Project World - page 10
Almost everyone who works with emails on a daily basis and uses their email client as the main instrument for tracking their work, knows about the “Follow Up” feature. I have used this feature for several years in Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird (via extension). This actually helped me improve my productivity – I have started following up important letters, which required action from me or my counterparts. And, as a result, I had a better, clearer overview of my daily & weekly tasks and never forgot about promises I gave.
Today we’re going to touch upon the slippery subject of health & safety incidents which is not only interesting to safety engineers. First of all, whenever a health & safety incident occurs, it is not only human life and health which is in danger (and is precious). The company budget may suffer from huge compensation claims for these issues. That is why not only preventing health & safety incidents, but also their careful investigation is crucial. When we say investigation, we don’t mean that the person to blame needs to be found, but rather a careful investigation needs to be carried out to find the root of the problem in order to prevent incidents from happening in the future.
Your company is growing bigger and it’s harder to control a wide range of critical processes because they involve cross-departmental effort to be applied. With company growth, sooner or later you’re going to have to control those processes with the help of business automation, because you can’t simply write an email or call to find out what’s going on with a certain project. First of all it’s hard to figure out whom to call. The company is big now and if you used to know everyone, when there were about a dozen people, now you simply can’t know everybody.
Agile is a methodology of how to deliver a product that was born in the IT industry. While business software is delivered as well by the same industry, it might be useful to take a closer look at one of the iconic software development methodologies. This could help when it comes to using business software for any industry.
When you start your business process design, you should be aware of one common mistake. It is process complication, or, at the other side – process simplification. Every business process must be organized to achieve as many benefits, as possible. And, at the same time, to spend minimum resources. That’s the key feature of successful business.
Let’s take any BPM tool on the market: once you set up a process in it and you start using the solution, and the process, any changes brought to the process will turn out to be costly due to programming issues and system requirements. So your real life business process has to follow what’s been set up once inside the system.
Today I’m going to tell you about how Comindware Tracker can help you in the case when you start working as the project manager on a project you have little knowledge of. Of course, information from this article will be useful to experienced project leaders too. But, most probably, they have already discovered best practices to manage their projects. So, my main audience for today is ‘accidental’ project managers.
Have you ever wondered how these giant international corporations purchase all the stuff they need for daily operations? Like pens, paper, printers, materials, computers and coffee…Do they hire one of those Hekatonkheires, (otherwise known in Greek mythology as the “Hundred-Handed Ones”. Or do they have a tribe of little gnomes responsible for that? Or maybe they have bought the latest 3D-printer, capable of creating all this stuff? And, although I like to use my imagination sometimes, if they do neither of them, what do they do? In real life, every company has a special department, which ensures that the company does not stop its daily operations because of lack of resources.
Your work information is interconnected and can be used by all departments when you use Comindware Tracker. All data is available across the application, including files, reports, invoices, requests, lists of objects, client cards and anything else you might need for your personal and collaborative team work.
When it comes to automation, quite often different departments use different systems for their specific work. This way, when, for example, sales use SalesForce, marketing uses Marketo, accountants use Workday , HR uses HRtribe – whenever they need to do any kind of common project, they don’t have visibility into each other’s data. They start to solve the problem with the help of Excel files and emails which compromises the very idea of automated systems use. Whenever integration of the systems is in question, it is a timely and costly solution.
As you probably know from my previous posts, Comindware Tracker is built around the brand new Comindware ElasticData technology. So what is behind that technology? Today I’m going to lift the veil on this modern technology and give you a short overview of its benefits over traditional databases.