Last week we took a look at the basic ideas behind what Google Wave is, how it works, and how it’s set up to bring email into the 21st century.
It’s good to help you get an idea of where to start. But there’s nothing like some first-hand examples to help you understand how new tools can improve life as you know it. So here are suggestions for what you and your colleagues could be doing on Wave right now that would be far more effective than email, instant messaging, or your average Google Docs collaboration.
Agenda of the meeting, acts and actions:
Compiling a meeting agenda is often considered a low-priority task, leading to meetings that never get to the heart of the important issues. With Wave, everyone involved can compile an agenda and even some pre-meeting comments can be made so the meeting can get to what really matters. Meeting minutes can be entered directly into the same wave, as can actionable decisions, and any discussion that cannot be completed in the available meeting time can be concluded later. That’s a lot of power to make meetings faster and more effective.
To-Do List Tracking and Team Tasks:
There are team-based Twitter-style tools (like Yammer) that can allow you to keep shared internal status updates. Or you can use instant messaging or shared documents to run collaborative to-do lists. Wave can bring the essence of these ideas to a single forum. In a single wave, a team could maintain an open, shared list of to-do items, with feedback from other team members on where they can help each other get things done. The threaded comment system in Wave means it will be very clear to all team members who is saying what and who is offering help. When something is done, the strikethrough character format option can make it clear that certain milestones have been reached.
Reporting and presentation building:
This stems from the more basic idea of tracking tasks and to-dos. If the entire team is working on separate parts of the same document, or contributing facts and statistics to a report, this can all be done directly within Wave instead of using external document creation tools. Wave is especially effective at allowing a team to brainstorm ideas without having to take everyone away from other work to do so. As ideas come to people in due course, they can be dropped into the mix.
Planning events or seminars:
We’re building the collaboration layers here. Events and seminars can be some of the most daunting business tasks, but Wave has additional tools to make it simpler. If decisions need to be made or support tallied, there are special extensions for Google Wave that allow people to vote ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Maybe’ on an idea, or include Google Maps in the document for instructions. . Tasks and submissions can be tracked as before, and if things feel too unwieldy, it’s easy to copy a section of a wave and split it into its own separate discussion where that work can continue.
As mentioned last week, there are even more tools available to automate Wave. New features are being created every day, and for something that’s still in its infancy, it’s a credit that there are so many valid ways to use them to improve the way you work right now. Invitations are now fairly easy to get: ask around in your network of colleagues and contacts and you should be on Wave in a matter of days. #
Seamus Byrne is a technology journalist and founder, creative director and host of Byteside.