Entry Software Corporation

Entry

Help Desk and Project Management Software

Importance of Properly Setting Project Milestones

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The importance of setting project milestones

Every project manager knows the importance of keeping a project on track. When a project falls behind, the team needs to put in a great deal of effort to put ensure it is back on track because of the time-sensitive stages of a project; most of the time it leads to the project being delayed or cancelled entirely. Keeping employees motivated to complete a project can be difficult, the easiest way is with the use of project milestones.

Project milestones are important points on a project’s timeline that employees can look at for the visual progression of the project. The thought behind making milestones is to categorize the parts of a project into digestible sections as opposed to viewing the whole project at once; this should motivate your team to complete tasks on time. However, it is important to understand there is more to making project milestones than just setting them. Setting meaningful milestones will motivate your project team members more than setting frequent or unreachable milestones. Here are some things to consider when deciding your project milestones.

Tip #1: Frequency and Timing

As a project manager, you may be tempted to overuse milestones as a motivational tool to keep the team moving along the ladder to reach the surface of success. Don’t fall into the trap of labelling every task completion as a milestone. With more milestones, each one becomes less momentous, inadvertently taking away from the motivation of work. On the other hand, don’t adopt the other extreme approach by ignoring or not recognizing significant and relevant events as milestones. A good compromise is to consistently designate important deliverables as milestones.

Tip #2: Visibility

Milestones need to be placed prominently in the project’s schedule and tracked periodically. Make sure that your milestones have been incorporated into your project scheduling, calendar, or another project-tracking software program. This promotes positive work productivity closer to the goal; similar to a runner getting closer to the end of a marathon.

Tip #3: Accountability

Milestones are commitments that must be met on time. If a milestone is missed, it needs to be addressed immediately by re-examining the resources to determine if they are properly matched to the objectives. This reinforces the meaning behind each milestone and the importance of the impact when achieving each milestone.

Tip #4: Fallibility

It may sound counter-intuitive, but you should select challenging milestones that carry a degree of risk for failure. Treat milestones as learning experiences and opportunities to make adjustments, so the final product can be flawless. People learn from mistakes; applying this philosophy to your projects will assist you to do your best work.

Understand project milestone management and reporting. Contact Entry Software for more information.

Management Ready with Help Desk and Project Management Software

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The concept of being “Management-Ready” when using help desk and project management software comes from a recognition that people are typically less managed than ever before. Although IT knowledge workers are largely empowered via self-empowerment, management-ready depends on people offering visibility into their workload so that others know when, how, and whether to interrupt. This is what makes it possible to align efforts and optimize the efforts of busy people. [Read more…] about Management Ready with Help Desk and Project Management Software

Helpdesk and Project Management Software and “The Blur”

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IT resources often do a blend of project, support, operational and informal work. At Entry Software, we have determined that informal work creates “The Blur”.

The Blur is made up of informal work that is not centrally managed or tracked. As a result, capacity for projects, support, and operational work is altered in an un-measurable and unpredictable way. [Read more…] about Helpdesk and Project Management Software and “The Blur”

Making Sense of Help Desk and Project Management

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Why would an IT organization need to have a team management solution that brings together a help desk tool and a project management tool into one, integrated environment? To understand this question lets break the IT department into components:

How is work assigned to the IT Department?

Strategies and directives set at director levels trickle down into IT as projects to be executed. These projects, when executed and turned into working components that will somehow help the organization meet the strategies and directives once set.

  1. Managers request changes to applications and network infrastructure. There is an ongoing dialogue between departmental management and the IT group that facilitates change. Changes, large or small will either become projects or short-term tasks.
  2. End-users request help. PC’s break, connectivity of devices needs to occur, new staff is hired, old ones are fired. There are a never-ceasing ebb and flow to the needs of end-users.
  3. Operational, long-term, activities are in place to keep all the equipment and software running in peak condition. These tasks and mini-projects are vital to the organizations’ livelihood and consist of maintenance and regulatory tasks performed routinely.

IT teams are organized in a pyramid of cost and scarcity. The top is the most expensive and least plentiful, the bottom the least expensive and most plentiful. Typical IT organizations consist of level one help desk staff, level two analysts, level three experts, one or two project managers and a number of managers, all silo’d by a pool of expertise.

Help desk staff are typically isolated from the rest of the team as they are dealing with end-user and customer requirements. The level two staff are writing programs and executing operational tasks. Level three teams are working with level 1 and 2 staff to lend their expertise where required.

Level one: most plentiful, least expensive, typically not working on projects or operational activities. Level one requires a help desk solution to manage incoming requests for service and to escalate requests to level two.

Level two: mid-level cost, more plentiful, the project workhorses of the organization and the team where many of the level one issues are escalated into. Require help desk solution to manage escalated calls from level one and require project management solution to manage assigned tasks.

Level three: most expensive, scarcest, tough to get hold of and high importance to the organization because of their subject matter expertise. Require help desk solution to manage escalated requests from levels one and two and project management to manage tasks. Add in a project manager and various management teams with the need to get projects done on time, optimize resources and keep costs down and we now have a daunting job of managing this group.

