Orangescrum Capabilities That Increase Your Productivity

There are a lot of articles, suggestions, tools available to increase your productivity. But at the end of the day, it will not enhance your productivity unless you organize yourself and generate optimum output with minimum input.

Question is why you or enterprises want their employees to be highly productive at a workplace?

• You want to do more work at less time?
• You want to achieve better results of the work you do with your time?
• By more productive, you want to earn more with your time?
• You want to be more productive to relax and make life easier?
• You want time to do something you’re passionate about?

If you look at the above points, then you will get one thing, without managing your time effectively you can’t increase your productivity.

You can use all possible tools and systems at your disposal, but what matters most is “your own awareness of your time & how effectively do you use it”.

“People’s behaviour stats show that they actually use 60% or less of available work time. Even though they are physically at work five days a week, they are only productively using three days. So you pay almost 70% extra wage for getting things done.”

Let us see how an intuitive and smart time tracking solution can help you manage the greatest of resources; i.e. “Time” and lead to optimum results for your team and company.

Time and Resource Management

As amply clear, you can never be more productive without managing your time. And to this effect you need

• An inbuilt Smart Timer – to track your time.
• Resource Availability – to help you decide whom to use, when and where.
• Resource Utilization – to review and analyze how your team fared w.r.t the estimated time.
• Leave Planner – to have a robust resource planning with real time insights.

Let us see how Orangescrum’s Time and Resource Management capabilities help you achieve

ALL of the above!

Timer to Track Time:

With smart intuitive timer, you can track the exact time spent by you or a resource on a task. It will give a better idea how much time you’re spending; accordingly, you can manage your time or you can take corrective measures.

How to use the timer?

You can start timer in 4 ways;

• Task List Page
• Quick Links
• Quick Button
• Task Detail Page

From the task list page, you can click on the dropdown as shown in the below image and then click on “Start Timer” to track your time.

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Why Project Management Is Effective For Your Business And Teams

Hey you, what are you doing here? If you are checking this out it means one or two things. You are determined to learn more about your project management challenges and the next step is to find the best project management platform that would solve your problems.

OR, you have already got a project management platform in place and it sucks!!

By that I mean, it is too hard to use, too unreliable, too freaking expensive.

That’s right. When you think of project management you are figuring having to spend considerable time, money and effort. And that is exactly what general project management platforms/tools are now charging you.

But, there has to be a better way, right? And that is why you are here. In this article, we will discuss the core elements that we sometimes neglect and consider unimportant, which leads to drastic changes in the desired business outcomes.

Whether you are in charge of designing a car, moving your team to a new facility, preparing a solid marketing campaign, preparing advertisement framework for your client, or just about any other project (large or small), you will consciously or unconsciously go through the same four phases of project management: Planning, Defining, Implementation, and Performance Review.

For example, if you are in charge of planning a marketing automation, you’ll typically begin planning with the desired outcome and an estimated deadline for completion of the automation.

Then you will have a ballpark budget allocated to each campaign. Once you are in the Defining and Implementation phases, you will need to structure the framework and start executing the details of the project.

While defining or executing the project, you are most certain to come across new information, and based on the new information gathered, you will have to revise your budget, project deadline, implementation model, etc.

In other words, more you understand the bigger picture; the better you will plan your project.

You see, what stands between us and achieving our most ambitious goals has far less to do with possessing some magical skills or talent, and far more to do with how we approach problems and make decisions to solve them.

And because of the continuous and compounding nature of all those millions of decisions you make on a regular basis, even a marginal improvement in our process has huge impact on our end results.

Now let me prove this to you by taking an overview of each of these phases and the activities involved.

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Things Productivity Tools won’t solve

Each one of us is busy digging for productivity tools for ourselves. It’s the in thing. It’s the buzz word to live by (for the foreseeable future at least) with AI and Robots all set to knock on your desk. Not your fault!

Absolutely fine… there is nothing wrong with it.

But, yessss the BIG but – are we really aware of what triggered this search for the perfect productivity tool???

Why do YOU think you are “not productive”?

What makes you think you will turn productive overnight with a “tool” by your side?

What makes the tool superior than you?

• Fear of the unknown
• (perceived)Lack of abilities
• Or lack of trust on your own capabilities
• Plain and simple habit of procrastination
• Do not find the work rewarding
• Or mere lack of focus

Really, what is it….

You wake up with a smile, get going with your daily chores and all set on your desk. And then you see the tasks of the day staring at you. You take a good look and then first head out to your inbox. (Procrastination Step 1)

Between clearing your inbox and getting back to your tasks you get sucked into that erratic phone call, continuous pings on the office chat and obviously your Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn pages. 

All of these normal & seemingly harmless daily activities have 

PROCRASTINATION written all over them. 

No “productivity system” can beat this. And you guessed it right – You CAN!

We are a comfy yet scared species. (Just as all the others, I think?)

We are at our intelligent best when we want to shy away from situations that are uncomfortable, bring in uncertainty and make us feel helpless or depict our lack of control. 

It is normal. We all are guilty of doing it at one point or the other. 

What matters, is getting ourselves past this. As they say – ships are safest on the harbour. But they aren’t meant for that!

And what do we do exactly?

Break Free – No, don’t run away from the tasks you see as daunting. Just take a walk in the park or around office, regroup your thoughts, and identify what is required of you and what is more important…. Shying away from your responsibility or diving through the storm and come out stronger!

Accept and Make peace – Be honest with yourself. Accept that you are frightened. Make peace with the fact that may be you will not be able to pass the test with flying colors.  Persistence is far more important than winning.

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How To Spot And Rescue A Failing Project

Most often, we all follow the success story/path/strategy of other businesses or individuals. But sometime it may boomerang for new or existing businesses. By the time we realize, the project is already in trouble and started failing.

There are many reasons for project failure. Stakeholders change project objectives, bad planning of resources and priorities, sudden budget or time cut etc. 

It is very hard to spot the early signs of project failure, but here is how you can spot the mistakes relatively easy, if you’re watching and how you’ll rescue or turnaround it in quick time.

It is very hard to spot the early signs of project failure, but here is how you can spot the mistakes relatively easy, if you’re watching and how you’ll rescue or turnaround it in quick time. 

• Stakeholders are not attending project meetings
• Developers are leaving the project
• The financial group is asking just too many questions about daily expenses/resource allocations
• Project Milestones are not completing on time
• Expense is higher than estimated

Once you find out these issues frequently you need to review projects immediately. The review includes budget, expenses, execution plans, resource allocations etc.

As a manager, you need to reassess if you go by the same strategy, plan whether to achieve the project goal on time and budget or you need to stop all project activities for a period in order to re-plan, modify the design, improve the communication strategy after discussing with all stakeholders, and then, finally, realign all the necessary resources. 

Depending upon the unique aspects of a project, there could be multiple reasons for a project going out of control. It may include the following:

Sloppy Requirements Gathering:

With our eagerness to start a project, most of the times we gather incomplete requirements. 

Any incomplete requirements will have both a negative cost and schedule impact on the project, if you are developing a project using a standard waterfall methodology. 

User requirements are still utmost important in iterative development projects which can be negotiated ahead of any development stage.

For projects to succeed, it must start with compact user requirements.

Schedule Slippage:

Many times, project schedules get out of control when dates and deliverables aren’t monitored and tracked on a daily basis. 

Aiming the quick progress of the projects, managers leave behind issues unresolved for days, which indirectly affects schedule managements. I recommend that you should check project schedules daily.

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