IT Managers Good Job With Your Management

IT managers would blindly follow what their management told them to do, but if there were, then those days are now long gone. We live in an age where everyone, including IT managers, question everything that they are told to do. Given this, how are you as an IT manager supposed to deal with your management?

What Kind Of Loyalty Is The Company Looking For From You?

The fact that your company promoted you into an IT manger position means that they trust you to implement the company decisions and policies. This is great news, but what does it really mean?

I guess there is one important point that we should discuss here: let us assume that your management is not completely evil. If they were, then just about anything that they would ask you to do would go against who you are and what you believe. Let us assume that you are working for some good people who are working at a good company. What this means is that you really do want to do a good job for them.

What this means is that you are going to have to show them some loyalty. This means that as a member of the company's management team you are going to have to implement the company's policies and your management's decisions. Note that this is not blind loyalty, but rather a "thinking man's loyalty".

Providing Good Input

Being an effective IT manager is all about having the right information with which to do your job. Your management is now going to be asking you to provide input on issues related to your areas of responsibility.

There is something that is very important that you do when your input is requested. You need to make sure that your input is as broadly based as possible Don't allow yourself to provide narrow ideas that will only benefit you or your team. If you do this, then very quickly everyone will come to view you as being self-serving and will stop asking you for your inputs.

If you can provide inputs that relate to ways that the entire company can become better, then your input will start to be sought out. The value of your inputs will be realized. People will understand that your inputs go beyond your team and can help the complete company.

What All Of This Means For You

Becoming an IT manager means that you are now a part of the company's

management team. This means that you need to start to implement your company's polices and your management's decisions.

What this means is that when you are asked to provide your input to your management you need to make sure that your inputs are bigger than just your team. Provide your thoughts on how the company can be made better. By doing this, you will soon be seen as a source of valuable information that the company can use instead of just being an IT manager who is only looking out for themselves and their team.

IT managers can spend a lot of time working on how to set up effective communication channels with the members of their teams. However, it turns out that they have another task that is just as important: effectively communicating with their management. Provide your management with good input and you will be seen as a valuable member of the company's management team!

Change Management Before Implementing

Not everyone would readily embrace it. We shall try to understand how you would implement or manage change within your business organization so that you can get what you wish to achieve out of the change.

But first, managing this is about thoughtfully planning and sensitively implementing and consulting with all the parties involved or affected by the supposed change. Only when you do this then you shall have successfully managed change. Change has to be realistic and achievable and measurable too so as to be successfully implemented.

Facts About Change Management

The first thing you must keep in mind before you implement change in your business is that you need to understand what you would want to achieve with the management. This has to be clear because only then you will be able to plan for the implementation. Again, you can only monitor management when you know what it should bring about or the expected results. So, this is a key step in implementing change.

The second aspect of management in as far as change is concerned is that you also ought to figure out why and how you will get to know that the change you were trying to implement has actually been achieved. This is critical because change must have a goal. Management must be achievable. As such, you must have strategies in place to help you assess your progress so that at the end of the day you can tell whether you have achieved or not.

It is equally important that you get to know who is involved in the process of change. As already indicated, change management is about involving the people who are affected with the change or in the change. You will need to know who is affected and how they react to the change so that you can quickly and effectively formulate strategies of handling the situation.

A Few Do's and Don'ts

One of the things that you must never do when trying to effect change in your business organization is that you must never sell change to anyone for the sake of accelerating an agreement or implementing an agreement. This way, the change is likely to have adverse effects.

You should ensure that the change is understood and managed in a way that the people involved are able to effectively cope with the change.

Finally, you must ensure that everyone who is involved in the change is aware of the change and agrees to the effects. Change is not to be imposed but should be freely embraced by the people. If you create a need for change among them, they will see the value of the change and support its implementation.

Four Types Of Change Management Jobs

You are considering a change management job but aren't sure where to start, or even sure if the field is right for you? Look no further; all your doubts will be assuaged in this nifty article. We'll be looking at the various types of job you will encounter and what to expect from each different type of position. By the end of this article readers should aim to walk away with a clearer picture of what they could expect in the different Change Management Jobs out there.

