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project leadership

Why a Centralized IT Management Platform Improves Team Productivity

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IT team using the same system

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

Are you finding it nearly impossible to get organized and keep track of documents, scheduling 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 from 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 on up to 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 unexpected support issues to 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 where all team members have access 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 productivity, efficiency, and success of your company.

Knowing Your Role in the Business: The Project Manager

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The modern business world is complex and incorporates numerous concepts, giving people roles that they may not understand the extent of their responsibility. The focus of today is the responsibilities and methodology of being an effective project manager.

By definition, a project manager (PM) is the leader and director of a small group of people within a larger company. The project can be anything that pertains to the larger business and their ongoing operations. Being a PM is about balancing the cost, consistency of schedule, and identifying the scope and risks. They are responsible for planning and executing an effective and quality project. Additionally, the PM is responsible for overseeing any issues that may arise internally or externally to the project.

The first duty of a project manager is to formulate a management plan. This includes deciding the roles of the members and their responsibilities, resource implementation estimate, and a general time and workload scope of the project. There are three main concepts that a PM must understand when making a formulating the management plan; cost, scope and time. When the balance between these three forces is found, a quality management plan has been formulated. This is the business concept of the Project Management Triangle; finding a balance in the management plan. The STR model is a mathematical perspective of looking at the project management triangle:

scope = time x cost

The aspect of “cost” is about having the sufficient resources to fully run the project. A resource is defined as any consumable asset the project uses; this includes money, supplies, labour, motivation etc. When developing a management plan, it is important not to strain the use of your resources while still using the given resources efficiently. The aspect of “time” is about understanding the temporal limitations of workloads of the project. Often times, a PM will be given a project and they will have to set deadlines for tasks to coincide with the employees work efficiency. The aspect of “scope” is a combination of the two previous aspects. It is about determining the limitations of the project’s deadline. Having a short deadline for a project will lead to strains on cost and time to extremes as everything needs to be completed swiftly. This leads to a poor quality project. Having a long deadline may seem beneficial, but it is wasting financial resources and time. Finding a balance to have work be completed efficiently will best suit the management plan.

Once the project has commenced, the duty of the PM is to not necessarily work on the project but to monitor employees, enforcing the management plan and problem solve obstruction of workflows. While performing duties as a project manager, it is important to be able to adapt to each situation as there will be several unique problems that may occur. Some of these situations that may occur include additional team building, training, and misestimation of cost, scope or time which often lead to readjusting the management plan.

In conclusion, being an effective project manager is about observing what you have (resource and time) in order to envision something it could be. While you are not acting on it yourself, PMs are to remain present in the process in order to keep the project on track, despite what roadblocks may appear.

Project Management Strategy – Transform Everyone in IT into a Project Manager

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Techniques and insight gained as part of the Project Manager PMP training is invaluable to an IT organization, when all staff is engaged in the project management portfolio, and project management software the effect will be a single, cohesive project centered organization.

Level one support through to CIO’s when educated in project management and certified as Project Management Professionals (PMP) is an effective IT Strategy. Arrange training budgets with local schools, online learning and internal mentoring by certified staff. A strategy that will

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Ways the Project Manager can add Value to Projects

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Add technical oversight and effort where needed

If you’re the project manager and you bring some technical skills to the table, use those when possible to fill in gaps. I was onsite with my team at one major airline customer for a software install and I found myself doing data loads between meetings because our team was small and our time was short. It helped and we were able to meet our deadline for deployment. Project managers can add value to projects. [Read more…] about Ways the Project Manager can add Value to Projects

4 Key Project Leadership Responsibilities – Part 2

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Key project leadership responsibilities.

In Part 1 of this two-part series on what is basically my top four actions to incorporate into your PM behavior and persona in order to keep your team following you and respecting your leadership, I covered these first two items in 4 Key Leadership Project Responsibilities – part 1:

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Leadership Abused – Part 1

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Power. It can be a wonderful thing. It can also be the worst thing possible when it falls into the wrong hands, goes to someone’s head, or is neglected in such a way as to damage the goals, cohesiveness, and progress of the project. Review these situations to help avoid and recognize leadership abuse.

It can be a project manager acting out of control or outside the guidelines of his professional authority.  It can be a project team member leading key tasks who is avoiding the delegated authority thrust upon him.

Whatever the abuse may be, it needs to be recognized quickly, dealt with swiftly and eradicated efficiently so as to best ensure that the forward momentum of the project is not affected too adversely.  But how?  These are dangerous situations with customer’s dollars and satisfaction at stake. If not handled appropriately, the consequences – at least to the project at hand – could be catastrophic.

Three potential leadership-abusing situations to look for:

Avoiding what’s assigned

When team members seem to be abusing any leadership responsibilities thrust upon them for a project, it may become most apparent in what they aren’t doing as opposed to what they are doing.  What I mean by that is they may be disregarding their assigned tasks – which are critical to the completion of the project – for their own tasks and focus on what they believe to be more important. Team members refusing to follow what has been delegated to them for what they believe to be more important can, in fact, be doing great harm to the project engagement. And such rogue behavior can also be detrimental to the overall cohesiveness of the project team – especially if it involves a senior team member with some authority over other members of the team.

Regular practices being avoided

Most organizations have at least some sort of structured methodology in place for how they go about the practice of managing projects day in and day out.  They may not always be the best practices and some employees may have ideas on how to do things better, but until you have taken your suggested process or methodology changes or improvements to senior management for approval, the assumption is always that the normal processes will be followed.  Leadership that abuses this will appear to be “going rogue” and while their ideas may be good, their actions – without formal approval – may actually be divisive and detrimental to the project and to the organization.

Team cohesiveness eroding

When leadership is being abused or seems to be very misguided, the effectiveness of the team will diminish as well.  Team members may seem to be unsure of what they should be working on or they may seem to be aimlessly working on several tasks – far too much multi-tasking – without really accomplishing anything of significance.  This will be most apparent to the project client as project progress will seem to be mysteriously stymied and they may begin to reach out to executive management in the delivery organization to express concerns.

In Part 2 of this two-part series, we’ll discuss ways to respond to or handle each of these situations and some high-level responses to leadership abuse.

For more information visit the Entry Software site and signup for an online 30-minute demo with an Entry Software consultant.