A few months ago we ignited a YAM into our system, a system where collaboration was key.. we had our development Team split between Pune, Chennai , Brentford, Wales, SFO and our product teams split in Germany, France and US. You can imagine that with such a distributed development Team it is not easy to manage effective communication and collaboration. Forget about effective at certain times even communication is not easy...
Yammer came to be a respite to our Team.. A microblogging platform, that works for your organization, has a set of handy apps to help you effectively use it at the same time has a cool set of Integration. Though we havent found ourselves to be the spamming users of Yammer we have definitely seen ourselves to be using it effectively.
Now no matter where our Team are we tell each other :
1. What we are doing
2. Where we are stuck at any point of time
3. We share some special Team moments , some announcements and sometimes even jokes and laughs.
4. We now know what our colleagues are doing
5. We know where they are stuck
6. We now have an easy way then sending an email and waiting for X person to respond.
7. We found a way to YAM now instead of asking someone to ask someone to ping someone...
Yammer is really effective and helps collaboration smoother and in easier way. There are Desktop clients for both Linux and Windows that let our developers across platforms use it. We got Black berry client for it, we have the browser version for those who dont want there CPU leaks to such apps, we sometimes switch to twitter and put a #yam to keep our Team in touch.
In the last few days we are using Groups effectively. So within the organization various groups like OPS and Project Teams now use groups to update. We now intend to use communities effectively where the Idea is to bring the Customer Services , Sales, Operations, Marketing everyone involved under different communities.. this would make them more collaborative and give more visibility of what is happening around.
How to set Yammer for your Team?
1. All you need a valid domain and email address on the domain to start with.
2. Visit www.yammer.com
3. Create a Organization with your valid email address.
4. Receive an invitation and confirm.
5. Fill in your Profile details as in Age, Sex etc.
6. Invite other users with the email addresses that are on the same domain, wait for them to join.
How not to fail Yammer for you?
1. Keep on updating it.
2. Chat , Interact do not spam.
3. Use the apps and tools like gtalk integration, RSS feeds , BB app, Desktop app as you surely would not use the browser version for very long.
4. Dont be a spectator. Be interactive.
5. Yammer is not to monitor people. It is to interact with them. So if you are a manager use the tool to involve.
6. Share , Share and Share
Well if you are a development Team, Distributed .... You surely gonna like this.
Yam baby Yam.
