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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. 

Biggest Workplace Pet Peeves

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Workplaces, for most, can be a place where a vast majority of your time is spent. However, it can be very easy for workers to become annoyed with co-workers in the workplace, regarding their actions. People want to keep their workplace as an enjoyable/tolerable environment since they spend a significant amount of time there. Time management and organization are common areas employees lack. This can lead to late assignments, messy work areas and lost files down the road, which is not the “ideal” employee managers and owners want. Pet peeves are always rising issues within the workplace, although with simple solutions it can be fixed

Procrastinating is a rising cause of poor time management these days, from the rise in technology and social media. Time management is an area many people struggle with, especially in the workplace. For instance, imagine you are working on a project that has a short timeline with a co-worker, and as the due date approaches you realize that your partner has little to nothing done. This can become quite frustrating in workplaces, as it not only hurts the worker that can’t manage their time but also has a negative effect on co-workers and the company.

Lack of organization is yet another pet peeve that highly occurs in the workplace. Why? Organization and time management go hand-to-hand with each other if someone is unable to manage their time it can lead to poor organization. This adds a negative, unwanted weight to the company that isn’t helping them. From a manager’s perspective, they are responsible for making sure their employees are productive with completing the required work. If employees are not being efficient with their time, it can become very annoying for the manager. Failing to manage time can raise many problems down the road, creating unhappy managers, owners and customers. Easily enough there are many tactics for both employees and managers to help ease their “annoying” traits in their workplace.

Create a List

Keeping track of what you have to do for either a day or month can help remind you about important deadlines or tasks that are coming up. Seeing visually all the tasks that need to be done can help you organize the importance of each task; helping you accomplish each in time. Now, having forty tasks jotted down on a piece of paper is too overwhelming and can cause you to fully ignore the list entirely. The key to a list is keeping it very simple so that you can instantly see what needs to be done.

Set Reminders

Nowadays technology has become very popular, and with this, we are able to do many things on just one device. Setting reminders on your phone, about important projects or jobs that need to be completed for work, is a great way to keep yourself on track with meeting deadlines; keeping your manager happy.

Set Deadlines/Goals

Set a deadline for a project or task you have been assigned to, and try to stick with it. To help you from being late on projects, set your deadlines a couple of days before it is actually due, so that if any unexpected circumstance arises you have extra time to ensure it will be completed on time.

Project Management Systems (PMS)

As an owner or manager, you may find it very beneficial to invest in a good project management solution, to help boost your time management. These solutions are usually always, easy to use and extremely useful when it comes to keeping businesses on track. PMS’s organize and display tasks and assignments that need to be done and what employees are working on what. With this, managers can assign employees different tasks and delegate tasks efficiently. PMS’s can also help identify the areas employees or the company is lacking, which allows managers to add extra time or help to make sure the work is getting completed on time. PMS’s come with many strong benefits that can assist managers with their time management in a much easier and more organized way. This saves crucial time, that can be used in other areas maximizing the work efficiency, leading to an increase in success for a business.

All in all, there are many pet peeves like time management and organization that occur within a workplace irritating co-workers, making their work environment unenjoyable. In addition, having poor time skills can lead to problems that may hurt the company down the road, with unhappy customers, partners or clients. It also does nothing towards your reputation but bring it down. However, not to worry, because there are many easy solutions previously mentioned, that can help you stay on top of your assignments at work!

Four Key Ways to Reduce Customer Efforts

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In the world of business, the customer is king. Although the business determines the product or service, customers are those that go out of their way to purchase. In our modern age, customers have a wide variety of options to shop from and thus businesses have to appeal to each customer specifically. This is known as keeping customer satisfaction high. With a high customer satisfaction, customers will be more inclined to spread the word about the quality of your business and your offerings. One avenue of increasing customer satisfaction is to have an efficient and convenient system of purchasing so customers put little to no effort in checking out. In general, people will be more likely to go with the more convenient option than to go out of their way to do business with you. To achieve this, there is a few simple systems a business can put in place to reduce customer efforts and increase overall customer satisfaction.

Provide an Online Self-Serve Service

It’s no secret that the internet is one of the greatest inventions of our time. It connects people from across the world, allowing them to interact and communicate with one another anytime, anywhere. Almost every home across the world has access to technology that can access the internet. This has lead to numerous opportunities for businesses everywhere to expand outside their region. Customers can access your product or services from the comfort of their own home. Although it may be simple, it is very important; move to an online space. Setting up and maintaining a website is both cost-efficient and cost-effective, not to mention it will boost your clientele to a national if not global state. This reduces the customer’s effort, they no longer have to go out to scout your business to doing so anytime, anywhere.

