Starting a project with Giraffe
It seems like there’s always one too many projects going on at work. The various tasks start to pile up, bottlenecks and dependencies start to form, and the stress of figuring out how to complete everything wares on everyone involved.
On-Time! Under Budget! These are the broad strokes and guardrails we hear from leadership. Regardless of the project goals and objectives, meeting the deadline and budget is always a primary focus, and that’s what we all strive to accomplish…
But projects are tough — there are so many moving parts, so many people involved, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Speaking from experience, coming out of a particular project is certainly rewarding, but gearing up for the next one often feels daunting with all of the unknowns that each project uniquely brings.
There are ways to make every project more digestible, that’s what we’ve come to find over time. Proper planning, alignment, and defining responsibilities help to get people on the same page. Plus there are lots of tools out there that help to automate a lot of routine tasks. And with Giraffe, you and your team can save hours of time each week searching for content across all of your favorite apps.
Working on a project team means that you produce content. A lot of content. There are presentations, training materials, comms, bugs, requirements, development docs, spreadsheets, data reconciliations, and new processes. All of this lives in Google Drive, Asana, Jira, Slack, Email, OneDrive, Box, and other apps making it tough and annoying to search for what you’re looking for.
How many times have you asked a teammate to send you the link to a particular spreadsheet? Or searched your inbox for a particular Google slides presentation only to find that it was shared in Slack?
This would happen all the time for us, and in aggregate, we’d spend significant time tracking this helpful information down. This frustration was what led us to build Giraffe; helping project teams find what they’re looking for in a matter of seconds.
Dozens of teams and companies use Giraffe to curate content across all of their favorite apps so that when you or your teammates are looking for relevant content, you can make a single search and find what you’re looking for.
In this post, we walk through how to use Giraffe on your next project so you can earn back hours of time and avoid searching in all the wrong places.
Getting Started with Giraffe
Supplementary YouTube Video Link: Starting a project with Giraffe
Setting up a Giraffe workspace takes no more than 5–10 minutes — it’s super quick.
Setting up a workspace involves providing a few basic details including allowable email domains so that only people from your team are able to join and search in your workspace.
Once you create your Giraffe workspace and create a basic user profile you’re all set to start inviting team members to join.
Our power users typically add our bookmark extension to make it super easy to curate content in Giraffe. By going to the settings menu, you’re able to add this extension with a simple drag and drop.
At this point, you and your team are ready to get started using Giraffe and earn back time finding the content you need. Anything that has a URL can be added to Giraffe by simply clicking our bookmark extension. We’re mindful of this idea of curation your team to ensure that relevant content is presented at all times. As a basic exercise, take a look at all the tabs you currently have open, are you hesitant to close them because you fear that re-discovering them will be a pain? That’s exactly what Giraffe is for. Add each tab (Google doc, helpful article, spreadsheet) into Giraffe with our bookmark extension and in no time at all, Giraffe will start to amass all of the content you and your team commonly reference making it super easy to re-discover down the line.
We’re the platform that centralizes the content from all of your commonly used apps. You’ll continue to create docs in the apps you’re familiar with, but with Giraffe you can find them much faster than digging through file and folder structures.
Typical project docs we see being added to Giraffe would be any sort of project management board i.e Asana/monday.com, docs that your team has in Google Drive and Notion, Slack messages (this is a big one to capture helpful answers!), files in Dropbox, and bugs in Jira.
By making a search in Giraffe with a few keywords, you’ll be able to quickly find all of the relevant information you’re searching for.
The more content you add, the smarter GiraffeBot (Our AI Assistant) gets. GiraffeBot will serve up relevant content and remind you if something may need an update i.e. a spreadsheet titled “Month over Month metrics” that hasn’t been updated in the past 30 days. Upkeep and maintenance is something that is continuously a problem on projects, and with Giraffe we help to ensure you don’t spend time working on outdated docs and versions.
If your team leverages Slack, install GiraffeBot in your Slack workspace! We provide you with a similar search experience from any Slack channel or DM. To install Giraffe in Slack, here’s a quick video to help guide you.
In Slack, search for similar keywords by typing /giraffe [keywords] to find what you’re looking for.
With Giraffe you don’t need to wait on your team to send over that doc, instead, you can search for it on your own time and find what you’re looking for. Why not, eliminate some of the frustrations inherent with every project related to disorganization, noise, and fragmented content across systems?
Giraffe is helping project teams, big and small, find content and answers faster. Ready to check it out? Join our waitlist today! We’re actively bringing in new teams to help them work smarter on projects.
Let us know if you have over a dozen tabs open right now :)
❤️ The Giraffe Team