The Hard Jobs

As they say it's better to start with the worst first, so we thought we'd get the worst out of the way and dispel the myth that all jobs in the change management field are absolutely wonderful and a walk in the park. There a great deal of jobs in this field that are, hard. They will be testing, both mentally and physically due to the long hours and the internal conflicts you'll be expected to deal with and conquer on a daily basis. However, these jobs generally yield the best reward - to the victor goes the spoils. Bear this in mind when applying for Change Management Jobs.

The Easy Jobs

Now that we've got the bad news out of the way, it's time to move on to the good news. There are going to be easy jobs out there, jobs which don't tax you mentally and have flexible hours to suit you and your working life. Just because you're working in change management it doesn't mean you're expected to be some kind of superman devoted to changing the world. These jobs however, generally, won't yield as big a pay packet as some of the more taxing positions which is to be expected. Consider these Change Management Jobs if they appeal to your ambition.

The Boring Jobs

Which brings us on to door number 3, the boring jobs. As well as many change management jobs being hard or easy, a number of them can be classified as boring or fun as well. These labels might seem trivial, but there's no need to over complicate things with terms that nobody understands or can relate to! The boring jobs are exactly that, they are incredibly taxing and include repetition of menial tasks over and over again to get the job done. If you're not a logical and analytical person by nature, these Change Management Jobs would not be a good fit for you.

The Fun Jobs

Ultimately if you're looking to work in a position that you enjoy doing work that you love, you'll want to search for one of the jobs categorized as 'fun'. These positions are perfect for those who enjoy spending time with people and investing time in their fellow man. The fun jobs are few and far between, but when you do find one the wait is certainly worth it.

Importance Of Time Expense (T&E) Management System

Over the years, time and expense management systems have become an essential part of all sizes of organizations. Employees need to accurately keep track of their work hour schedules so that the organization gets paid by the clients for the dedicated amount of time and expenses for their projects. As the organization keeps growing, the employee strength increases and so does the number and variety of projects handled by the employees. Inevitably, it becomes a headache for the organization to allocate and optimize resources with considerable visibility to fetch the maximum output as well as to maintain the account receivables with utmost accuracy.

There lies the importance for a time and expense (T&E) management system. This kind of a system can help an organization to effectively manage T&E entries and timely generate the invoices in order to keep the cash inflow running. An efficient application can keep track of all the work hours based on tasks, projects and/or resources for a particular client in order to bill the clients correctly and timely. It can also contribute to streamline the work flow at various levels of running projects. Organizations, big or small, are increasingly turning up to third party providers or for in-house development team to implement T&E management system as per organizational structure and project requirements. There exist a number of such application products in the market that enable single users as well as organizations to manage their project schedules and invoicing data efficiently.

 Employees, however, do not always feel free to use these applications. Most of the time, it takes a whole new system for them to understand thoroughly before they can actually fill the time sheets up online. Often the T&E applications are complex and difficult to interpret for the users. It requires a lot of time to first learn the system and then completing the process on a regular basis. Most of the employees consider this tasks as out of their project scope and nothing but waste of time.

Therefore, it is important for organizations to opt for a system that is simple and easy to use. It should have rich functionality to track time and expenses incurred in projects, separately and together. There should be some efficient tools to analyze the data stored in the system so that it can keep track of all invoiced and un-invoiced T&E entries and accordingly bill the clients for UN-invoiced time and expense sheets. For example, an effective dashboard view can help to slice and dice all the data and make reports of invoiced and un-invoiced T&E entries based on different parameters. Also, convenience is very important for such a system. As employees have to submit time sheets on a regular basis, it is essential that they can add, save and submit T&E entries as well as upload any necessary document/file without any hassles.

Currently existing web-based or browser-based systems have some restrictions when it comes to convenience and user experience. Such a system asks for certain hardware and software requirements. Employees can full up time sheets only while working in office network. But if an employee is working out of office or in some other remote place, he/she may not be able to log in to the system and submit time sheets.

