Top Business Tools to Increase Productivity
The world seems to be getting more hectic every day. Running a business in the modern world is definitely not easier – you have to be on top of many things in order to succeed. But interestingly, the idea that we are constantly doing something is not translating to productivity. In many places, productivity is not increasing by more than 1% to 2% a year – so where are we going wrong?
For many businesses, the problem is focusing on the wrong things. Business owners might be using small business HR software but not for tasks that would most benefit their business’ productivity. There is a tendency to try doing what everyone else is doing without analysing if it’s the right action for your
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You should also focus on the three core aspects of running a business: project management, human resources and business finances. By finding software for these tasks, you will notice the biggest boost in your productivity.
To get you started with boosting productivity, here are a few examples of the tools you might find helpful and a few options in terms of the software products.
Project management software
Project management software can have the biggest boost in your productivity. This is exactly for the reasons mentioned above: we often waste time juggling too many project at once and forget about the importance of finishing one task before moving on to the next. A good project management tool will allow you to schedule, prioritise, manage and share different elements of the project.
Examples of good project management software:
Wrike is a solid end-to-end project management tool that can scale according to your business needs. The software allows real time editing, which ensures different members of the team can work seamlessly even when not in the same location. If you want to test your software first, Asana is a great option – it comes with a robust freemium version with support for up to 15 users. For teams with projects focused on collaboration and team communication, Basecamp is a superb pick. It has extensive discussion boards and a visualised home screen to make project management fun and intuitive.
Small
This is a massive one in today’s era of modern technology: emails, instant messaging, status updates, sms etc. When you are in the middle of an important task and you get interrupted or distracted, it can take you up to 20 minutes to get back into the zone. If this happens 3 times in a day, that’s 1 hour of lost productivity. In a fortnight, that’s 10 hours or more than one whole day of lost productivity, just from being interrupted. Imagine what you could do if you had a whole extra day every fortnight. Now you know how.
A project manager must be a skillful planner and can inspire his or her team to produce as needed. Per LaBrosse (2007), project management can be used throughout the organization to boost personal and collaborative productivity by building a standardized system that embeds best practices into the way projects are managed” (p.26).
Two ways that a supervisor can promote productivity improvement for staff members is to provide employees with the necessary resources to effectively perform their work duties and to foster a work environment of open communication and trust. If a supervisor can provide the necessary training and resources to maintain employee training, employee productivity would maintain at a constant rate or productivity would improve. Well trained and knowledgeable employees translate into a productive work environment. Employees that are well versed in their roles and have the necessary training and resources are more effective and productive within their work environment. An open communication environment would also help employees maintain or increase productivity. If employees feel like they have a voice or their opinion matters, employees tend to be happier within the workplace. If a supervisor’s team of employees is unhappy or feel like there are no open lines of communication, quality of production may suffer or decrease. A supervisor could potentially promote productivity improvement whining his or her team by providing the necessary resources for success and maintain an open environment of communication. Both providing necessary resources for success and open lines of communication promote improvement and maintain higher levels of
In this week’s discussion board, we learned about several project management tools and how they are used to facilitate the successful implementation of IT related projects. Additionally, we learned what happens when IT projects fall behind schedule, the reasons for the delays and if these reasons will hinder complex software implementations in the future.
Recommend a different software application that could be used and explain how it would improve productivity.
In HR Sector there are lot of things to be repaired, fixed and improved in order to maintain the business and staff effectively. Some changes have to be installed.
Project Management can be used in everything you do in life; both personal and work related.
An outline of productivity to help you optimise everyday tasks and even outsource almost everything in your life and be a lot more effective and possibly happy
Using project management offers a business a way for dealing with considerably lowered phase times. With businesses operating internationally projects that can have an effect on the company as a whole are not easy to manage without a proper line of attack. For this, project management would help cross functional teams to be more successful.
All employers seek out ways to improve the productivity of their workers. Because increased productivity of their employees translates into increase revenue. One of the ways to increase productivity is by having employees that are happy and satisfied with their jobs and that have a vested interest in the work they do. Therefore, it benefits the company to seek out and explore any types of activities that will increase an employee’s satisfaction therefore increasing their productivity.
When reading the book The Goal written by Eliyahu Goldratt, there were many lessons that I learned in order to have a clear and concise understanding of a positive level of productivity in a company. To have a positive level of productivity there are may components that are taken into consideration. Understanding what it actually means to be productive and how to increase the level of productivity by knowing the actual goal of the company that is trying to be reached and the components that go into the process of being productive. There are many factors that contribute to the level of productivity and being able to identify these factors is the key ingredient to having a successful level of productivity.
The major issue with lower productivity in my plant is wasting time. This encompasses many organizational concepts such as procrastination, cleanliness and orderliness, stealing time, goofing off. This happens on both sides of the employment structure.
Project management is not only useful in the working environment, but it could also become great skills that can be used for all life projects that we do through out our life.
1.) Productivity is defined as the relationship between resources used and results achieved¹. Improvement in this area means either obtaining more and better program output from a given level of resources or using fewer resources to maintain or improve a certain level of output. The federal government has a vital stake in improving the productivity of state and local governments for two primary reasons: (1) the national economy is strengthened as a result of improvements in the productivity and fiscal prospects of this key sector; and (2) the effectiveness and efficiency of the multitude of federal grant and regulatory programs using state and local governments to implement federal policies are directly related to the management capacity
They are not tool specific. In today's software-reliant world, the reality is that the methodology and the organization's project management software tool are often heavily intertwined. Complication and sophisticated client expectations of the latest projects reveal the flaws of traditional project management methods. In addition usually project managers are expected to make a sense of balance between client expectations and business interests and also to improve the end product, decrease cost and duration of the project (Project Management Institute 2005). The disadvantages of traditional project management method are listed below.