The freelance economy is experiencing an upsurge globally and in South Africa, and we’re seeing a trend among our clients to outsource a lot more of their work. Project management tools need to support the collaboration between companies and external contributors better, and they also need to support freelancers better. We developed External Collaboration to address the need that agencies have to manage their external service providers with the same tool they use internally.

A boon for traffic and project managers

Traffic managers may have previously found it challenging to maintain a clear overview of a project when some contributors didn’t have access to the company’s workflow software. External collaboration gives key roleplayers a complete view of all project resources, time allocations and capacities across the board, at any time.

For larger jobs, companies collaborate with each other and may have multiple teams all working on the same project. We wanted to build a feature that would make it seamless for everyone involved to work together, whether they’re in-house, freelancers or entirely separate companies.

External collaboration took many months of planning, development and testing, and we’ve had immensely positive feedback from our clients since we began testing it in May.

How external collaboration works

The functionality enables Magnetic users to add individuals and teams outside of their companies to Magnetic, even if those people aren’t using the platform. Essentially, we made it super easy for our clients to add freelancers and contributors to jobs, be it on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

With external collaboration, every stakeholder involved in a particular job or opportunity can be given access to that project, permitted task access and/or assigned tasks. They’ll also receive notifications as changes are made to keep them up to date.

Magnetic now aligned with leading international offerings

Few South African workflow management systems give users the ability to collaborate with individuals outside of the platform, but a number of the top international offerings do. By building this functionality and bringing it to the South African market, we’ve aligned our software with some of the top international project management solutions, but of course, at much lower cost, and that was key for Magnetic.

As a proudly South African company, Magnetic has endeavoured to deliver a solid, versatile product at a price point that suits the local market. Companies pay a flat monthly fee per user and there are no contracts. A ‘pay as you go’ model enables companies to add and remove users, either in-house or external, as and when they need to.

South African agencies are just as ambitious and advanced as their international counterparts, but they don’t necessarily have the budgets to splash out on custom-built systems or ‘brand name’ international solutions. Magnetic is built for the local market, by a local team, and takes into consideration the specific needs of South Africa’s agency landscape, particularly in the freelance economy. 

For more information, visit www.magnetichq.com. Alternatively, connect with them on Facebook, Twitter or on LinkedIn.