Increase Employee productivity with simple strategies that have proved to beneficial to Managers.

Productivity has taken the center stage in the business world. 

Let’s find out the exact secret behind this theory:-

What drives your business ROI is connected with what drives productivity. What drives productivity depends on what drives your employee’s enthusiasm levels. 

Since our company is made up of people, it’s tough to neglect the most essential element that scales your business.

Due to remote working conditions post-pandemic, it has become increasingly essential to measure productivity levels based on workaday analysis.

Some of the hybrid and remote workforce solutions revolve around:

• Being Visible
• Tracking data of all workday activity

What is the solution to tracking productivity?

Post pandemic crisis demanded a huge surge in productivity tools that included Time Tracking software. 

To eliminate the challenge of visibility among remote teams, Orangescrum “Timer” enables easy and instant time logging with a comprehensive view of tasks and member activities that cannot go unnoticed.

Some of the happiest customer reviews on tracking projects and productivity levels helped us gain clarity on strategies that could improve remote team productivity.

Let’s check some of the top Productivity Strategies remote and hybrid companies swear by.

Top Strategies to Increase Employee Productivity

Setting Targets

Businesses need to often compare their processes and performance metrics to industry practices. Benchmarking on the parameters of quality, budget, and time can increase employee productivity. 

Why do we need benchmarks? 

Setting targets and identifying benchmarks is important as it helps in comparing similar job roles and relevant skill sets. 

Clear Communication

The key to the company’s success is effective communication. Employers who communicate well with their employees on a two-way basis can quickly boost productivity. 

Everyone needs to progress and focusing on the future is the key. 

Discussing past issues can prevent you from fresh ideas for increased employee productivity. Maintaining an open and good communication channel sets a positive tone. This helps in enhancing a great rapport and exchange professional synergies.

Measure Performance Metrics

It’s important to align your KPIs and goals for the team for measuring the level of productivity. 

Some of the important performance metrics are: 

• The completed number of projects and tasks
• The number of hours spent on each project and task.
• Start and end times for attendance
• Total number of hours worked in a day, week, or month
• Levels of daily productivity
• Idle time

Once you analyze the performance metrics, you can quickly discover top achievers. It’s best to draw analytic reports to look into team activities and see where they spend most of their time. 

Planning Tasks

Employees can achieve goals and KPIs faster and boost their own productivity by clearly stating what needs to be done. Also, target metrics are planned for each activity.

This method may also lead to increased employee accountability, which has a direct impact on staff engagement and productivity. 

Setting clear goals and expectations can lead to improved performance, allowing leaders to recognize and reward their employees.

Tracking time

 “You cannot manage what you can’t measure” is an old saying. 

A lot of companies miss out on Time Tracking especially now that we’re under the terror of the crazy waves of the pandemic.

Time tracking as a precious element helps in tracking productivity by preassigned parameters. Delivering on time and on a budget is critical to a company’s success. Having said this, we also believe that the “Activities feed” on time is essential. 

Some critical questions you need to ask while tracking time—

• Does their time spend bring revenue?
• Where is the team spending most of their time?
• Is the project profitable?
• Does the time spend deliver results as expected?

Ensuring Transparency

Transparency is the most crucial element in measuring progress and providing feedback. The most engaged and top-performing team members benefit from transparency with their managers.

Team members need to share their activities and the collected data. This helps in creating a trusted environment. 

Sharing data across the team, and even departments can help employees see their overall impact on the team and the organization. This can also aid in increased teamwork and communication.

Ready to implement Employee Productivity Strategies?

Orangescrum is a Project Management Software that offers customizable options for sharing data and increasing visibility through a bird-eye view of smart task management and time tracking.

Start a 14-day FREE Trial today.

The priority of every business is to pursue a smoother project delivery. But sometimes the project fails, due to various reasons. And over the years, many businesses also developed their internal project management office and tried to stalk about those failures.

These PMOs tried to regulate a path where projects can be managed and make them predictable and successful as well.

So, a successful PMO allows projects to continue that are integrated with the organization’s strategies and endorses the winning conclusion of the projects on time and on budget.