This difficulty can be overcome by newly emerging cloud based systems. A cloud based system requires no upfront investment. A computer with Internet connection will suffice. The system can be accessed anytime anywhere as it demands no software or hardware. All the data is stored in the cloud and can be freely accessed. Employees, irrespective of where they are working from, can simply log in to a computer or a mobile and can submit time sheets on a regular basis. A cloud based application can offer all these advantages in order to optimize the time tracking and invoicing process with minimal complexity. The only
constraint for a cloud application is that some big organizations who deal with huge resources find it not secure enough to rely upon.

Organizations of varied sizes are increasingly adopting time and expense management applications into their systems. Even individual professionals and freelancers who work alone or in small groups are understanding the importance of such a tool that can help them to collaborate more effectively with the clients and keep the payment system more transparent. And with the ever growing complexity of organizational hierarchy and increase in clientele, cloud based applications are sure to make a big impression in near future in addressing the time sheet and billing management issues in organizations. Proper running and record management system.

Risk Management Uncertainty Project Environments

Unforeseen disruptions can affect everything from technical feasibility to market timing, cost, and financial performance. Project risk has a very dynamic nature, in the sense that risks which eventually cause performance problems often have cascading and compounding effects on projects. Here are a few project risk management strategies that can help you succeed in a competitive business environment, despite these negative potentialities:

Identify & deal with contingencies early

A contingency is a condition that occurs when uncertainties emerge with the potential to impact a project. Once you have identified a contingency, it is helpful to categorize the associated risk with defined impacts. This will give you a basis for communicating the degree of risk impact with your project team. Category-1 risks might mean no impact on project performance, category-2 risks might mean impact on task or project subsystems only, and category-3 risks might stand for impact on project performance. In either case, it is important to know that only risks on the project's critical path can be category-3 risks. Using project management software can help you make this assessment, in your own projects.

Assess feasibility early & frequently

Feasibility analysis tools such as concept tests, focus groups, and prototype trials can serve very well as means to detect risks and treat them early on in a project's life cycle. Adequate feasibility analyses will allow 

you to think through contingencies in your projects, as well as mold and shape your development strategies. By guiding the progress of your projects with frequent feasibility analyses, you will lower the risk of poor usability and design by continuously integrating your clients' feedback into the development cycles of your projects.

Combine quantitative & qualitative risk MGT

With the help of project risk management software, we have become effective at identifying and dealing with risks that can be described quantitatively. But while quantitative methods provide an important tool set for project risk management, it also takes the collective thinking and collaboration of all project team members and stakeholders to identify and address the complexity of risks in today's business environment. To strengthen the qualitative side of your project risk management, engage in review meetings, brainstorming, focus groups, and other activities with your project team/stakeholders.
 

To conclude, we've discussed several project risk management strategies, which included identifying contingencies early, conducting frequent feasibility analyses, and complementing quantitative approaches with people-oriented approaches. It has become clear that some organizations are more successful than others in dealing with project environment risks. By investing the necessary time and energy into your project team, and into learning and applying these methods.

Public Relations As a Management Tools

Public relations (PR) and use the effective tools as a communications process is not advertising in the sense that a product is being promoted. Rather, PR is a process of promoting and managing an individuals or an organization's image and reputation as perceived by the public. The management of the image is a matter of persuasion by an admittedly bias technique, but the bias should not represent any aspect of the individual or organization that is not true.

The effort of PR is intended to persuade the public using the media to establish and reinforce reputation, raise the public awareness of the subject, enhance perception of integrity, and motivate action. The most important factors in public relations in the accomplishment of these efforts is to be relevant to the public mindset while trying to persuade particular point of view and to do so with verifiable substance of information.

To succeed in these efforts, PR uses a number of tools to communicate an individuals or an organization's image and reputation to the public, but there are two primary requirements for successful PR: it must be relevant and it must be timely if it is going to reach the public and persuade individuals to action.

Relevance goes to where people live. It must affect and persuade individuals in a very local and personal way to motivate them to action. If your message attempts to persuade a public perception that they must invest in precious metals, but the individuals reached are poverty-stricken, the suggestion will be ignored as irrelevant to their condition. First, they must be persuaded in the tools to lift themselves out of poverty to a condition of disposable income, then persuade how best to use it.