Guide Customers Through Simple Interactions

When a customer wants to purchase a product, they want a simple and quick method of doing so. Leaving customers impatient or confused will lower satisfaction and raise effort needed in a given transaction, which is not good for business. Input a system of simple and quick interactions between the customer and the business to keep customers happy! This can be done by clearly categorizing and price labelling which can be more effectively done on a website or landing page. The business can use SEO (search engine optimization) and other simple UI (user interface) so the customer can visually see what they are purchasing and for how much. When a customer can search for and claim their desire quickly with little effort, they are very satisfied.

Supply Customers with Avenues for Feedback

Your product, service or method of purchasing is never perfect and will always need to be refined with the changing times. Sometimes customers may encounter an issue with an aspect of your business. Encountering any issue will lower that customers satisfaction with the business, however, it is how the business deals with the issue that can benefit the customer and the business. This is done by having an accessible avenue for a customer to offer their feedback on their experience. If they have an issue, it is likely that other customers may have had similar issues. The business may not know about problems in their system but by having an effective feedback system, it can benefit the business while also have the customer be heard. These avenues can be verbal via the phone for example, or online in the form of an email, chat message or text request.. A help desk is a software that allocates an aspect of the website to receiving and organizing customers questions or concerns about the business’ designated customer service team. Having an accessible way of doing so reduces the customer’s effort when addressing issues.

Proactively Using Feedback Gathered to Form Appropriate Solutions

Once you have received feedback that has hindered a customers experience, the business must look at ways of forming a solution to the issue does not happen again. This could be altering aspects of your UI or SEO or be related to assigning more appropriate names for products. Whereas supplying customers with avenues for feedback allows customers to speak up, actively using said feedback gathered to form appropriate solutions makes the customers feel heard. This makes customers feel appreciated. In turn, the alterations to the systems will lower the customer effort as they will not encounter the same issues.

In the modern business world, customers are an important part of the business formula. Their experience with the product or service can influence increased sales. Having customers put little to no effort in their purchase raises satisfaction with the business. This is why it is important to have proactive ways of keeping their experience simple.

5 Principles of Schedule Management

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What is schedule management?

In project management, the schedule refers to the intended start and finish dates of a project’s milestones and activities. Completing deliverables on time equates to good project management. Your schedule serves as your timetable for a project that will show you how you are progressing while taking into account factors like limited resources and potential setbacks.

However, despite a clear schedule, there is always the potential for uncertainties. Therefore, smart project management should follow some simple rules:

1.    Don’t Promise What You Can’t Deliver

Scheduling will demand that you set a date of completion based on predictions and expectations. Before you commit to a schedule, you should have had ample time to evaluate all the factors. The last thing you want to do is make a promise to a client that you cannot keep for the sake of giving them an answer on the spot.

2.    The Client Should Be the First to Know If the Schedule Goes Sideways

Admitting to the customer that something’s gone wrong and that you’ve now been thrown off schedule is hard to do;  however, do it you must. You might be tempted to keep quiet about it and just wait until the client asks about your progress and deal with it then. You’ll find that this is a sure-fire way for the customer to lose trust in you.

3.    Avoid Scope Creep

Change is inevitable, and that’s why curbing scope creep becomes so challenging. Too often, IT project managers find themselves failing to put their foot down and be tough when receiving requests for additional functionalities. And when team members who are eager to please and impress start to make unauthorized decisions to add more value to the product, the scope creeps.

Ensure your scope change process is rock solid and that it also includes the impact on the project schedule. Follow the original specification document and don’t allow unmanaged contact between your team and the client.

4.    Spread Contingency Throughout Your Project Timeline

Even the most carefully laid out plans have no escape from random occurrences. Equipment breaks and people call in sick. Anything that could go wrong inevitably goes wrong. This is why you should always have a pool of contingency throughout the lifespan of your project. In other words, plan for the unplanned.

5.    Pick the Right Level of Detail

Define the amount of control you want. If your involvement in every aspect of the project is not necessary, don’t push for multiple meetings within the day that will collectively slow things down.

When mapping out your schedule, identify to what degree your team will need to update each other to ensure that everyone involved has the same understanding of what needs to be achieved and by when. You’ll find that there’s a significant difference in productivity between day-to-day scheduling versus week to week. It all boils down to the type of project and level of control and attention it demands.

Project management solution, TeamHeadquarters, knows all about the many uncertainties that take a project off-schedule. That’s why it aims to keep you in control and focused, maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of your time, as it also eliminates all drudgery from project management.

For a free demo of TeamHeadquarters, click here.

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