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This article has been modified from its original version by Amar Hanspal, Autodesk. You can view the original article here.

Legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson once said that for a team to succeed, the players have “to surrender the ‘me’ for ‘we.’”

Basketball player egos can be hard to check at the arena door, but there’s a whole other meaning to this quote for the makers of the world. Designing or making something—whether it’s a bridge, building, or luxury watch—is a team sport.

In order to succeed, teams must be able to connect and communicate regardless of where they are. The ability to work—the web, your tablet, your phone, any device—is critical for the rapid design and creation cycles of today. There really hasn’t been a way to do this effectively . . . until now.

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3 Key Ingredients of Collaborative Working:

1. Simplicity
Removing the complexity of setting up teams who are managing and working together on design and engineering projects. Team members should be able to concentrate on core activities and not get caught up trying to understand different file formats, versions, locations. They must have the confidence that they’ll have access to the right information, in the right format, at the right time.

2. Invisibility
Teams working together on projects with the ability to focus on the task at hand. Distractions are removed by ensuring tedious tasks like version control “just happen.” That alone is a miracle for most folks. The constant frustration of moving between different tools, newsfeeds, platforms, and screens is eliminated. The collaboration experience becomes invisible within the tools you use day to day.

3. Integration
The collaboration platform should allow for developers to build applications on top of it for design, fabrication, and more. It has open application program interfaces that allow developers to combine seamlessly a user’s context and role into a project.

Bringing it all together

A cloud-based 3D CAD/CAM tool for product development like Autodesk Fusion 360 with Fusion Team brings a single space for people to work together with all the power of what would have been “hoarded” on desktops or FTP servers a few years ago. In this modern way of working, traditional data management is no longer required. Teams know they have the latest designs and the ability to roll back as needed, and sharing designs with key stakeholders is simple and intuitive.

Designers now have the breakthrough ability to branch iterations of their work and merge it back in later if needed. It’s the ultimate flexibility, and was never possible with historical approaches to data management.

Cloud Collaboration Is More Than You Think. The world has changed dramatically and is now experiencing an era of computing abundance—an “Era of Connection.” The way things are made—cars, buildings, furniture, electronic devices, lawnmowers, whatever—has changed remarkably.

Thankfully, the future of how teams work together—simple, invisible, integrated—is here. The designer, engineer, or architect no longer needs to send huge files back and forth. They just send a URL to the data that lives in the cloud. The barriers are now gone, and teams can do everything from concept to design to fabrication in one cloud software ecosystem.

With Autodesk Fusion Team, your entire team can stay informed and involved throughout every stage of the design and fabrication process.