Photo by thetaxhaven
Within a competitive society such as the one we live in today, you can’t afford to run a slow and ragged business. You need to invest time in planning, you need to think of possible expansion and give consideration to how your employees can work the most efficiently without having to rip their hair out to meet deadlines every time.
1. Provide the Right Equipment
With current advances in technology it shouldn’t be too hard to provide your staff with computers that are powerful enough to deal with day to day activities.
However if your employees are doing some specialised job, such as design or video editing for example, they might need better hardware. Try to anticipate their needs and give them a machine that can actually handle the job.
2. Work out the Workflow
Draw a diagram that can help you visualise what stages your product or service goes through if you need to. If you can’t visualise all the stages, you can’t assign proper roles and you can’t adequately predict what resources you need.
Failure to work out your workflow can mean your company winds up with either not being able to cope with the workload because the flow bottlenecks somewhere, or turns into an over bureaucratic mess that will slow everything down since everything goes through too many steps.
3. Hold Meetings When Needed
It’s a good idea to keep everyone in the know and let them see the bigger picture. This way you can get suggestions and perspective from angles you haven’t previously thought about which can lead you to a much clearer picture of the daily operations of your company and its employees.
It will be also be much easier to know if there are any stops in the workflow and find solutions with the key people in the right way and at the right time.
4. Use Cloud
Cloud allows faster sharing and editing of data across multiple computers.
The ability to access information and documents and modify them in real time is becoming a necessity in a society where everything goes faster by the minute. Businesses reflect this – they have to deliver a new product every few months, or develop the next technological breakthrough before someone else does.
There are different types of colocation services each one with their pros. Even if you are concerned with data protection and security, there are services that give you total control over what goes on in your servers if you are willing to invest the IT staff to maintain them.
In a world where even email is becoming slow, cloud storage allows for immediate interaction. Do you feel your company has greatly benefitted from it, or do you think it is too much like hard work to integrate into everyday working life?
Attached Images:
- License: Creative Commons image source
James Duval is an IT manager who deals both with people and technology. When he’s not busy driving forward the latest development project he blogs for ConnetU London Colocation.