We participate in an internship program with a New York City high school called City As a School. They place kids, who have more or less flunked out of their original high schools for any number of reasons, into corporate internships in an effort to open up their views for their own futures.
The kids are always very polite, helpful and great at stuffing envelopes. In turn, we help them meet their requirements, one of which is an end of term project. It’s usually a paper or presentation of some sort. Depending on the intern, it can be a laborious effort. But, it is part of the commitment we made.
The first time I had to work with an intern on their project, I was actually in the middle of a big client project, in addition to my normal task list. The prospect of stopping what I was doing, a few times, while we go back and forth on the paper he was writing, was not appealing to me. Since he had his paper on his school’s network, where I had no access, it would had have to have been the tiring system of emailing back and forth the document for edits. It was going to break my concentration on my tasks at hand, but I had to hold up my end of the deal. After all, the intern had chosen a topic that was directly correlated to what we do and it was good to see him show such an earnest interest.
When I received the first email, I opened it up and was pleasantly surprised to find an invitation to collaborate on a file, rather than an attachment. I clicked on the link, entered the file as a collaborator and was able to make the edits on the file and watch as he made his additions to the same file, while I still had the file on my screen. Collaboration at work! It took a total of three of these sessions, each about seven minutes, to help him finish his project as opposed to what would have been many email interruptions to my day over a much greater span of time.
The people at City As made a business decision that works not just for them, but for the companies they work with. Collaboration through the cloud not only gives the student access to his files from any internet enabled device, be it home, school or internship location, it is far less intrusive and much more efficient for the companies the kids intern at, their clients as it were. The investment in collaboration through the cloud can be very low, and often times can be even less than the cost of a new server, if the choice were to upgrade or move to the cloud. The other type of investment to consider is the time it will take to train your employees to use collaboration, not only amongst themselves, but with any clients that would be open to it. It could significantly increase productivity and shorten project turnaround time. Just ask City As interns and their collaborators.