But with a PMO’s error, the projects can fail. So the other levels of management must be added on the front of the PMO.

Usually, the successful path for many PMO approaches includes:

Project Management Office –

Here the organization is characteristically starting to offer help to project managers to track time and expenses, make relevant status reports, and follow deliverables and risks.

Program Management Office –

It becomes more important when a firm grows and their project management pathways need to be mature.

Like firms arrange several projects in support of an overall program and share reports to the higher executive and project owners.

Portfolio Management Office –

Here the organization configures at the departmental level and makes sure both programs and projects bring to the line of the business objectives.

Over the years the above-mentioned chain has been working as a ladder for enterprises. With a new and higher level of project management has emerged in the last few years – Open Source Project Management software.

How Project Management Works?

A project management methodology runs outside of any particular department but shares the reports with C-level organizational members. Like; Managing Partner, CEO, CFO, etc.

The PM manages both programs and portfolios within the entire enterprise and presents a high-level view of the organization’s portfolio of projects.

An EPM offers visibility across different divisions of an organization and effectively collaborates with a strategic coalition of projects. These visibilities frames also provide a more strategic and organizational view for increasing the ROI evaluation with demand forecasting and resource planning without humanitarian involvement.

This module is unlike the conventional project management program. The traditional project management modules are more tactical and operational.

An EPM is different from the traditional project, program, and portfolio PMOs. The traditional PMOs are more tactical and operational, while an EPMO provides a strategic umbrella to these PMOs.

It improves and supports their work but does not remove them, most important the overall project organization equipment achieves strategic business goals.

With this high rate of project success, it is pretty obvious that enterprise project management methodology is gaining the interest of both small and large-scale organizations.

What are the Benefits of PM

Project management offices, whether we are talking about projects, programs, or portfolio offices all have some problems in their operations.

Very often PMOs are not strategic enough — project and program PMOs operate at a functional level and portfolio PMOs are often only tactical in their view. But, an EPMO can go beyond project, program or portfolio management strategies. It can help pull other PMOs together and provide some unique benefits:

Standardization

Standard PMOs in a large organization will have grown out of various departments, business units, or locations. As such, they may have very different maturity levels and use disparate frameworks, tools, and reporting mechanisms.

The creation and influence of an PMO will require these various PMOs to centralize their standards and operations to meet strategic needs.

Executive Visibility and Involvement

Since an EPM operates at a strategic level within an organization and reports directly to the high-level executives, projects, programs, and portfolios often get better executive visibility.

With an involved and presumably more interested executive team, aligned projects will have a greater chance for success.

Better Alignment with Strategic Goals

Because of its high level of operation within an organization and executive visibility, an PM can more readily ensure projects are aligned with the organization’s strategic goals.

Coordination in Global Operations

If an organization has offices around the world, a centralized EPMO can help bring together PMOs that are geographically dispersed or departmentally separated, allowing for collaboration and support of cross-functional projects.

Broader Focus

Traditional PMOs often only operate at a department level.

PMOs from different departments will have different views of what is important and will typically lack a wider or more strategic view of active projects, programs, and portfolios through out an organization.

PMOs can help bring together disparate departmental PMOs and provide strategic alignment and executive-level exposure.

Demand Management

A good PM will capture project demand from across an organization and help to effectively manage demand-forecasting. An PM will presumably have no departmental bias, which means it can more easily help prioritize resources to meet organizational demand.

Value Management

With a broader vision across the organization, an PM can also be well positioned to evaluate the value and ROI of projects for the organization.

Streamlined Effort

An EPM will have a view of project management across multiple departments or business units, hopefully helping to eliminate any duplication of project management efforts.

Stronger Project Organization

An EPM enhances the role of project, program, and portfolio management, providing an overarching level of management that can contribute to the success of projects.

Source: PMI ORG

According to a 2017 Project Management Institute report, organizations that have established an EPM reported that 38% more projects meet their original goals and business intentions, and 33% fewer projects failed.

Warp-up

Each project team has its own set of requirements but these 5 are the most common yet crucial capabilities that help drive projects to their successful completion.

