Collaborative Projects and Working with Teams

At PI, we specialize in team projects. Whether it’s collaboration among the partners on business matters or a larger project involving associates, like our embedded indexing work for O’Reilly Media, collaboration comes up in some form in everything we do.

Benefits of collaboration

Working together has obvious benefits, like sharing the workload to meet tight deadlines, or making sure we can back each other up in case of emergencies. It’s useful for problem solving and learning new indexing strategies. One of the best benefits, though, is its usefulness in mentoring and training.

Mentoring through collaboration

A team project is a super way for an indexer to get experience in a new subject area or learn new software. The indexing community is helpful, and we can always turn to various discussion lists or social media to ask questions as we work into a new area, but on a team, we can ask those questions of people who are already intimately familiar with the actual project. The less experienced have a model to follow, and can ask questions they may be unwilling to ask in a larger public forum.

Managing collaboration

If you’re managing a team project, consider setting up a small group chat using Skype, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp or other messaging software. That allows for synchronous decision making, and most platforms will allow screensharing, where one team member can demonstrate something on their computer while the others follow along. This is great for learning new software.

On a recent project, we had three partners creating updates to three indexes (a subject and two specialty indexes) to a nearly 1000-page guidebook. We used Skype to work out structural issues—like ensuring parallel subheading arrays across the indexes—and deciding which aspects of the previous edition indexes to keep and which to change (and how to change them). We could have each worked on our own, making our own decisions, but by communicating as we worked, we were able to produce a much more consistent set of indexes.

Our motto at PI is “Professional Integrity In Partnership,” and teamwork is definitely a key part of our approach. Efficiency, skill sharing, and reliability are all made possible with collaboration.