No IT team can afford to rest on its success. Year after year, as projects grow in complexity and budgets become more restrictive, even high-performing IT teams may find themselves under pressure to do more with less. If you are wondering how to increase the productivity of your IT team, these five tips can help you meet the demands of today and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow.
#1: Provide the Right Tools
Outdated or inadequate project management tools will throw a wrench into the workings of even the most successful IT team. In order to manage multiple work streams and project assignments at the same time, teams need a solution that provides an organization-wide view of resource availability and project status, while integrating with existing processes and infrastructure.
Planview AdaptiveWork is an innovative cloud-based enterprise project management solution that delivers a suite of tools tailored for modern IT teams. With easy-to-use features for ticketing, change requests, case management and other essential functions, Planview AdaptiveWork provides a cost-effective and highly configurable way to increase productivity in the workplace.
#2: Set Appropriate Goals
Goal setting is one of the most delicate parts of an IT manager’s job—setting the bar too low will leave resources on the table and leave team members feeling bored, while setting unrealistically high goals will foster feelings of resentment and helplessness. Finding the ideal middle ground requires an understanding of executive expectations, team member abilities and technological capabilities.
#3: Encourage Collaboration
Countless hours are wasted every year on non-productive activities like searching for misplaced documents and reading through unnecessary emails. Online collaboration tools can eliminate these productivity-killers by allowing IT team members to find critical information quickly and easily. Planview AdaptiveWork’s industry-leading collaboration tools let teams create conversations that capture important details from emails, documents, instant messages and other channels, all in an easy-to-access central location.
#4: Provide Meaningful Feedback
Every employee, contractor or partner needs to know how they are doing on the job. When there’s so much work to be done, it’s easy to postpone (or simply forget about) providing regular feedback to team members, but IT project managers should make it a priority. Timely, detailed feedback is a great tool for improving productivity—it helps high performers stay motivated, and gives lower performers a chance to improve before they create problems for themselves and others. While most team members will enjoy getting positive feedback in a public forum, it’s always best to handle negative feedback in private.
#5: Be Flexible
An approach that works well for one project may be disastrous when applied to another. To ensure that each project has the maximum chance of success, enterprise IT teams should be flexible enough to work in a variety of project management methodologies. Planview AdaptiveWork’s project management solution for IT supports agile, waterfall and other project approaches. Better still, Planview AdaptiveWork allows each team to work in its preferred methodology while retaining the ability to collaborate with other teams that may be using different methods.
