Entry Software Corporation

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IT Strategy

IT Incident Management System Metrics

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What is an effective incident management system? Taking action to restore normal service operation quickly while minimizing negative impact on business operations. Managing incidents effectively is an essential piece for providing quality customer support. This can also help teams improve their current operations to prevent future incidents.

Benefits of an effective incident management system:

  1. Increased productivity and efficiency
  2. Higher level of service quality
  3. Visibility and transparency
  4. Valuable IT service management documentation
  5. Enhance end user satisfaction

The self-service portal is the single point of contact for the users to report any incidents. IT responds, handles, and resolves any request or issue to the business and/or customers depending upon what both parties think about impact and urgency. Then the incident is designated to staff that can best resolve it.

Incident Management Metrics 

There are 3 major factors through which an incident order is decided upon: Impact, urgency, and priority.

Impact – How a business is affected by an incident?

Urgent – How urgent the incident is and how much time it will take to be resolved? 

Priority – What is the priority of the incident ? (Low, Medium or High)

5 steps of incident management:

  1. Incident Reporting  communication begins at the time an incident is identified to acknowledge to the user or business that a disruption is taking place and investigation is in progress.
  2. Incident Escalation occurs when an incident triggers an alert and the proper procedures are performed by the individual who is assigned to manage the incident.
  3. Investigation and Diagnosis IT team performs analysis, then staff can begin investigating the type, cause, and possible solutions for an incident.
  4. Resolution and Recovery  involve eliminating root causes of issues and restoring systems to full functioning. Resolving an incident also includes documenting analysis findings and steps taken to restore service.
  5. Incident Closure communicating and confirming from users that the service experience is normalized ensuring customer satisfaction is met.

Incorporating SMART Goals into Setting Project Milestones

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Incorporating SMART goals to reach project milestones is key to your teams productivity and motivation.

What does SMART goals stand for; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Project managers know the stress and importance of maintaining a project’s timeline. When the team encounters an unexpected delay they must coordinate their efforts into getting the project back on track. However, with the delicate timeline of a project this can become challenging to achieve. Delays usually lead to the project deadline being pushed back or the cancellation of the project as a whole. Meaningful project milestones must be put in place and the team’s incorporation of SMART goals should be used ensure efficiency. 

Project milestones are key elements to the project’s completion. They allow the team to visualize the progression of the project on a timeline. Milestones are used to divide the project into sections to avoid the overwhelming feeling of the project as an entirety. SMART goals can be used in synchrony with project milestones on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. Setting these goals as a team holds everyone accountable and to the same standard. These defined and attainable goals with specific criteria can work to improve the motivation of your team. 

Timeline and Goal Reinforcement

Using project milestones will ensure team motivation. The identification of each task completion as a milestone can take away from the momentum of the project. This is when SMART goals can become extremely valuable to project managers. Setting and reaching a weekly SMART goal gets your team one step closer to the completion of a project milestone while also providing a sense of progress. This gives your team the motivation to work towards the larger goal and allows them to see the importance of the milestone.

Visual Representation 

There is great importance to visibly scheduling project milestones on your team’s project calendar. These milestones must be presented with importance as their completion is essential to the project’s deadline. The team can set their weekly SMART goals in accordance to the project milestone deadlines. Therefore, using a project tracking software has great advantages for your team’s motivation and productivity. 

Responsibility

Project milestones are set with the understanding that they will be met on time. In the event of the team falling short meeting a milestone, it is crucial the project manager addresses it. This may include re-structuring and examining resources to improve functionality of the team. Reinforcement of a project milestone emphasizes the importance of meeting these goals as individuals on a team.

Liability to Error

This is an important concept to consider when setting milestones as a project manager. The project milestones need to be challenging enough to pose a risk of failure. This creates learning experiences for the team when re-configuring focus points and gives opportunity for SMART goal setting to get back on track. The failure may provide room for improvement within the final project. 

