Reducing the Challenges of Workforce Collaboration

How Do You Reduce Headaches Of Managing Projects (While Saving Money On IT)?

It’s a special kind of relentless attack which all business owners and managers face: the persistent, crazy, chaotic assault on your time and attention. No one is immune, and every business deals with it.

Some leaders handle the constant pressure on their attention brilliantly, keeping the team organized and highly productive. But most people struggle with this, They often feel crushed and overwhelmed by all the things they have to keep track of and do. This goes double if your business is in growth mode and not “standing still” or casually strolling through its existence. 

Add to this a remote workforce, and it can be intensely difficult to wrap your head around all the projects, to-dos, deadlines and client deliverables you and your leadership team must manage. Pulling all the pieces together from many different directions is complicated. Keeping things from slipping through the cracks can become a full time job. 

While we as an IT company cannot tell you what projects are most important, we can absolutely help you and your team stay far more organized. With the right tools it is easy to know if the people on your team are properly aligned, prioritizing the right work, and focused on their MVP's (Most Vital Priorities). We can also help you organize communication to lessen the chances of a dropped ball or a breakdown in communications. In our experience, this is by far the #1 reason why problems happen in business.

One of the tools we recommend to clients wanting to regain operational control and experience clearer communication is Microsoft Teams. There are a lot of reasons why this is a “super tool” for productivity and organizational alignment, and as a bonus, it typically ends up saving our clients quite a bit of money on technology. We often find that clients are using multiple channels of communication between different areas of their business. Applications like Slack, Zoom, and a myriad of popular project management platforms can be replaced by leveraging the power of Microsoft Teams, a core component of Microsoft 365. The result is putting all of these divergent technologies into one lower-cost, more secure, and more tightly integrated system.

Let me share just a few of the cool features you’ll love in Teams. Keep in mind that this list is far from complete. Microsoft Teams has over 1,900 applications you can pick from to integrate into a Teams Channel to organize information, workflow, tasks, deadlines and documents.

Posts: The “post” feature works a lot like Slack in that it will allow you to post questions, reminders and status updates to everyone on that Team regarding that project. This not only keeps ALL communication for a project in one place, but it creates a history and alerts everyone on the team to what’s going on. This feature saves a lot of money for companies using Slack since it’s native and included in Microsoft Teams.

Workflow Management: This section of Teams is one of our favorites because it allows you to create “complex” to-do lists where you can assign each item to one or more people; have a progress status, priority and due date; add documents and files; and create a checklist of all the things that need to be done. Better yet, team members who are responsible for the project can provide status updates and check off items that are completed so you know where you are with any given project. If you want to put this part of Teams on steroids, consider integrating with workflow management apps such as Tello. One of the challenges, especially in a distributed, remote workforce, is keeping an effective sense of workflow.  Being able to easily assign team members to particular project tasks using an app like Trello means fewer details fall through the cracks.

Video Conferencing: While Teams is not as slick as Zoom, it does have some features that make it better for team collaboration and projects. The biggest advantage over Zoom is that you can hold a video conference, and the recording of the meeting – along with all of the notes, files and links – will remain in that Team for easy reference later on. This can be extremely helpful for people who might not have been able to attend a meeting, making it easy for them to find and watch the recording, and it also retains a record of critical conversations. Plus, it eliminates expensive Zoom licenses for all employees because it’s included in Microsoft 365.

Business Intelligence: Tracking project goals, data points, and trends is made easier in the Teams environment when the data mining and reporting features of Power BI are integrated with the popular collaboration platform. Embedded interactive reports can help move discussions along and fuel innovation, growth, and a deeper sense of buy-in.

These examples only scratch the surface of what you can do with Teams, With such a wide array of integrations, Teams can be customized to fit most every business to enhance organizational collaboration and control. If you want to see a demo of Teams or do a cost analysis to see how implementing this can save your organization money on Slack, Zoom and other project management platforms by combining it into one application, click here to schedule a brief call.

Who Owns It: Cybersecurity Compliance?

 Why Cybersecurity Compliance Doesn’t Belong In The IT Department’s Hands

What if you discovered that all of the hard work, investments and time you’ve put into growing your business is at risk due to a failure of your outsourced IT company, or possibly even your well-meaning (but overburdened) in-house IT department? If you were exposed to that level of risk, wouldn’t you want someone to tell you about it?

This article is that wake-up call.

 

Over the last several years, the risks associated with cyber security attacks have grown in magnitude. They are no longer a low-probability hazard that will result in a minor inconvenience. Businesses of all sizes and types are getting hacked and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even multiple millions, in addition to suffering significant reputational damage and loss of customer goodwill. For some, it’s a business-ending event. For nearly everyone else, it’s a significant financial disaster that can negatively impact profits and revenue for years.

 

Yet too many CEOs and small business owners are still abdicating critical decisions regarding risk tolerance and compliance policies to their IT company or IT department when these decisions never really belonged there. For many organizations, they rely on the basic risk assessments offered by external IT companies as enough information to base what amount to policy decisions.  It is not enough. They do a commendable job assessing one facet of risk, typically the technology side of things, yet leave the people and process components to their own devices.  

 

Here's a good example: Let’s suppose you have an employee who refuses to comply with your data security and password policies. They also consistently avoid taking the proscribed cyber security awareness training. These deficiencies put your company at risk for a cyber-attack and compliance violation. This is clearly a People and Process problem. Should your IT manager or IT company discipline this employee?

 

Is it sensible for the CEO to abdicate a response to what is purely a culture problem to their IT department? If you say yes, the question is, when was the last time you met with them to specifically address this issue and direct them on how to monitor and manage it? Likely never – or once, a very long time ago.

 

Therein lies the problem. Most CEOs would agree that it’s not up to the IT department to make that call. And yet, many of these same CEOs leave it entirely up to the IT department (or outsourced IT company) to handle the situation and make decisions about what is and isn’t allowed, how much risk they want to take, etc.

 

Worse yet, many CEOs aren’t even aware that they SHOULD have such policies in place to ensure their company isn’t compromised or at risk – and it’s not necessarily your IT person’s job to determine what should or shouldn’t be allowed. That’s clearly the responsibility of the CEO. Culture starts at the top.

 

As another example, many companies have invested in cyber liability, ransomware, or crime insurance policies to provide financial relief in the event of a cyber-attack. The logic here is to cover the exorbitant legal, IT, and related cleanup costs that result when such an event occurs. Yet our experience shows that most insurance agents and brokers do not understand and cannot convey to the CEOs to whom they are selling a policy what the IT requirements needed to secure a policy. Therefore, they never advise their client to make sure they get with their IT provider or internal IT to ENSURE the right protocols are in place, or risk having coverage denied for failure to comply with the requirements in the policy they just sold them.

 When a cyber event occurs and the claim gets denied, whose fault is it? The insurance agent for not warning you? Your IT department or company for not putting in place protocols they weren’t even briefed on? Ultimately, it’s on you, which is why you as the CEO must make sure that decisions impacting the risk to your organization are informed ones, not decisions made by default.

 

Of course, a great IT company will bring these issues to your attention and offer guidance, but most are just keeping the “lights” on and the systems up, NOT consulting their clients on enterprise risk and legal compliance.

If you want to make sure your organization is prepared for and protected from the aftermath of a cyber-attack, call (413) 786-9675 or click here  to schedule a private consultation with one of our compliance advisors about your concerns. It’s free of charge and may be extremely eye-opening for you