Entry Software Corporation

Entry

Project Management

Knowing the Role of Business: Chief Information Officer (CIO)

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A Chief Information Officer (CIO) by definition is an executive job title commonly given to the person at an enterprise in charge of information technology (IT) strategy and the computer systems required to support an enterprise’s objectives and goals. With the evolution of technology, this role has become more and more important in business, making the CIO’s job ever more crucial. CIO’s are usually very high up in a business due to their high stake responsibilities for the company. It’s hard, specifically, to outline the responsibilities of a CIO due to the constant change in technology. As well, a CIO’s responsibilities can range from company to company.

The CIO of a company is very important as they are responsible for: strategic planning of the business growth objectives, creating a business value through technology, and ensure the tech systems and procedures lead to success for the business, as well as other management responsibilities such as Supplier Management and Information Risk Management (IRM). The CIO contributes greatly towards the organization of analytics and storage of electric information for of a business. To fulfill the responsibilities of a CIO, a team is constructed to complete tasks that are well thought out.

The CIO works hand-in-hand with the businesses IT department and in some cases the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of their company. Depending on the size and or success of the business, CIO’s can also be an executive. Although, these responsibilities are a base since in many cases their responsibilities vary depending on the company.

Now, how can you become one? There are many requirements for becoming a CIO of a company. It is required to have at least a bachelor degree in business administration and is strongly recommended to have a bachelor degree in computer science or a related area. Next, you will need experience with project management. This can be done through internships, previous jobs, and online or in-class courses. Building your technical credibility is very important as it will help strengthen your portfolio in our technological business world. Choosing the right area to specialize in and certificates that are offered will help with your technical credibility. After you earn your bachelor you need to go out and gain real experience in the IT department and risk management. This is crucial since CIO’s need to know these areas well; in order to succeed for the company. Lastly, receiving a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) will connect the world of technology and business together which is what a strong CIO needs. Working on leadership skills is also crucial as CIO’s lead and manage an organized team through many different jobs every day. However, this job does take time and a lot of effort to fulfill, needing a lot of experience and promotions to reach a C- level in a business.

CIO’s are very crucial for companies nowadays as the world becomes more dependent on technology. This career carries many responsibilities that require technology and business education, alongside great leadership and communication skills. All in all, with the vast increase in our world today through technology the demand for this job will increase as well, which may be a good job to consider for the future.

Importance of Properly Setting Project Milestones

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Every project manager knows the importance with 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 visual progression of the project. The thought behind making milestones is to categorize the parts of a project into digestible sections 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 motivation tool to keep the team moving along the ladder to reach the surface of success. Don’t fall into the trap of labeling 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 deliverable’s 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 other 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.

How Smart Project Management Software Saves You Money!

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It may seem that no matter how focused you are on work, there are always times in which you hit a roadblock and lose concentration. This is natural; we are only human. Issues begin to form when you return to work, and you are unsure of how to continue from that point. Whether you cannot find where you left off or cannot remain in the same format as your previous work, issues often stem from being disorganized. It may take some time to regain your momentum of work. Office workers waste an average of 40% of their workday (Wall Street Journal Report). Not because they aren’t smart, but because they were never taught organizing skills to cope with the increasing workloads and demands. Smart project management software saves you money.

From a business perspective, this process wastes time and resources as your maximum work efficiency is being hindered by disorganization. This issue often stems from the systems the business has in place to organize the workload between its project resources and conveying the task needed to be done effectively and efficiently. The typical executive today wastes 150 hours a year, almost one month, searching for lost information. For someone earning $50,000 a year, that translates to a loss of $3,842 (Forbes ASAP). The most straightforward solution to this problem is using smart project management software.

Project management software provides various organization and communication services between employees and their managers that will eventually save the business money. Using the correct organizational tools can improve time management by 38% (Mobile Technology Product). One of the main areas of communication and organizational assistance is in project management. With the software, you can create individual projects that only those involved can access that displays the workloads of each. This is beneficial for the managers running these projects as they can easily see what project team members have completed and have left to do for the project. Through this system, you can visually compute the productivity and quality of each team member and can designate specific work to those more suited to complete it. This will better balance time and resource management.

