Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Non-billable hours are hours worked that cannot be charged to a client: internal meetings, admin, training, business development, proposals, and project overruns you chose not to invoice. Every guide to this subject treats non-billable time as a problem to minimise. That framing causes two expensive errors. It leads firms to price as though non-billable time does not exist, which understates the break-even rate by around 60%.

Our latest cloud release offers three new capabilities that are focused on one goal: to protect the data you can’t afford to lose and sync data that you can trust. A quick summary of what’s new: You can now stop sensitive data from being leaked the moment it is copied, control which files can be uploaded to applications, websites, or emails, and sync employee records straight from your HR system.

Small businesses increasingly depend on digital tools to communicate, share information, manage projects, and stay connected with employees and customers. When internet connectivity is slow or unreliable, everyday activities such as team messaging, file sharing, video meetings, and access to cloud applications can become frustrating and inefficient. High-speed internet gives employees the connectivity they need to communicate in real time and keep collaborative work moving.

A project plan is the document that records what will be delivered, by when, by whom, at what cost, and what happens when any of those change. It is the reference the team and the stakeholders return to when there is disagreement, which is the only test of whether it was worth writing. Two things get conflated constantly and cause most of the confusion around this topic. A Gantt chart is not a project plan — it is the schedule section of one.

AI agents have made more than 19 million tool calls to Miro’s MCP server since February 2026, and the users behind them span product, design, marketing, operations, and project management. When we launched Miro’s MCP server in February, we had AI coding tools in mind.

Shadow IT is the use of software, hardware, cloud services, or other technology for work without an organization’s IT team's knowledge or approval. It can be as simple as an employee sending a document through a personal cloud storage account or creating a WhatsApp group to coordinate with colleagues. These workarounds can help employees solve an immediate problem, but they also move company data outside the systems IT teams are responsible for securing and governing.

Being available has quietly become part of the job description. Nobody writes “check your inbox every seven minutes” into an employment contract. Yet a delayed reply can feel like a small professional failure, even when you were busy doing the work you were hired to do. So you check. Between tasks. Before a meeting. During the few minutes that were supposed to be a break. The uncomfortable part? Staying close to your inbox does not guarantee that important work moves forward.

A market positioning project that used to take a consulting team four to five weeks now takes two and a half days. That's not a forecast. It's what Michael Nenninger, former EVP of digital consulting at msg, described on a recent episode of the Leaders in Consulting podcast. His team built the work as an AI workflow: around 60 prompts, 15 sub-tasks, and a human checking quality along the way. The host did the math on air: that's 5% to 10% of the effort it used to take.

A collections agent signs in from a bedroom in a shared flat at seven in the morning. The VPN connects, the client CRM opens and a screen full of cardholder records appears. For the next eight hours every system log will read as compliant. Not one of them will record that a flatmate walked behind the monitor twice, or that a phone sat propped against a water bottle with the camera pointed at the screen. That is the gap outsourced delivery now lives with.

Slack can still be working for your team when you start wondering if something else would fit better. Maybe the bill has grown. Maybe conversations are easy to start, but decisions are hard to find later. Or perhaps your team needs a simpler way to turn a request into something someone actually owns. The best Slack alternative depends on what you want to improve: cost, ease of use, asynchronous communication, task management, or control over where your data lives.