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Boost Your Tech Project Team Performance

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Your technology projects succeed when your project team performs well as a team and individually. When team members communicate clearly, stay accountable, and focus on what matters, your projects run smoother and achieve better results.

Here’s how to make team participation work.

Define Your Project Team

Remember that your project team is more than your IT staff and vendors.  You project team should include stakeholders – executive sponsors, subject matter experts, and key users/user groups. Your extended project team helps you define success metrics, prioritize requirements, manage and communicate change, and provides testing and feedback.

With a well-defined team, you can manage your project to the metrics that matter. You also have more control of project scope and direction.

Set Clear Roles and Commitments for Team Members

Teamwork starts with clarity. Define roles, responsibilities, expectations, and deadlines from the start. Verify that everyone knows their responsibilities, and accountability and motivation will naturally follow. (This 3T@3 Series recording discussing managing project input and feedback)

Clear commitments reduce confusion and align your team.

Prioritize Tasks

After setting commitments, establish priorities. Technology projects have many moving parts. To manage these effectively, teams should collaborate to identify and rank priorities based on urgency, impact, and dependencies.

By focusing on high-priority work, you ensure that your team completes critical tasks first and that you allocate resources efficiently. Clear priorities also help your team maintain a steady workflow and remain aligned.

Follow Up Consistently

Even the most organized teams need structured follow-ups to maintain momentum. Regular, structured check-ins help you and your team track progress, address roadblocks early, and reinforce accountability. Use follow-up and status meetings to catch missed deadlines and project issues before they get out of hand. You gain flexibility to adjust timelines and resources slightly without compromising the overall project schedule.

Consistent follow-ups help you address issues early, keep your team on track, and reinforce a shared sense of responsibility and accountability.

Handle Disruptions Constructively

Working in a team isn’t always easy. Sometimes team members may be disruptive, overlook mistakes, or push back against collaboration. The key is to address these issues early and respectfully. Take the time to listen, acknowledge what’s going on, and respond promptly. Be transparent when addressing concerns and remember that it’s perfectly fine for your answer to be “no.” When you explain the reasons behind your decisions or changes in direction, it helps everyone stay on the same page. Even if not everyone agrees, they will understand where you’re coming from.

By constructively managing conflicts, you and your team maintain a positive environment that encourages productive contributions from everyone.

How We Help

We provide the structure, communication, and support your team needs to succeed. From defining roles and prioritizing tasks to managing follow-ups and challenges, our professional services help keep your IT systems in sync with your business priorities so projects move forward efficiently.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America.

5 Tools for Remote Team Success

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One of the challenges we face with nearly everybody working remotely or from home, is how to manage teams.  In particular, customer-facing teams and teams whose members normally work together in person require more adaptation.  here are

Managed Live Chat for Web Sites

If done well, Live Chat on your web site improves your ability to engage and service your current and prospective customers. In addition to providing real-time connections to site visitors, robust live chat systems let you classify operators, message between operators, and hand off responsibility for chats. Leveraging live chat, your customer facing teams — sales and service — can work more effectively and with greater coordination.  Contact us to discuss how we can broker tools like Olark, and get you up, running, and trained quickly.

Managed Shared Inboxes for G Suite

Customer facing teams often share an inbox to managing incoming messages.  When the team is remote, tracking who is responsible for each email thread becomes even more difficult.  Tools like Hiver let you manage, route, and track shared inbox messages across your teams.  Contact us for more info and check out this webcast and demo.

Team Planning Tools

Tracking tasks, projects, and dependencies among teams requires some organization.  In Office 365, the Planner app provides a simple format for tracking team members, assigned tasks, and basic dependencies.  As part of the Office 365 suite, Planner integrates with users’ inboxes and calendars, and with personal and shared storage.  Planner can also be added to Teams channels as a Tab.

In the G Suite environment, we recommend Hive as an affordable, easy to use, planning and task management tool.  It is similar in functionality to Planner and other tools, like Trello, and integrates well with your G Suite identity, Drive, and more.

Contact us for help and guidance getting your project tools in place.

Bookings in MS Office 365

Designed for use by appointment-based businesses, Bookings is an Office 365 app that lets individuals schedule appointments themselves.  Customers can select the time, a particular person, or the first available when scheduling. You control available times, available staff, and appointment defaults. If you are reaching out to your customers, Bookings is way to speed up the appointment setting process.

Intranet Sites

With teams working remotely, access to files on in-house services may be limited, difficult, or slow.  Remote access tools like desktop sharing and VPNs add complexity and increase users’ frustration.  Moving files into Intranet sites can provide fast, secure, reliable access.

    • In G Suite, you can turn Drive folders and hierarchies into Intranets in a matter of minutes with OverDRIVE.  The software lets you create and manage web sites quickly and efficiently, using Drive as the content repository.
    • In Office 365, Sharepoint sites provide an easy mechanism to share files and other content relevant to teams.  You can connect Sharepoint to Teams and Groups, giving users secure access to files and resources vai the methods easiest for them.

As you assess your operations and your needs, we are here to help.  Please contact us for a Cloud Advisor Session.  Our assessment and recommendations are free and without obligation.