Collaborative Minds Blog

Collaborative Minds Blog - page 24

Processes vs. Projects vs. Functions
In our  first article we described how the division of labor increases productivity of an individual employee yet, at the same time, creates a disconnect between departments reducing the company’s effectiveness.

These problems arise when the company grows. As long as the founder is in charge, and the number of employees is limited, the mutual understanding and motivation among managers is sufficient to limit “friction” to a minimum. Then, e.g. a new ambitious sales director comes onboard to reorganize the sales department.  The changes might be positive overall, but the former mutual understanding with the director of Manufacturing is no longer there, leading to tensions, that evolve in a search for a “scapegoat” in meetings with the CEO.

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How the Division of Labor Lowers Productivity
It’s all because of Adam Smith! Wasn’t he the one who introduced the division of labor? What, he didn’t invent it but simply described it? Anyway, it’s the phenomenon that we are going to talk about, not the person.

It happens all the time: as soon as we find a solution for a problem, the solution becomes a problem itself. The division of labor is not an exception: it increases the productivity indeed, but it also decreases in other cases.

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How much reporting do you need?
What are you looking for in a workflow management solution for your team? Should it be customizable enough to adapt to your team’s processes? Should it be easy to use? Should it have powerful reporting tools? Of course, all these factors contribute to the overall product value, but for a manager, one of the key points are the product reporting capabilities.

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How to beat project scheduling problems

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Harrin of A Girl’s Guide To Project Management.


Putting together a project schedule is one of the most important tasks for a project manager. It’s also very easy to get caught out! Here are some scheduling problems and how you can beat them.


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7 Key Ingredients to Successful Project Execution and Completion

Spearheading a project isn’t a walk in the park. You would be responsible for its planning, execution and completion, as well as the aggregation of separate tasks by teams and individuals into a cohesive whole. Grace under pressure is always an essential, but below are seven other key ingredients to lead a project to success:


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How to Manage Multiple Projects – 5 Things You Need
Managing any project can be tricky. Your job as the manager is to ensure each moving part is working towards a common goal, and diminish, if not completely eliminate, unnecessary processes that merely waste resources. Delegation is a necessity, and in order to be an effective manager, you need to understand the project inside out, and from different perspectives, i.e., from the perspectives of your team members, because this is how you gain their respect and loyalty.

This being the case, it is fair to say that managing multiple projects across different teams, all at once, is exponentially trickier. But it can be done and has been done. We list five things on how to manage effectively multiple projects simultaneously.

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5 Basic Tips for Better and Smarter Project Management
If project management is a process that helps us achieve our goals through proper planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling, the smart way is to do it in a manner that optimizes available resources while effectively integrating them to produce desired results.

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Comindware presents its revolutionary solutions for Higher Education at the 20th Annual Online Learning Consortium International Conference
CMW Lab, a leading provider of products and services for predictive Project Management and adaptive Business Process Management took part in the 20th Annual Online Learning Consortium

International Conference. The Conference is a premier forum for Online Learning and continues to expand and play a strategic role in innovation and improvement of higher education. The conference provided the unique opportunity for Comindware representatives to explore the rich variety of models for institutions, and a wide range of opportunities for faculty, staff and administrations.


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Managing dynamic permissions in Comindware Tracker

Managing complex workflows that involve people from different teams, departments and even locations often introduces unique challenges in the context of grouping and isolating your requests from each other dynamically, based on the request type, current workflow step and/or other data points. If you have hundreds of requests fired off to your team every day, you may need to have specific people supervise requests of different types.

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The Future of Integrated PM Solutions
Project management (PM) has always been about accomplishing a goal within a constraint, or a set of goals within a set of constraints. And while the core theory hasn’t changed, the route businesses travel between point A and point B is experiencing a dramatic shift.

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