How can IT create a defensible position within the corporation?

With the truth. To gather the truth you need to have all the time captured on all activities by all staff. This means that the levels one, two and three are capturing their time against help desk requests, project tasks, and routine operational activities. Then, as a management team, the truth of what has occupied the IT team’s time is delivered in standard reports.

Get the proper tools

Providing the tools required to help you learn the truth about your organization:

  1. Help Desk to manage all incoming work from end-user and customer communities;
  2. Project Management to manage all planned activities, tasks and projects, and routine operational activities.
  3. Project Portfolio Management for Project Managers to deliver real-time, concise and accurate information to project sponsors.
  4. Resource Management Reports to optimize and schedule staff.

Learn how to optimize your IT team with TeamHeadquarters.

TIPS

  • Focus on the core competencies of your organization. If you’re an insurance company then your IT team should be focused on how to deliver the services of an insurance company. add-on application like IT Management Software should be outsourced to SaaS
  • Take it slow. When making a change in the IT organization you’ll have the most resistance and least amount of agreement from level three staff. Focus on level 1, they’ll be more compliant.
  • Keep it simple. Complex models breed complexity so, by keeping it simple you’ll be able to do more with less.
  • Flatten your IT group. Take the Kaizen model of IT management and organize your expertise units. This takes you away from an isolated grid of silos towards functional teams that work together to solve issues quickly.

(more…)

Service Industry Identify Advantages to Integrating Projects and Operations

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If you’re an ISV for Microsoft, SalesForce or one of the many ISV focused software vendors then you’re busy and looking for ways to improve your offering, enhance customer retention, and to boost profitability.

We frequently meet with ISV’s and note a recurring theme in relation to project and operations management; the need to integrate project delivery and operational management together into a single system. [Read more…] about Service Industry Identify Advantages to Integrating Projects and Operations

7 Steps to Gain Resource Clarity in Project Management and Help Desk

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When planning resources for your IT organization there can never be too much resource clarity.  Who’s available and, what skills do they have are two resource-based questions but what about other points of clarification?

  • Do they fit culturally?
  • Are they using the systems operationally that you use to manage the team?
  • Are they working from prioritized lists?
  • Are their external and internal communications in line with corporate minimums?
  • Are customers able to easily access the service they require?
  • Have your customers been trained to utilize service effectively?

You may want to develop a software strategy (see: Help Desk Software Strategy Development)

Seven steps that will help you provide clarity for both your resources and customers.

  1. Set a standard for your organization that all work must be assigned, managed and prioritized using tickets and tasks from a project management and help desk software system.
  2. During the initial stages, have frequent, short one-on-one meetings to review the working list with your IT resources. This stage is very important as it sets the tone for the newly adopted working style and helps with the transition of change.
  3. Conduct frequent, unannounced drop-in visitations with your staff to encourage the new working paradigm and assist your colleagues. Reiterate the fact that their working life will become that much more controlled and simplified when the get out of “The Blur”.
  4. Communicate via writing how all work will be formalized with your staff and their customers. It’s important that everyone in the organization understands how formalizing the work within an automated work management system will improve the quality of work and timeliness.
  5. Provide a simple customer service portal for self-serve help desk and project request submissions. This will provide your customers (internal or external) with an easy way to submit requests and view the status of the work without having to bother your staff.
  6. Kindly return work requests to the customer who makes the request via email, phone messages or “hall tackles” with simple instructions on where and how to place a formal work request using the self-service customer service portal. You will need to train your customers as well as your IT staff.
  7. Change your voicemail to announce, “All work requests must be placed via the customer service portal located at the following URL address”. Make your cell phone number available in case of an extreme emergency only.

In order to track your progress, continue to meet with your IT staff on a regular basis and ask them one simple question: “What are you working on today”? If they are out of “The Blur” then they should have a short working list and feel confident that they can meet their daily objectives. Once you get out of “The Blur” it becomes easy to feel when you are starting to slip back in.

Your natural instinct will have you prioritizing your work on a regular basis to avoid re-entering “The Blur”. Meetings will become more productive and be centred on your work issues, not meeting to discuss what you are going or might do.

Once you have reduced or even eliminated “The Blur” you will notice some interesting changes in your organization resource clarity. See how TeamHeadquarters can get you out of “The Blur”.

  • Your staff will have more control over their work-life and have a much more positive attitude.
  • You will proactively receive positive feedback from your internal and external customers. 
  • The phone calls to your help desk will reduce. 
  • The slip-through-the-crack syndrome will be virtually eliminated.
  • No more deer in the headlights look from your IT staff; no more disgruntled customers. 
  • The calls to upper management by irate customers will be dramatically reduced. 
  • You will find out very quickly who your troubled customers are and proactively work with them. 
  • Your IT staff will be viewed as a more professional group than in the past.

A demonstration of TeamHeadquarters will provide you with a complete understanding of how a combined project management and help desk system can help obtain resource clarity in your organization.