Time is money: How to streamline your job and boost productivity

IT leaders have their hands full, trying to improve collaboration and transform their respective companies. A good place to start would be eliminating time-wasting practices and streamlining project management. You need to figure out what works best for your firm when minimizing bad habits, removing time-wasting approaches, and locating efficiencies. But this can be a time-consuming process and it helps if you have some idea where to begin. Thankfully, we’ve compiled a list of actions that eradicate the barriers to your success, increase your productivity, and reward your company without delay.

Tame the cloud

You cannot deny the benefit of the cloud as far as collaboration and productivity is concerned. Owing to the technology, your collaborators have an easier time tracking progress and implementing rapid changes. However, cloud solutions are likely to breed new issues and waste your precious time if they are incompatible with one another. Keep in mind that there are numerous point solutions, and your company should exchange valuable information among different cloud solutions. If that’s not all, care should also be taken in regards to shadow IT. Always check whether the services you turn on are safe and provide the necessary functionality.

Simplify email usage

email usage

Contrary to popular belief, email wastes a lot more time than it conserves. That can come as a shock to IT leaders who prefer email over other types of messaging. But the bitter truth is, your inbox drains your attention and time.

How? Well, for starters, you spend a lot of time going through irrelevant emails just to find that one important message you might have missed among them and which requires your immediate attention.

Bad email practices not only eat up a lot of your time but that of your colleagues and employees as well. AI advancements, however, seek to mitigate the problem to an extent. Make it easier for new people to understand the suitable course of action in an email chain by summarizing the action point or information.

Cut down on tech development cycles

Curtail processes where one team must transfer their tasks to a different group. Remember, the age-old waterfall practices of software development is considered outdated. So, your IT teams must ensure their processes have the lowest development cycle possible.

Given the rapid rate of technological changes, teams must stay alert and agile, and adapt to the new way of things. This is easier said than done, however, as such large-scale organization change requires sustained time, effort and support from the leadership of the company. So, get rid of waterfall planning tools and mindset, and speed up things in your company.

Expand the network

Always try to increase the size of your professional network and add this network to the decision-making process. Start by leveraging the experience of your industry colleagues. This will enable you to ponder over questions and ideas, and come up with new approaches.

Many companies are prone to believing that a particular problem is limited to their organization. But the truth is, others are dealing with similar problems and discussing the same with each other may help you both resolve the issues.

Get rid of extraneous pilot projects

pilot projects

Save a lot of time by removing technology projects from your to-do list that don’t solve any business issues. Sure, companies will always welcome proof concepts for artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud, and other technologies. But the harsh truth is, these companies must devote some time to understanding the technologies and applying them to the business requirement. Technologies are evolving at a rapid pace right now, and these projects incur high expenses but do not offer much value in return.

Steer clear of redundancies

Nothing kills productivity like doing the same things over and over. Always search for one delivery path so that duplicate processes don’t affect your customers or company. Your IT team must clearly define the intake processes so that strategic objectives and fresh ideas can enter the picture. After establishing the objectives, clearly mention your priorities and create well-defined IT projects that enable technical teams to figure out what must be done. This enables them to focus more on fulfilling and delivering milestones while adhering to a rigid scope, budget, and schedule. When your technical teams master the art of avoiding any rework, they will automatically save time.

Solve problems with your team

removing time-wasting approaches

Always be honest and upfront with your workgroup. Learn to communicate clearly so that strong project queues are formed and you can maintain dashboards to track the progress of the projects. At the end of the day, it has more to do with work habits than technology. Why? Because most IT pros are strong problem-solvers.

So, instead of reducing the time consumed, they will be more adept at exposing the flaws and discussing the course of action with their respective teams. More often than not, technical teams choose their own technologies and tools for resolving the time issue.

Master the perfect productivity software

Take your pick of different tools that are designed exclusively for collaboration. For example, you can choose Trello if you’re facing trouble with visibility and prioritization. The tool works great to highlight the priorities of your projects at all times.

Slack, on the other hand, is useful for asynchronous collaboration on major IT projects. This system facilitates a more agile approach to work, meaning you’re able to switch to a project without wasting any time and view the related documents and dialog.

Remove whatever doesn’t work

Many IT professionals are prone to repeating the same traditional actions and sticking to the same outdated practices. And can you blame them? They’ve been hardwired to do that from the start.

New technologies must give way to new efficiencies, which challenge the old rigid ways of thinking. For example, the accepted practices for patching a legacy app can actually be quite dangerous when applied to server-less or containerized applications.

All organizations want more productivity from team members

IT leaders are often stretched thin, trying to juggle multiple roles at the same time. This leaves them with very little time to focus on other aspects of the business. However, the tips mentioned above can help you save some time while boosting productivity.

Time is money!

Featured image: Pixabay

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