Make it a point that you have the power of:

• Project templates for simplified task management
• Kanban boards and custom task status workflow
• Time Tracking
• Resource Management
• User Role Management

And, imagine you have to rely on multiple systems and tools to get to all this information! What a waste of time and effort!

Orangescrum open-source project management tool brings all of these critical aspects into one and enables holistic collaboration across the organization.

The open source project management software helps to centralized access to project information, activities and tasks, resources, visibility to progress and true status of your execution.

Execution, monitoring and improvisation goes hand-in-hand with a real time granular view of all moving parts of your project.
Want more?

Take a look at all the enterprise project management requirements and capabilities you may need right here!

Project Management we see today is far more evolved than it first started. It is no longer about detailed documents a bunch of them in fact, phases and gates driven with multi-year timelines.

Gone are the times when projects meant a fat budget, huge resource allocation probable brought together from across the world to a single office facility.

On top of it, the answers to the question – “what the project is all about?” would never be the same from the people working on them. Each had his own interpretation.

Not that it doesn’t happen today, but on a much-diminished scale.

The point is, as everything else, project management today too has evolved a lot and for the better.

It has become better for the project managers, the project team, stakeholders and the business overall.

Primarily because Project Management today is more outcomes-focused than ever before!

How did the shift happen?

Disruptive Digital Transformation has brought about a sea change in the way we operate today. Teams across the globe are connected in real-time with the help of more and more communication platforms.

Be it chat, instant messaging, tagging, video conferencing or video chats; technology has made it really easy to access people and information with the tap of the thumb.

As a result, there is rapid information exchange, more visibility and increased collaboration at all levels across organizations.

Silos are a thing of the past. Instant is the new age mantra.

The workforce has become highly mobile. Work isn’t defined by a messy desk and office hours.

Enhanced mobility and connectivity have given way to boundary-less offices where teams connect, collaborate at will and remain highly engaged towards the goals at hand.

There are some downsides too, but it well-managed the benefits outweigh them by a huge margin.

Businesses have been able to mark their presence alongside their customer and as a result, there has been a marked increase in customer feedback and connect.

All of which leads to quick productivity gains, breaking away from silos, informed decision making, and quick issue resolution to deliver with more accuracy and agility.

Projects now are delivered iteratively and in increments with optimum customer inputs and satisfaction.

Staying disconnected or rather unaware of progress has become really hard. And as a result, improved scrutiny to project deliverables and result have only helped to up the ante and deliver with quality.

Yes, it is always about on time within budget. But now it is more about deliverables living up to promised outcomes.

Project Management today demands a wide range of skills from its project managers and project teams. Right from being a hands-on techie, to be adaptive to new technology trends to a host of soft skills.

Projects have become increasingly complex in nature along with the involvement of multiple stakeholders each with his own goals and way of getting things done.

So how can a PM keep his ducks in a row?

It’s the purpose of the project that each stakeholder has pledged their ownership to. Unless the team is aligned with the purpose even the most savvy project managers will end up with project failure.

And this is where adopting digital project management has proven beneficial.

• You get to keep the entire team aligned with the project goals (short term and long term).
• Project progress is highly visible.
• Real-time analytics and data help you take proactive measures as needed.
• Collaboration on issues and risks is faster and productive.
• Information sharing prevents multiple sources of truths enabling greater transparency.
• Teams become more focused, engaged and motivated to contribute due to the freedom obtained from adopting digital collaborative project management platforms.

Now, think of the second wave impacting project management. The advent of big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

These niche technologies have already been adopted for medical research, biotechnology, meteorology, automobiles, personal assistants (chatbots), traffic monitoring, security surveillance, and automation to name a few.

Project Management has also adopted them with quite a bit of a success w.r.t to process automation, risk identification & mitigation, predictive analytics based on past project data to forecast project outcomes.

Imagine the onus these technologies put on the project managers. Project management skills alone can never keep them in good stead when the projects are being run with AI.

It is not a bad thing. Far from it actually. The PMs are positively impacted with the use of AI as it has increased the need for them to deploy more of HI (human intelligence) given the fact that automation has taken away their repetitive and manual tasks.

They allow for the PM and the project team to focus more on upskilling themselves, getting creative in delivering quality outcomes with precision.

