The Business Problem

Your Research and Development (R&D) department lies at the heart of your business, anticipating market opportunities and developing new products and services “ahead of the curve” to give you competitive advantage. Dispersed development teams often use diverse locations to their advantage, coordinating across different time zones to work continuously, around the clock, to release a product to market faster. This can only happen if your R&D staff can effectively collaborate to share ideas, capture information, follow internal processes for regulatory compliance, share best practices and connect with experts—colleagues, customers, partners and suppliers—at different stages of the development cycle to work together to complete R&D projects in a timely manner.

The IGLOO Software Solution

Combine your organization’s talent, relationships (both inside and outside the firewall) and knowledge to build highly productive R&D teams.

Expertise Location

Using an IGLOO corporate social network you can immediately build your project team, from the ground up, and ramp up members to start contributing immediately. IGLOO profiles give you access to your employees’ background, skill level and experience, allowing you to use the best resources from anywhere in your organization to create a highly effective R&D team. You can define roles and set up permissions and responsibilities based on profiles to ensure that the project stays secure and on track. Using IGLOO, you can get your R&D projects up and running in minutes not months.

Manage Your Knowledge

A sense of focus is a vital component when building an effective team. IGLOO provides a secure community in which team members can access everything they need to participate in and complete projects successfully. All project-related information is stored in one place, so new group members can quickly get the information they need, such as Product Specifications, Project Scope and Requirements documents, to begin contributing to the project much faster. And IGLOO’s powerful content management functionality supports multiple file formats—such as MS Projects, ghant charts, functional and technical designs, CAD drawings, engineering documents and more. All information within your project can be searched, bookmarked, commented on and subscribed to (email or RSS) by authorized team members. This allows your R&D team to stay on top of information in changing task or priority lists, for example.

Depending on where you are in the R&D project lifecycle, content may be amended and your team membership may change. IGLOO’s easy to use Administration Console allows you to manage the presentation, security, membership and settings of your R&D project from a centralized and secure control panel.

Manage Your Business Relationships

Integrated Calendar functionality can be used to keep the team on schedule. Use it to coordinate team meetings and track milestones. Your R&D team cans subscribe to the event calendar and receive email updates (instantly, daily, weekly or monthly) when changes are made to the calendar.

Managers can keep tight controls on the project by monitoring individual activity within the network to see who is contributing to the project. Managers can also set up private areas for storing, managing and collaborating on highly sensitive materials such as Project Timelines, Specifications and more.

Blogs can be used to discuss product development. Members of the team can participate in more formalized discussion forums. Announcements can be used to broadcast product-related news to the team.

A Development Wiki—a collection of web pages that team members access and modify — can be set up with each new project. Employees gather on them to chart the Product Roadmap or write software. This is especialy valuable in global organizations, where employees work remotely to contribute or brainstorm, regardless of location and time zone. All of the information captured in a wiki is securely stored in the network, preventing the loss of valuable knowledge during the project, or once it has been completed.

The corporate social network can be extended to include customers and partners, promoting interaction with customers or beta users for product testing and/or validation of research and development findings—adding insight and value to development projects.

Use IGLOO to establish Communities of Practice, in which you can save ‘best practice’ methodology and build on these tactics to reduce duplicated efforts and establish industry standards.