How Employees or End-Users Can Benefit

For employees, project management software provides a dashboard of all of the projects they are assigned to. This way they can designate their time to assignments that may be more significant or time-based. Through the organized layout of all the work that needs to be completed, project resources will be more inclined to complete one task at a time opposed to multitasking as projects are presented. People who multi-task decrease their productivity by 20-40% are less efficient than those who focus on one project at a time. Time lost switching among tasks increases the complexity of the functions (University of Michigan Study).

Project management software is incredibly beneficial for communication and organization to all levels of business. For managers, they can layout projects and work for project team members in a way that designates appropriate workloads. Project Managers know the workload of team members so they do not become stressed and can better assign the project tasks is a more controlled manner. As for team members, they will be better at designating their workflow in an organized fashion to keep it on track. Overall, this will increase the worth of the business resources as it is going towards productivity as opposed to wasted on confusion.

Information Sources From http://www.simplyproductive.com/2012/03/time-management-statistics/

What to Look for in Project Management Software

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Managing an organized work schedule and workload can be difficult. Managing many people’s workloads and schedules can be even more difficult. Having organized project management software in place to organize the resources, events, and schedules will make the job of the project managers a whole lot easier.

Project management software can provide services that will help businesses organize teams and projects in an organized fashion. Not all software offers the same services. Here are the necessities of a good project management software system:

Resource Visibility

When deciding on a project management software, always keep in mind whether it will have complete resource visibility. When acting as the project manager of an operation, understanding the assets you have and how you are going to use them is important to keep organized and on budget. Project management software should visually inform the project managers and users of the resources currently available and what the used resources have pertained to. Additionally, it should contain all team members’ resources displayed for clarity among the team so resource utilization is maximized.

Simple Work and Event Scheduling

A good project management software system should integrate all of the user’s work and events into their system. Calendars such as Google Calendar or Outlook can be integrated so you receive email or notification reminders about upcoming events. You can also create plans or events so it will notify you in advance.

Team Member Work Loads and Scheduling

Project management software should allow for team members to be organized and managed in projects. Aspects such as their workloads and schedules can be organized and altered at any time by the manager. It should also relay clarity to the team members by including information about their assignments. Each team member works with their schedule and the system works with their availability. Finally, timesheets are included so the managers know the effort consumed to complete work. Overall, the project management software should organize the ideas and jobs of the project managers and provide a clear schedule and fair workload for employees.

Quality Project Help Desk

A very important aspect of a quality project management software is to improve customer service through the use of an integrated project help desk. A help desk is an online system where customers can comment, advise or inquire about difficult or confusing aspects of their project deliverables or experience. The customer sends a ticket to the project support team who then answers the request, which is then sent back to them. The software will set up the system and provide the support team with an organized system to address each problem. The system should allow the support tickets to be affiliated with a project since issues will arise as the project is in the development or deployment phase.

Organized Project Management Support

Overall, good project management software should provide support to the project manager through organized UI, automated reminders, visual resource management, team member overview and scheduled events. All of these aspects should be presented to the user in an organized and easy to use way. When all of these aspects are together they form a proficiently functioning project management software system.

Value in Integrating Change Management and Project Management

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Manage changes to projects or initiatives within an organization on both a technical and human level.

Project management is the process of supervising a project team through a series of tasks that ultimately reach completion of a defined goal with a specified target date for completion. On the other hand, change management is intended to support an organization’s adjustment to the changes due to either internal processes or external factors.

Often change management involves continuous efforts with no explicitly defined deliverables. This lack of clarity when companies are evolving to meet fluctuating market conditions and emerging technologies.

Perhaps the clearest distinction between project management and change management is the level of structure that is characteristic to each. At the enterprise level, project management involves defined phases, methodologies, and techniques.

Change management may share all those points; however, unlike project management, it is extremely unpredictable. While project managers can plan their whole project in detail before any actual work occurs, change managers must be prepared for unexpected developments and need to shift their approach and change their strategy as needed.

The integration of change management and project management creates value for a given project for many reasons

Singular but Shared Objective

With the integration of project management and change management, efforts can be focused towards a shared objective. This leads to a significant improvement in the performance of the organization through successful implementation of a change that will deliver the desired results.

