Featured article by Emily Roberts, Independent Technology Author
IT companies have to be able to make their clients solid promises in order to gain their trust and win their business. In a market where reliability is as critical as quality results, you have to demand excellence from your staff at all times, while also providing them with the means for staying on track. Meetings, coaching sessions, and evaluations will help all parties involved to achieve greatness.
Additionally, using methods such as the Kanban process works to create a visually based workflow method that brings all key players on major projects together. Get your employees to become more productive by working in a collaborative environment where you can constantly stay informed of their progress.
Getting Your First IT Projects in Motion
It’s one thing to write a winning proposal that gets your clients excited about working together. When it is time to produce the results, looming deadlines, unexpected hurdles, and breakdowns in communication can make even the most confident IT managers uncomfortable and stressed. Learn to get new IT projects jump-started quickly and efficiently with tools like Kanban. In a few minutes, you can lay out the details and requirements clearly, invite all participants, and watch as your newest project begins to take shape. If changes need to be made part way through, you don’t have to send out mass emails or contact employees individually.
What is Kanban? The Kanban method of lean project management uses a virtual whiteboard to concisely lay out the details, even new ones.
Sourcing Key Talent
When multiple employees work together on critical projects, information technology managers might not be able to immediately identify their most talented workers. After all, several employees share both responsibilities and rewards when they successfully complete a project on time. Do you know who the strongest coders are at your company? What about the employees who excel at troubleshooting and testing software for bugs? Utilizing interactive tools like Kanban that require workers to check in and provide progress reports allows for maximum oversight.
Keeping Track of Project Status
If you have overseen large-scale IT projects in the past, you know that staying up to date on project details can take a concerted effort. Some employees just aren’t the best at returning emails or phone calls with haste. When companies use whiteboards and interactive tools to share progress reports on projects, no guesswork needs to be performed. If a milestone hasn’t been met, IT managers are the first ones to know. This can help IT professionals prepare for the future; it can even tell them when they are going to be working late hours. Most of all, tracking a project status in real-time helps companies to keep their promises to customers and always present quality solutions.
Assessing Managerial Involvement
Some IT projects can be finished up in a couple of days with the help of entry-level employees. Then there are the massive projects that call for all hands on deck. In other words, managers must know when their input is required so they know when it’s time for them to step in. If they just take their employee’s word for it, they might take a step back when a more aggressive management style is necessary. There’s no need to wait for staff to voluntarily inform managers of scheduling problems or other snafus. Whiteboard technology provides IT companies with the means to keep tabs on every aspect of projects, both big and small.
Meeting Deadlines and Goals
Pacing can be difficult to maintain when an IT company takes on a varied range of projects. If your business is going into new territories, it can be difficult to determine exactly how many employees need to be tapped. You can peek in and see how much progress is being made toward deadlines and milestones by implementing whiteboard technology. In addition, this tool can help you to gain the trust of your clients. Create credentials for your customers to log in and take a look at what your company is doing behind the scenes, or even enable them to look at how past projects have been tackled and properly executed. Simply put, digital whiteboards allow company owners to keep track of every project close up, from afar, and even remotely.
The most important thing to remember about the information technology sector is that there are new companies providing solutions to clients at all price points. Rather than compete by lowering your prices, you should highlight all of your strongest selling points. Perhaps you have an award-winning team of staff or maybe you promise to deliver all projects on time. Quality is always the most critical selling point when it comes to IT companies in the industry for the long haul. Don’t undersell your value or feel that you can’t grow because of time constraints. Instead, use digital whiteboard technology to set and achieve any goal imaginable.
