication, collaboration and management of assignments and projects. Due to the pandemic, the increase in the number of users is accelerating and in June 2020 more than 7 million companies have chosen Bitrix24 as a suite of indispensable tools for organizing remote work.
Bitrix24 is a collaboration platform released in 2012 and designed for companies of any size and highly appreciated for providing functionality considered necessary at a very low cost and on a single platform, including: communication and collaboration tools, assignments and projects , Complete CRM, contact center and websites.
Today Bitrix24 is much more in demand as the online collaboration platform that packs a large arsenal of tools for remote working for an unlimited number of users, including: assignments, project management, personal and shared calendars, events and reminders, chat, video conferencing, online agenda, document management, task flow, automatic time tracking o, deadline control, 5GB of free online storage and much more.
Bitrix24: management of tasks and projects
The key element of business continuity is the remote management of tasks and projects, as it is necessary make up for the absence of coexistence in a physical place with tools capable of allowing an effective organization, without obstacles or slowdowns. To operate in true "business continuity" the workflows must flow in a completely natural way: they will inevitably be different rhythms and methods, but not for this worse than "normality".Bitrix24 focuses on this point heart of its offer, developing a panel with a simple management of tasks so that the work can be coordinated and monitored in real time and continuously. For each assignment, there is an agenda and timing, as well as different roles that can interact to create the task, collaborate, follow it or redistribute it over time. The single job must therefore be able to be fully regulated in an overall flow of tasks, so that everyone can know what the other elements of the team have to do and what they are working on: everything is integrated into a single platform that allows the efficient management of both assignments that of the workforce concerned. By doing this, the team has the possibility to operate as a single body even at a distance, even without the shoulder-to-shoulder coexistence that often completes everything that an imperfect organization is unable to guarantee.
For each project it is also possible to establish a clear planning, also allowing the simplified generation of Gantt charts or access to other tools to have an immediate glance on the progress of the work. If over 7 million organizations are already using Bitrix24, it means that it is a platform capable of responding to any need precisely by virtue of the full flexibility with which each phase of work can be managed.
Assignments to a work group
Managing assignments means first of all managing the timing of assignments:Gantt chart
In this Gantt chart it is clear how a simple interface is able to explain both the individual tasks and their timeline: the team is thus fully aware not only of the active tasks, but also of their deadlines and the interactions between their missions and those of their colleagues.
Kanban Table
A Kanban table contemplates in reverse a visual planning of the project from a logical and sequential point of view, being able to better interpret the correlation between the work phases net of the indicated timelines. This allows the team to have an overview of their role in the design and implementation phases.
Shared calendar
Shared calendar management allows you to put events, meetings and other appointments to common factor, managing these aspects at the team level as well as at the personal organization level. The shared calendar is the red thread that holds the team together by synchronizing the moments in which the co-presence (perhaps in a video meeting or in a meeting in person) is an essential factor to carry out the work. But a shared calendar reveals its usefulness above all when it is synchronized with every other aspect of the organization of assignments and tasks, so that you have a real timeline without overlapping, without bottlenecks and without contradictions.