Alignment and Buy-In

Through the integration of technical and people activities, there is a higher chance of employees embracing the change, ensuring majority buy-in, and resulting in the right outcomes for the project.

Flow of Information

The smooth flow of information ensures that affected employees are receiving the relevant information. Furthermore, it helps guarantee that the project team gains valuable feedback on adoption and response to the change on the back end.

Project Management and Change Management Training

The two roles tend to demand distinguishing methods of training and different areas of expertise, given the contrast in how project managers and change managers are expected to execute their work.

Project managers typically begin their careers developing expertise in a field. With gained knowledge and experience, they eventually start leading projects. Today, more and more project managers are earning professional certifications like PMP to sharpen their skills and increase their industry value.

It is common for change management experts to come from communications or management consulting backgrounds. They have acquired knowledge on how high functioning organizations make decisions and how the change management process inevitably affects employees, customers, and vendors.

But unlike project management, there is no widely-recognized change management certification for change management experts. They can, however, establish their level of expertise by gaining PMP and other recognized project management credentials.

To better appreciate the value of project management and change management, sign up for a free demo of TeamHeadquarters, the solution that gives you total control of project ticket queues, integrated email agents, sophisticated and comprehensive resource management, task scheduling, project groups, portfolio dashboards, integrated status reporting, integrated and customizable reporting, the inclusion of customers on project tasks and tickets and a Customer Self-Service Portal.

5 Key Steps to Successful Project Management

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Managing your first project can be daunting. To simplify things, here are five steps critical to the successful management of a project:

Step 1: Initiate the Project by Defining the Scope

This phase typically begins with a business case where you will examine whether the project is feasible and important stakeholders will do their due diligence to help decide to approve the project or not.

Build the project infrastructure based on the problem that needs solving. Put in writing what the expected changes are. What is the end goal? Define the criteria for how the project success will be defined. Determine if there are potential limitations like funding, resources, and time.

Step 2: Create the Project Plan

The project plan is the core of your project and needs to involve all of the stakeholders and gain their buy-in. The project plan should provide direction over the project’s lifespan. Review the plan with status updates.

The project plan should contain performance measures and any process changes that need to take place and who and what will these changes impact. Define how to address risks should they arise. Determine how your resources will be acquired and maintained and how to reward you team members for achieving milestones. Describe the training required for everyone involved in the project. State your expectations.

Step 3: Initiate the Project Plan

It is the project manager’s job to initiate the project plan and identify adjustments as demanded. When you launch the project, confirm the people who will complete the tasks in the project plan and ensure that everyone understands their role and is aware of the process for communication. Inform team members about beginning and end dates and how they will be affected, and keep them updated on the progress.

Manage the project team by providing sufficient training, monitoring resources, and resolving issues.
Use project management software to create, execute and control projects and facilitate communications.

Project management software like TeamHeadquarters gives project managers a full picture of resource availability across all work (not just projects) and trends before they assign them to tasks.

Step 4: Evaluate and Document Progress

Your time will be spent monitoring and communicating to allow you to assess and document the project’s progress and limitations effectively. When you prepare the documents and reports, ensure they are accurate. Catalog problems as they happen, and make certain the key stakeholders are informed about these issues.

If a problem arises, consider the alternatives and the potential effects. Present the situation and the proposed solutions to your stakeholders. Document any new information you’ve learned to your and re-evaluate periodically.

Step 5: Reach Your Goal, Deliver and Close the Project

The final step in project management involves the evaluation of the project’s achievements and failures which are crucial for the success of future of projects. Deliver the results to the stakeholders and prepare a project closure report with input from the entire team involved in the project.

Include and observations on how to improve on future projects through lessons learned. Distribute the valuable knowledge gained by the experience so that you can apply the positive actions to future projects while avoiding the negative incidents. When a project is correctly concluded, team members are motivated and feel empowered to tackle future projects.

Project management, even for first-time project managers, can be challenging. That’s why project management software, TeamHeadquarters, was designed to help you build projects quickly, make status reports, and produce and disseminate project updates easier.

Click here for your free demo of TeamHeadquarters.