Just imagine the fact that you are presented with factual insights about the outcome of the project you are about to take based on past project performance. You are certainly well-equipped for course correction, saving costs and time as well.

And the most important thing of note is both digital and transformative technology such as AI are well-aligned to the overall project management methodology.

Have the project management processes kept pace with technology?

The answer is a definite YES! But before that, take a look at how our processes have evolved. Waterfall to Agile has put us in a far more confident position than ever before.

Instant and iterative! Both these ingredients ensure we do it all right! Mistakes happen and will continue to happen. But the cost, strategy and time impacts have significantly reduced.

Why do you think we have a rat race among companies to adopt Scrum and Kanban methodologies?

The risk of waiting for that perfect product to go to market is humungous. Your competitor would have reshaped the industry by then. Or you may end up building/delivering something that the customer never wanted in the first place.

Well, this is an obvious and simple narrative. But what about the team morale, the loss of productivity and absolute loss of business reputation. Given the social mania we leave in, nothing can be brushed under the carpet.

Our processes have become far more resilient and highly adaptive to business. And the advent of technology has just propelled their benefits.

The key lies in the right adoption strategy and timing. It is not a one size fits all panacea.

Understand the nature of your project, the culture of your organization & that of your customers and strike the balance. Run your projects in a hybrid approach if needed.

Either way, you have all the technology, the tools and the processes you need to succeed with your projects.

The question isn’t so much about why or how; but WHEN?

Are you ready to get on board with the future of project management? I would love to hear……

It gives us immense pleasure to announce the latest release of the Orangescrum Open Source base code.

Orangescrum Open source edition strengthens the project and task management capabilities for your teams. It allows for inclusive collaboration with unlimited projects, milestones, and tasks to be managed in an utmost transparent and productive manner.

Release Summary

The release consists of code & UI/UX improvements, bug fixes, and deprecation issues fixes.

The best thing about this release among others is the ability to directly invite/add users to Orangescrum without the SMTP setup. It saves you time and hassle of setting up email configuration to get your team on board.

How to add users in the Orangescrum V1.8.0?

Click on “Add User” on the User list page. The revised pop-up has an additional field for “password”.

The admin can set a password of his choice and once he has successfully added the user, he can share the email id and password with the user to login.

The user can log in to the tool and change the password if he wishes to.

Note: Owner & Admins must note down the password before hitting the Add button.

SMTP Configuration is a MUST for all email notifications for daily catch-up, task updates, status changes, task comments & replies.

You can download the open-source (V1.8.0) for both Linux and Windows.

Preferred Linux OS – Centos 7, Ubuntu 18

Fixes Covered in this Release:

• Unable to Save a New Task Template
• Headers already sent warning fixes
• Table add-ons for model add-on were not found in data source default issue
• Invalid command ‘Header’
• Remove username from the drop-down
• Remove checkbox when no users are in the list from Add user popup
• Create task page layout changes
• My dashboard popup design changes
• Making the validation message throughout consistent
• Create a milestone button blink issue fixes while changing the list view or grid view
• Loader not removed after adding users
• Deprecation issue fixes
• Email Notification off on button design change
• Issue fixes in the add user to project popup
• Icon colors are not prominent in a new dropdown
• Filter box design changes after individual filters applied
• Deprecated warning message fixes in the footer, to-dos, task list, login form
• Base code invite user functionality removed, owner/admin can directly add users with email id and password

FREE DOWNLOAD V1.8.0

Get your team on-board, organize projects by breaking them down into manageable milestones and tasks & track them through to successful completion.

Orangescrum open source edition is built to scale with your organization and project needs. Moreover, it is the foundation of your enterprise project management platform.

Want to take things slow?

Not a problem. We have built a host of project management & productivity plugins to help you plan, execute, monitor and analyze your project delivery and team performance in a holistic manner.

Mix n Match the features you need, as and when you need them and enhance the overall project management experience for your teams and customers.

You cannot go wrong with any of our project management and collaboration features ranging from advanced task management, executive dashboards, time and resource management, bug and defect management, single sign-on or the revamped mobile app.

Start tracking projects with Orangescrum today!