Timeliness is necessary to encourage immediate action. A promotion to attend a local rally of a political candidate in six months might be a good general story, but it is neither timely nor relevant to the immediate concerns of the public.

There are eight basic tools of public relations:

Press release: an announcement of immediate, timely and relevant information released to the media to inform and educate about issues relevant to that community.

Background: historic information to educate the public about the individual or organization origin and purpose.

Special events: shows, conferences and conventions to communicate current product, policy or purpose.

Point of view (POV) articles: organizational perspective on issues affecting public opinion.

Speeches: personification of issues; relevance and timeliness personified individual to individual.

Photos and videos: a visual record of special events and speeches to communicate to a wider audience than when originally presented.

Print content: brochures, manuals and newsletters to put hard content in the hands of the public for confirmation and background on what is verbally and visually presented.

Internet content: websites, blogs and social media in an effort to combine all the above tools to reach the widest possible audience.

By effective use of these tools using relevant and timely content.

Online Reputation Management

The only problem with this free analysis is that your analysts are highly biased and they can foul mouth you for some so trivial that you may not even recollect anything about it. Suddenly, the entire world will turn against you.

The entire professional fraternity is at the risk of overnight bombardment of unsolicited censures, but hospitality, health and legal services are the most vulnerable thanks to the high stakes that are at play here.

So, what should you do to if you get hit by one of these stink bombs? Is there an effective way of avoiding such nastiness? We will take a look at the two most common approaches taken by Online Reputation Management professionals and offer our own views on which we think is the better.

'House on Fire' Strategy

What do you do when everything is at stake? You begin contingency measures to stop your reputation from bleeding further and you do with every bone and muscles in your body. Chances are that you will hire more than one ORM professional team and spend huge amounts in days and keep your fingers crossed hoping that the bad times are over soon.

This approach takes advantage of the fact that public-memory is short termed. People forget things pretty fast if they are bombarded with new information. The old news starts getting hidden under a heap of fresh developments and in no time people will start asking what started the entire episode.

There are however very significant downsides of doing this. The first and the biggest is the price of hiring teams at short notice. The second is the brevity of outcomes. Google is particular about keeping its algorithms from being manipulated. If you keep piling similar content all over place, the bots are going to turn their mechanical eye on you!

Your content will be penalized and removed from the indexes and you will disappear faster than you came! So then you will have to set the wheels to motion all over again, until the shadow has passed.

The Really Effective Strategy of Managing Your Reputation Online

Google and all the other search engines out there want you to take things slow and build a robust structure. Long term ORM strategies are always far more successful that hasty patchworks of spam my content.

If you have the time to manage your reputation on your own, you should spread the work over a longer period. Do what you would have done in a day in a month. Spread your reach and create better pieces that cover your name and niche.

Create profile for your name or brand in all possible social platforms and start consolidating enough information about your name. Getting aggressive with your online brand reputation management efforts will get you nowhere!

How to Create Content For ORM?

God help your brand if you rush out to the nearest ORM team and they start plugging scraped and duplicate content with little variations. Instead of doing any good, you will have your name deeper in the muck. Choose wisely and find people who know what they are doing. Sometimes, it may be better to take some time to hand pick professionals from among many.

Lawyers, Doctors, Hospitality managers, Health care professionals who require a good name in the market to survive must invest in reputation management. Online discussions and review boards exist on the Internet and anyone looking for a doctor or a lawyer will come across these boards. Put yourself in your customer's shoes and think what you would have done had you seen something negative?

There was a time when reclaiming one's name and fame did cost a lot. It was beyond the reach of a doctor or a lawyer. Taking the fight on the pages of a tabloid or newspaper usually required huge sums of money. Thanks to the dominance of websites over newspapers and magazines, today we are capable of keeping our honor intact.

If you need real life examples of negative reputation spoiling livelihoods, we will share an incident in these very pages soon. We will see how the victim managed to sail past the turbulence and reestablish his name after a long battle with the media. He was from a different time when online reputation management was not even heard of.

