Tips and Tricks - page 5
It’s no secret that project management benefits go beyond just the client. They extend to the project manager, the team, the company, its other clients, even third-party vendor partners. Efficiency, customer satisfaction, team development, better flexibility, increased competitive edge, more opportunities to expand the company’s services, client confidence, lessons learned – there’s no denying that the project management benefits to be gained are many.
You may insist that it’s not a requisite, but it pays to have a trusted tool that reaps the benefits of project management software to facilitate project planning and analysis.
There are no silver bullets to project management success, but there are basic principles to keep in mind when planning and executing a project – from laying the groundwork to estimating the project, from developing the plan to tracking its progress. One such principle focuses on resource management solutions and falls within the project estimation phase.
By resource, we generally mean people, time and budget. But for this particular article, we will focus our efforts on the people piece of the overall pie.
In some businesses, especially in startups, employees may have to do other jobs here and there, aside from their basic responsibilities. One of the most critical of these “other jobs” is project management.
Even as more companies now prefer certified project management professionals, the reality is that getting a PMP certification can be quite an expensive commitment to make. Some professionals handed with additional project management responsibilities have to make do with mastering a simpler project management guide instead.
If you don’t know what’s going on in your department or your company right now, you are trying to manage a ‘blind system’. Even process automation doesn’t give you enough insight into daily company activity in this case. The holistic approach is a combination of tools you can put together around your automated processes to gain visibility. Here is what you can do:
Back in the day when social task management tools were unheard of, managers scheduled team meetings to distribute tasks and/or check members’ task statuses. Meetings were also required to discuss task execution challenges and brainstorm ways to ensure effective task management. Progress reports were then sent as a spreadsheet, or some other file type, via the company’s internal shared drive or through email.
There’s Springpad. There’s Evernote. There’s Google Tasks and TeuxDeux. There’s a ton of personal task management software to choose from out there – perhaps hundreds, if not thousands – and depending on whom you’re asking, one is significantly better than the other. But “personal” being the operative word, one is inclined to ask, what does a personal task management software have to do with team-based tasks and enterprise-wide projects?
A tool to help optimize project management execution and initiate ease of communication, your team project management software has a big role to play. Choosing the right one for your projects and teams is crucial.
They say the ultimate inspiration is the deadline. While that is true, the fact remains that deadlines are stressful. Still, without deadlines, there’s no way to tell if the works of art and technological conveniences we all are enjoying today will ever come to fruition. Without a deadline, what’s to stop you from taking forever to finish school or work on your life’s goals?
Workflow automation, marketing automation, email automation, and then there’s Google’s entry into the smart home space via its recent purchase of Nest, a big step towards what Cisco calls the Internet of Everything. Anywhere you look nowadays, there’s got to be something that’s automated somehow. While not everything can be automated or made more efficient by software, the fact remains that some things are too complex and/or repetitive to tackle manually, and that certain data can be too valuable to be left sitting idle for long with unstructured data.
When it comes to optimizing work processes or finding out what went wrong and why, you need visibility which Comindware Tracker ensures with one of its numerous great features. Today it’s time to tell you about the history tab which every work item has and how this tab can not only help you optimize your company processes, but also find out where exactly you have weak points in your processes and team work.
Are your employees feeling genuine interest in their current activities? Are they satisfied with what they have done and what are currently doing? If you have answered ‘Yes’ to both of these questions, you’ve definitely built a good team. And most probably you have already used some gamification techniques in your company. You never heard about it? “Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context to engage users and solve problems” – that’s the definition from Wikipedia.