Entry Software Corporation

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IT Work Management

Tips for Managing IT Team Effectively

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How to utilize your team effectively
Your team can either lead the company to success, or failure, which is why you need to utilize them as best as you can.

Teamwork is essential for creating the foundation of a high-performing business. Good team ethic leads to the success and smooth operations of your company. By identifying employees’ skill sets and assigning tasks that are well suited to their abilities helps to improve team efficiency. An effective team includes skills such as good problem-solving skills, decision making, communication and interpersonal skills. Here are some tips you can use when managing your team to benefit your company.

First, behind every successful business lies a great team. Teamwork maximizes the individual strengths of team members to bring out their best. Selecting individuals with the proper skills for the job is an important part of building a strong and successful team. When the right people are in place, work is always a priority and projects are completed effectively. You can find this out by:

  • How they embrace challenges
  • What motivates them
  • How the work with others
  • What their strengths and weaknesses are
  • How they handle stress and negative situations

When an effective team is set in stone they ensure success for your company operations.

Second, communicating the idea of success you’ve developed to your team in a way that clarifies both goals and expectations. All team members should trust, respect, and support each other, once the team is established and each member should know the value of their personal contribution to the team goal. By involving team members in the decision making process, it helps to limit conflict and complaints related to projects and tasks. The quality of decisions made will improve when the whole team is involved. Team decision making is beneficial, as it offers a diverse set of views that work towards creating a positive outcome for the company.

Third, conflict often arises when team members focus on personal issues rather than work related issues. Building a positive relationship with your colleagues can make for a much less stressful environment and work to reduce conflict. Teams who work particularly well together enjoy each other’s company and get together outside of the office from time to time to socialize and have some fun. This will lead to more productivity and success in the long run.

Finally, motivation can be in short supply during times of stress for some employees. However, if you have employees that approach work with a positive attitude and complete their tasks, other employees with recognize their hard work. Seeing others working productively will encourage underperforming employees to work harder as well. This will help to increase motivation and efficiency in your workplace.

Overall, these tips help to create an effective team and successful company!

Why Centralized IT Management Improves Team Productivity

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IT team using the same system

Centralized IT Management systems store important project tasks and support ticket information, provide communication lines, and create harmonized employee assignments and schedules in one location. These systems can be used to manage your company projects and support increasing IT members’ efficiency and productivity.

Are you finding it nearly impossible to get organized and keep track of documents, schedule project tasks,  and maintain customer service satisfaction simultaneously? 

Using a centralized IT management system can solve this problem. This system consists of multiple IT services and is operated from one location. The organizational advantages provided by this system such as scheduling, messaging systems, time tracking, resource planning, and many more allow your team to successfully reach goals at a higher efficiency rate. This simplification service can provide benefits to your company’s productivity rates and here is why. 

Reduce Multiple Platform Use

Managing multiple systems can become very disorganized especially when multiple communication platforms are being utilized. Important information can be missed due to a pileup of messages in different locations. However, with a Centralized IT Management System, notifications are organized in one location for communication with ease. Each team member will be notified of date tasks and news to achieve synchrony within the project at hand.  This means all correspondence such as uploaded documents and task updates sent between team members will remain within the system. This makes referencing and locating previous work simple. This will enable you to provide a greater line of communication between you and your team. 

Effective Scheduling

As you may already know, managing your employee’s schedules can be a difficult task. Scheduling becomes daunting when you are faced with an unexpected disruption that you as the manager must mediate immediately. Without a Centralized IT Management System, this type of disruption can draw too much of your valuable time away from other important work responsibilities. However, you can swiftly take charge by determining who you can delegate to unexpected support issues and communicating these changes in a timely manner with employees via a single platform. This system allows for more complex scheduling where co-workers can view each other’s schedules to see who they are working with in advance. In turn, this allows the employees to plan their day-to-day work with team members independently, therefore simplifying scheduling.. 