Implements Online Project Management Tools

 Online comprehensive project management tools to be successful. In the days before the Internet, even the most comprehensive management tools were limited by time and space. If the project coordinator at the main office made a change to the schedule or manpower estimates, then it would take at least a day for that information to get to the site foreman. But with online project management tools, those updates can happen instantly.

Before a company implements online project management tools, it is important that the company understand all of the features which are available. For example, the whiteboard feature can be something which allows a project coordinator and a site manager to exchange drawings and notes in real time. It literally shrinks the distance between the office and the site down to nothing.

If a project is a large internal project, then online project management tools can be used to organize groups and keep the project running smoothly. Once a coordinator gets an understanding of how to create and organize groups in an online piece of coordinating software, then it becomes much easier to assign tasks and keep up with the personnel in each group. The coordinator can tell which groups are doing their jobs and which groups are having problems meeting deadlines.

The great thing about good online project management tools is that each group leader can be an admin in the system, which allows the leaders to make changes and post any notes regarding their group's progress. At the same time, the coordinator can create protected areas where only authorized personnel can access records that are important to the project. It is a great way of improving the flow of information within a project while still keeping the critical information confidential.

In order to properly manage a project calendar and budget, it makes sense to try and get updated information in real-time. When interactive online software is used to coordinate a project, it makes it very easy to keep data current. Internet project coordination keeps all groups informed of any updates to project specs and it also helps the coordinator to make important decisions using accurate and up to date information. It will help to cut down on the costs of doing any kind of project because it will significantly expand the efficiency of any work crew and the management team that is monitoring the project.

Document Management System Software

Numerous business organizations these days put their money on electronic document management system or EDMS. This has not only become a trend but the reality will tell you that if you are dealing with a small or midsized business without a hell lot of finance, it is imperative for you to take on board a process that will make sure that your business is being done in an arranged manner where your employees won't need to devote unnecessary hours in finding or sharing paper documents through one to the other wooden or steel racks. Hence business people have surely realized the value of having a document management system in their office.

This is not surprising though since there are a lot of benefits this system has to offer. Some of these benefits are can be physically seen. And some of them may be intangible but still reflect in the better performance and production of the company. Some of the most substantial benefits of using an Electronic Document Management System in an office setup are:

Storage solution - the traditional process to store up heavy paper files' and such other documents in long racks are gone now simply because today you won't have that much of space available in your office. When budget is petite, you need a system that will help you store all your crucial business files and papers in the most hassle free manner yet it won't take up much space. Whether you have a small business or a colossal company, your office ought to have enough space for the staff to work and walk around. But with an EDMS, you will be enjoying a great reduction in the storage of paper in your office. Office will virtually become paperless! Since the files and documents will be converted into electronic structure, there won't be heaps of papers in cubicles, ultimately creating more space for your office.

Faster and easier retrieval of documents - electronic document management software is also very beneficial since it paves the way for faster retrieval of documents and other essential files. This is because all the files, business information or data will be loaded into a system which networks through all the departments and offices of the company. Interdepartmental sharing of information will also be faster and more convenient. A person just has to browse through the system to view, manage or share any crucial document.

Cost saving - most of the small scale industry business people have agreed to the fact that the biggest advantage of using document management solutions is that it greatly reduce costs of the business in many ways. Since the files will be electronic, you don't have to spend much of the company budget into buying papers, printers, resulting into less need for printing and file reproduction.

Apart from these factors, there will also be a great lessening of the need for manual labor, particularly in terms of archiving, managing or sharing of all necessary paperwork. Moreover only few staffs would be required to manage the system.

Performance To People Management

Effective performance management begins with the identification of what's vital to the organization because if these priorities are not clear and it is not clear what role everyone plays in the priorities, the rest of an organization's performance management effort is unlikely to mean much.

Managing employee performance requires first and foremost clear communication of what is important for the organization and how the individual can best contribute. In fact, studies have shown that the primary reason people don't do what managers want is that they don't know what the managers want.