How to Incentivize Productivity

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The last thing a manager or workplace wants is laziness or a lack of productivity. When workers aren’t properly motivated to get a task done, there’s a high chance the company will not succeed. Therefore, a solution can be inspiring the workforce to be as productive as possible, and doing so will improve the health of the workers, managers, and the company as a whole. Businesses who master the art of incentivizing productivity are those who can rise the quickest and achieve the most success in the fast-paced market we live in. Below are a few tips on how to motivate workers to push their productivity to the next level.

Set Quotas

One of the essential motivators for everything that humankind has accomplished in the modern world is neccesity. Using this strategy can help to get simple tasks done better and faster as well. This doesn’t mean employees should be scared while working, but quotas can be important for keeping track of everyone’s productivity and helping workers realize when they are slacking off. Start by measuring the current rate at which each employee gets work done, and set a goal or requirement for the next month that is higher than their current output, or one that is more realistic to make the employee of value to the business. When standards are set higher and employees know that they will be rewarded or penalized based on the amount of work they complete.

Make it Competitive

Humans have the instinctive nature to be on top, or to at least be as good as those who surround them. In the office, if multiple employees are doing the same job or are measured in the same way, (friendly) competition can have a huge positive effect on the amount of work that each individual completes. Having a simple tally board that displays how many units sold, projects completed, or clients attained by each worker in a given time period will push those with a competitive mindset to go further. Better yet, offer an incentive for the top 1-3 performers like a bonus, gift card, or material gift each month to set their drive on fire. If there is an opportunity to move up the company’s ladder, tracking results publicly will also show employees what it takes to get a promotion or raise over their co-workers.

Offer Rewards along the Way

While financial rewards for small goals like commision and bonuses don’t work for many companies, there are tons of ways that employees can be rewarded for completing lots of quality work. Even work that doesn’t directly correlate with revenue can come with incentives, which can grow for larger achievements to push employees even further. Take, for example, a janitor at a restaurant. They have no direct impact on sales, nor do they have a target laid out for how clean the restaurant should be. if a building starts to get dirty more often and customers complain about it, then it is often most effective for the restaurant to increase the janitor’s motivation through small or non-financial rewards. For example, a new rule could be set so that every time a customer compliments the cleanliness of the business, the worker gets credit for a free meal or side item of their choice. If a month goes by without a single complaint, then the janitor could be recognized publicly with an employee of the month signs or another award of recognition.

Here is a tool that can help.

What goes into being an IT Manager?

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Every day, an information technology manager (IT manager) is responsible for so many functions of a business. The importance of what goes into being IT manager is becoming increasingly greater with the constant advancement and reliance on technology in businesses. Being an IT manager isn’t simply a starter position either, the position requires experience and expertise in the field for it to be done efficiently. There are many difficult tasks and responsibilities that go into the everyday life of an IT manager; here are just a few:

Planning Projects

Advancements in a businesses management systems are always needed so the business can stay updated with constant changes is modern business practices. The IT manager is responsible for developing plans to improve their system and how to effectively distribute their work to employees. Determining costs and timescales are all parts of project management. Projects like these take plenty of time and attention to be completed effectively and always need to be in constant thought of the manager.

Coordinating IT Staff

Taking on the role of an IT manager means being in charge of a sizeable group of employees. The manager must organize duties for employees to keep them fully engaged to their maximum potential. Engagement drops to 2% on teams with managers who ignore their employees, so IT managers should always be available to employees questions or concerns. The IT staff must understand the computer management system of the business in order to maintain effective work.

Balancing Client and Business’ Needs

IT managers are also responsible for complying their online interfaces with the requests of the business and the customers. This means when a problem arises regarding usability or confusion from customers, the IT manager has to fix the issue without compromising the features original purpose. Similarly, when the business wants to implement a new feature in their website or mobile application, the IT manager is responsible for presenting the feature that won’t compromise the satisfaction of the customer’s experience. Finding a constant balance between these two aspects is an everyday duty of an IT manager.