Productivity Improvement

Locating documents, reports, and emails can become an extremely tedious task when using a non-centralized IT management system. The amount of time spent looking for a document could be used much more efficiently. Using productivity software you can combat this issue. Your important documents are stored systematically in folders which all team members have access to through a simple spotlight search. This rules out the headache that comes along with relentlessly searching for unorganized documents. Employees can dedicate more of their time to the task at hand, increasing overall productivity. 

Maintain ebb and flow 

Using a Centralized IT management system is extremely crucial to maintaining efficiency within your team. When such a system is not being used, small miscommunications and disagreements can continue to compile and lead to greater conflict further down the line. The use of a productivity system enables all employees to communicate with higher-ranking individuals to be heard and feel that their ideas are valuable. This leads to greater harmonization among all employees increasing the productivity, efficiency, and success of your company.

What goes into being an IT Manager?

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IT Manager at desk
IT Manager in a web conference call

What it takes to be an IT Manager

Every day, an information technology manager (IT manager) is responsible for so many functions of a business. The importance of what goes into being an 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 business’s management systems are always needed so the business can stay updated with constant changes in 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 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 with 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 its 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 regard 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 have adopted an already established computerized system for resource management or use additional software for service support and 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.

Innovate IT and Foster Company-Wide Innovation

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One of IT’s key functions is to provide quality customer service to end users. Specifically, the department is responsible for deploying new technologies that can help employees do their jobs better.

  • Pro-actively managing hardware, software and data.
  • Decreasing downtime of end-user machines by providing break-fix and troubleshooting services.

Consumerization of IT and a Shift in Priorities

However, as the consumerization of IT continues, companies will provide employees with more flexibility regarding device usage — including adoption of the growing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend. With this fundamental shift in enterprise technology, IT’s role will likely transform from one focused on deliverables, to one that is focused on consultation and support. [Read more…] about Innovate IT and Foster Company-Wide Innovation

5 Tips to Improve Knowledge Sharing Across Your IT Department

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Often, there is a lack of insight into what goes on within an IT department. As a manager, it can be difficult to know the statuses and updates of all the delegated projects going on at a given time. Or, if you’re an employee, you may spend hours resolving a ticket only to learn that a colleague solved a similar issue last week, last month or even last year.

By helping employees share their knowledge across the department, and creating direct communication channels, you can start to bring method to the madness. The following are a few examples of how to achieve this, all of which can be easily be implemented with IT work management software that integrates IT help desk, project management, and timesheets.

  1. Organize all processing data and notes on past projects that could be useful in solving common issues. This will bring efficiency to your IT department by helping your team avoid repeated troubleshooting of previously done work or research.
  2. Encourage employees to share information with their colleagues, without adding extra steps. CC or BCC each other on ticket-update emails, and save them for later reference when similar issues arise. Alternatively, an email feature in most ticket and project-management programs allows individuals to send messages to multiple parties, and the data is saved within the software for future reference.
  3. Review project statuses and communications on a regular basis, and use this information to update your team and share best practices routinely. You can likely piece together a method for this using email, ticket-management, and other systems; however, a more scalable solution can probably be found in work management software, which provides dashboard views and reporting capabilities.
  4. Have team leaders and project managers gather information regarding the amount of time each person has put into active projects, their expected availability and what pillar of work they should focus on. This will keep the order of what’s assigned to employees, whether projects are on track to meet deadlines, and who can step in to help on under-staffed or slow-moving projects.
  5. Gather relevant information in one central location to create a reference library. This will help everyone in the department advance in their capabilities due to the ambient knowledge shared by the team. Also, this repository of information and standard troubleshooting processes will help with new employee training.

Designating a common place for your department to centralize information will undoubtedly generate an overall sense of clarity and cohesiveness to your workplace. And, feeling connected to peers through communication is an essential tool for your department’s collective success.

What struggles have you experienced due to the lack of information sharing or poor communication? How did you resolve the issue?