While communication about targets and goals can be done as part of the strategic planning, performance review and execution processes, it should also be reinforced in the everyday conversations and coaching sessions between employees and their managers.

Ideally, performance management refers not just to people management, but to process management, and plant management.

Yet we found the most common element of performance management was identified as annual performance appraisals, which came in for some criticism during our research.

For example, several people mentioned that the annual reviews were a source of angst and dread, perhaps by both parties. They were always late and were considered among the more onerous of management responsibilities.

Others questioned their effectiveness. For example, when a bank implemented formal performance appraisals that evaluated Loan Officers on the dollar value of loans approved, and measured the Credit Department on 'the quality of the loan portfolio' (i.e. no defaults), it reduced profits and created dysfunction and animosity. The Credit Department was careful to take no risks, while the Loan Officers focused on quantity, hoping that something, at least would be approved. The bank as a whole suffered.

 This example is by no means an exception - Purchasing Departments are often measured by purchase prices, leading to excess inventory when they order in bulk and substandard material when they give too much weight to price instead of incoming quality and timeliness. One of the drawbacks of annual individual performance reviews - especially when tied to compensation - is the high risk of driving the optimization of individual metrics while sub-optimizing the organization as a whole.

But a few people said that their performance review process was greatly improved by increasing the frequency from annual to quarterly, indicating the feedback discussions were both more timely and less stressful. Others found that when reviews were de-linked from salary adjustments they could focus more effectively on coaching.

While there are a wide range of views about how to manage performance, some of our key findings include:

1.Performance Management must be about much more than individual performance measurement. As Dr. Deming said, over 90% of problems are caused by the system not the person. To manage performance, we must manage the system by which people, plant, process interact to produce results.
    

2.Frequent observation and feedback is more helpful to people than formal annual reviews.
    

3.Frequent communication about what an organization needs and wants greatly increases the odds that the organization will get what they need and want.
    

4.Group rewards encourage teamwork, while individual rewards encourage an individual to optimize his or her own goals even if it may sub-optimize the organization as a whole.
    

5.Tying money directly to performance appraisal can be a two-edged sword - raising stress and reducing the intrinsic rewards and personal satisfaction from doing a good job for the team.
    

6.Avoid managing performance through the "rear view mirror" by including steps for more frequently assessing and impacting how people perform
    

7.Make more of the goal setting process which produces targets against which we measure performance (and take corrective action)

Contractor Management services To Help manage For Growing Business

Batter Run your business with good management. When your business is changing a phase from a small to medium or large scale business, there will be many challenges if you don't have the right people to run it. As the business grows, existing processes become complex and new processes are added to your business model. You may not have the time to hunt for a good staff and provide them with a structured training program. This will be a time consuming process. There will be losses for the delay and as a result, you will not achieve the desired growth in the specified time.

For such situations, there are many companies that offer contractor services. These contractors may be "PAYG contractors" or those contractors who will work for your company and accept payment after completion of the work and submission of an invoice.

A "PAYG contractor" will be paid salary like every other employee of your firm. He will follow the same guidelines as a regular company employee and enjoy benefits such as sick leaves. Annual leaves will also be available for him. He will work and perform the same nature of duties like a regular employee of the company. However, taxes will not be paid by the "PAYG contractor".

You may also hire contractors to pay them by the hour. They will not get the benefits of employees like the pay as you go contractors. They are paid generally more than employees of your firm. They are assigned jobs of only one nature and paid as per their contract when the job is completed respective to the number of days decided initially. They do not get the employee benefits to avail leaves etc. and pay their own taxes.

These contractors are skilled enough to do the job for you. In the initial days of transition of your business, you can hire these contractors to manage the employee and work trade-off. This way you can focus more on doing what you are best at.

Management of the contractors is also a task. You may hire contractor management services to help manage the needs and requirements of contractors. It's a new way of doing business and does wonders for the ones who are short on time and resources. Hiring contractors provides you with time and employment for skilled people who like to work on their own. They perform better this way when the whole job is in their hands and it is their choice to choose how to do the job.