Get a grip on your information bloat
It’s overwhelming to manage all the information our teams create every day. While we seem to be living in a golden age of creative tools where anyone can write up, draw, or record their ideas — no team feels like they’ve got a handle on it all.
A common story sounds something like this: Engineering writes their documentation in GitHub, Design uses any number of different design tools, the Marketing team loves sharing Google Docs, and the Finance teams live in Excel. It seems crazy to have everyone using so many different tools, but the truth is, they’re all probably right for the job.
However, it means:
- It’s hard to find the right information. “Is it in that one email thread or in this shared folder somewhere?”
- There’s no clear ownership. “Who should I be talking to about this?”
- The information you do find feels unreliable. “Is this the latest version?”
Chances are, you’re nodding your head right about now because we’ve all run into this at one point or another.
The last thing you need is another way to contribute to your team’s information black hole. That’s why we created EveryTeam to help bring some sanity to the situation. Here’s how we’re doing it.
Bringing it all together
Since information is spread out across a bunch of different tools, you spend too much time asking for logins and digging through each tool’s silo of information. Each team might have institutional knowledge about where certain nuggets of information live, but people outside that team end up at a loss and have no way to gain visibility into the work.
Here at EveryTeam, we realized that while we wanted a way to keep using the best design, spreadsheet, or file storage tools — we needed a way to wrangle it all. So we built integrations that let you bring the important information from all your team’s tools and organize them into curated collections.
Collections let you organize designs from Figma right next to Google Docs — or Powerpoint slides next to detailed spreadsheets. Have relevant process documents inside your GitHub repository? You can bring those in too! As your team works together, everything is automatically updated so everyone always has the latest version. No more forwarding long email threads or random links!
Another huge benefit is that you’re able to search across all your tools super quickly.
Everything has an owner
Accountability is essential to getting anything done. Without clear ownership, it’s inevitable that information will be unmaintained and join your team’s growing information graveyard 😬.
This is why every bit of information inside EveryTeam has a maintainer. By default, this is the person who creates a new document or publishes an external file to a collection, but it can be changed at any time.
This makes it pretty difficult for anyone to think, “Someone else is probably on top of this.” Nope. It’s you. You’re responsible. Period. 😁 👍
Nothing is worse than a document that’s been abandoned, and we know the best way to maintain something is to make a habit of it. That’s why we built review schedules that regularly notifies the maintainer to check up on their work and make sure it’s up to date.
Status is front and center
Truth is, sometimes our information gets out of date. It’s ok! No one is perfect. The important thing is that your team knows when something is out of date. So many unnecessary misunderstandings and wasted efforts have been caused because someone read something they thought was trustworthy only to find out later that it wasn’t. “How was I supposed to know this PTO policy was written by someone who hasn’t worked here for 4 years?!” These mishaps kill productivity and demoralizes team members who are just trying to do the right thing.
EveryTeam puts the status right at the top of every document with a review schedule. This saves so much time that would usually be spent trying to decipher whether something is reliable or not.
Status is automatically assigned based on the review schedule set up by the maintainer. If they don’t review the information, the status will update accordingly. Other people on your team also have the ability to flag information as out of date or request that the maintainer review it if things seem fishy.
Get a grip
Too much time is spent tracking down old email threads or being led on wild goose chases by unreliable documents. EveryTeam ends all that busy work and let’s get you back to what matters — your work. We’re just getting started and these are just a few ways we’re helping teams manage all their information.
Ready to get a grip on the bloat? Sign up for the beta →