Designing and Managing Technology Systems

Whatever the business, the IT manager is in charge of maintaining an operational and safe computerized system. Being the leader means being the go-to person to find creative solutions to issues with the computer system. IT managers must be knowledgeable in their field as well in regards to the system. If there are any issues that arise regarding its usability or implementation of improvement, the IT manager is responsible for it.

With all the difficult responsibilities of IT managers, taking any opportunity to relieve stress from their everyday work is always needed. Many IT managers have adopted an already established computerized system for resource management or use an additional software for project management such as TeamHeadquarters. Being an IT manager may have it’s ups-and-downs, but with all the roles and responsibilities, you are one of the most integral parts of the business operations.

How to Optimize Your Business Dashboards

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W. Edwards Deming once stated, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This very true when one is looking to increase their company’s work efficiency. In the workplace, there is a lot on the go and for managers especially, it can be difficult to determine “What is succeeding?” and “What needs to be improved?”. Although, with the assistance of project management dashboards, many managers can easily access analytics based on their team’s operational efficiency.

Being able to measure and visually see key areas in your business, you can analyze what areas are performing well and some that need work. Identifying where your company is lacking in projects, allows managers to evaluate the problem, which can ameliorate these areas. Dashboards are definitely a needed asset that serves many benefits to a business. Ultimately, the big question is “How can you maximize this software, so it helps your company in the most useful way?”.

Many times, businesses do not choose the right key performance indicators (KPI) which can lead to useless information collected, allowing no insight on what needs to be improved and what projects are progressing well. To avoid this hassle, you must choose the correct KPI’s that will help give the right data to quantify the progress of the success of the business. This can be done by, first, identifying the goals and objectives your business wishes to accomplish. Example- Decrease customer service calls, by improving the online help centre. Next, you must choose which factors will present information on how well you are acceding these objectives according to the data scale. These are known as Critical Success Factors (CSF), and focus on how a business plans to achieve their objectives. To add to our example CSF’s could include the number of visits on the help centre website or the number of calls to customer service lines. Once this is done, KPIs will collect useful data and analyze the effectiveness of the activities and whether your company was successful at its objectives.

You now have very well collected data from your objectives, based on a timespan that fits your company’s needs, this can be either: daily, weekly or maybe monthly. Managers need to organize their dashboards, picking the best visual representation of the data. You can pick from a variety of options: graphs, tables, charts or gauges. This can express daily business achievement; plotting the data collected. Managers can analyze these visuals and pinpoint the areas that are not doing as well. To utilize this data in a beneficial way, managers can hold weekly meetings with their teams discussing their weekly performance. This helps visually and vocally communicate to you and your workers what is going well and what needs work. Here the workers can communicate to one another the reasons they may be not achieving the set objectives and brainstorm solutions to improve the negative data and change it to positive data. Managers should encourage their teams to go above and beyond, to motivate them to continue succeeding in the areas they are performing well while trying to turn around the negative trends shown in the data.

If you can manage to accomplish the previous requirements you’re on the way to improving your business and have optimized your project management dashboard. Dashboards help calculate the data analyzing how well your business is doing in key areas. This is crucial information that can help grow a business to higher success. It also helps managers see where the company is lacking and allows them to gather with teams to calculate a solution as to how they can improve their drawbacks. Overall, dashboards are very valuable to businesses, especially when they’re utilized in the best way!

IT Management | Strategic Thinking

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An IT manager called me the other day and says, “What can you do to help me achieve my IT strategy?” Great question, says I; tell me your strategy, and I will see how I can help.

The next five minutes I had to endure metaphors, vaguenesses, and I saw it was coming, “I do not have a defined and written down strategy” (aka, I have no idea what a strategy is but it sounded impressive didn’t it), realization moment.  Can you say, “Awkward?”

How do you help someone who knows they need help, yet is unclear about why and how?  You ask questions.

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