Category: Managed IT Services

The principal aim of this article is to identify and explore multiple dimensions of project failures during the entire life of project execution.

Many projects fail. The only way that companies can get better at performing projects is by learning from projects they have carried out. There are small things that can decide the fate of the project.

These all in project management practice and research has been to see it as a threat and as something that should, if possible, be neutralized, reduced and followed.

Question – “Did the project deliver the results and quality we expected?“

Answers to this question could be different from a different perspective. There is no single method or organizational structure that can be used to manage projects to success. Project failure can happen in any organization.

There are many reasons why projects (both simple and complex) fail; the number of reasons can be infinite and can fit into a different phase of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), initiation through go live. Sometimes it’s out of the control of a project manager and/or the team members. Sometimes failure is controllable.

Here are some of the common reasons why the project fails.

1. Incompetent Project Manager — A manager who helps steer the project in a timely fashion and provides sound, inspiring leadership can go a long way toward bringing about a successful project.

2. Less Involvement of Project Managers — Even the biggest project depends on the success of the smallest components. On relatively inexperienced teams, managers must be involved in the details for key activities.

3. Unavailability to Skilled Resources — Managers always struggle for the right skilled resources; leadership must provide planned/skilled resources on time to avoid project delay or failure.

4. Lack of Proper Planning — Without a clear focus at the earliest stage of the project, you make things harder on yourself, leading to inappropriate estimations and half-cooked planning.

5. Lack of Management Support/Leadership Alignment — Senior management must remain fully engaged throughout the project life cycle.

6. Missing Communication — A clear communication plan with stakeholder details, distribution methods, and frequency is essential to save your project from failure.

7. Ignoring Change Management Process — Every project must have a change control process, and every change request, however small, must go through it.

8. No-Risk Management Process — Many projects fail because there is no risk management process as an integral part of the management process.

9. Inadequate Quality Assurance — Managers often fail to plan appropriate reviews, tests, or checkpoints where quality can be verified.

10. Missing Management Tools/Framework — The right methodology and management tools help managers stay on top of the project.

11. Company/Culture — A political culture unsupportive of competency and transparency will leave team members unmotivated.

12. Inappropriate Prioritization — Managers should lead prioritization exercises with all relevant stakeholders, weighing value, cost, and risk.

13. Inaccurate Stakeholder Analysis — Identify your stakeholders, understand their influence and interest, and develop a plan to win their support.

14. Use of Unfamiliar Tools — Unfamiliar tools can cause severe problems as teams deal with a learning curve on top of usual duties.

15. Always Saying “Yes” to the Customer — Change is a major cause of project failure; before committing to something, analyze the pros and cons.

16. Bonding Between Team Members — It is the manager’s job to unite the team through forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.

17. Unrealistic Expectations — Set realistic expectations for every team member early so they don’t lose clarity and focus.

18. Talking Through Problems — Stakeholders have a vested interest in the project’s success and have a right to know about developments impacting the outcome.

19. Guesstimates on Effort — Inaccurate “gut feel” estimates can leave a team slogging to meet a deadline with a huge effort overrun.

20. Avoiding Code Reviews — Code review helps produce a stable, quality deliverable and catches issues testing alone may miss.

21. Skipping Prototyping — A sketch, wireframe, mockup, or prototype keeps expectations aligned and communication clear between stakeholders.

How many times do you get pulled into a lengthy email thread with co-workers? If your team communications are hard to document and scattered across programs, Microsoft Teams is the solution — a cloud-based collaboration tool that’s part of the Office 365 suite. Core capabilities include:

• Creating and managing workgroups
• Chat and instant messaging
• Audio calling
• Impromptu or scheduled video meetings
• File and link sharing
• Documenting work and resources
• Simplified access to other Office apps

Teams works across devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones) and platforms (Windows and Mac), and can even bring in outside partners like vendors and consultants — a big plus for productivity and project management.

Better Than Slack & Google Hangouts

At its core, Teams is a chat-based workspace with group and private messaging, and threaded, persistent conversations. It’s more robust than similar tools, comes included with Office 365, and connects to Excel, Word, OneNote, Planner and SharePoint. Skype for Business users should note its 2020 sunset date pushes most organizations toward Teams.

Customize With Channels

Teams are made up of channels organized by topic, project, or department, storing meeting history, chats and shared resources, all searchable. Channels can be customized with tabs for SharePoint, Planner, OneNote and other apps. @ mentions make it easy to reach a specific member or the whole team, and the Activity tab helps you catch up on unread messages and replies.

Video & Voice Meetings

Schedule voice and video meetings directly from a thread or from Outlook, launch impromptu calls, and record meetings easily. A background-blur AI feature helps remote workers keep calls looking professional.

By now, most of us are conducting business by phone and Zoom — but a surprising lack of professionalism, preparation and organization keeps showing up on video calls. First impressions matter, so here are 5 tips to make a great one on your next Zoom meeting with a prospect or client.

Tip #1: Clear away distractions. Just because you’re working from home doesn’t mean a barking dog or kids in the background belong on camera. Get help managing them, take the dog outside, and create a professional environment.

Tip #2: Dress the part. Business casual beats a t-shirt. Shave, comb your hair, and generally look like you’re ready for a meeting, not the couch.

Tip #3: Get your lighting right. Don’t sit backlit by a window or in a dark room — turn on lights or open the blinds so your face is clearly visible.

Tip #4: Mind your background. A messy room reflects poorly on you. If you don’t have a clean, professional background, use one of Zoom’s virtual backgrounds instead.

Tip #5: Be professional and respectful. Show up on time, don’t talk over people, and send a thank-you email afterward — the same things you’d do in the office.

Incorporate these 5 tips and you’ll stand apart from everyone else calling in from their bedrooms and patios. Always present your best in every client interaction.

The success of your business depends on your IT infrastructure — it’s often the source of competitive advantage for small and medium-sized organizations. Outdated or poorly performing IT hurts productivity, and running a full-time, in-house IT department can be a heavy burden of time, money, and staffing. That’s why many businesses turn to managed IT services.

What Are Managed IT Services?

‘Managed services’ describes the model that has replaced traditional IT support, where a Managed Service Provider — a team with expertise in networks, computers and other IT needs — handles the risk and responsibility of managing your IT systems.

What Are the Benefits?

Managed IT services increase performance, reliability and security without the cost of a full in-house staff. A good provider prevents expensive network disasters through proactive maintenance, planned backups, security and disaster recovery. Outsourcing lets you focus on your business instead of solving IT problems yourself.

What Services Does a Provider Offer?

Technical staff perform remote maintenance and support, providing 24×7 monitoring so your network runs at maximum speed and stability. This includes virus protection, backup monitoring, software patching, desktop management, firewall management, spyware detection, and hardware/software auditing.

Find a provider that understands your company’s IT requirements and helps you reach your goals — look beyond marketing at services offered, customer service, availability and reputation.

In any business, especially an IT firm, data is one of the key elements used in running daily operations. Advances in technology have paved the way for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which offers real advantages over traditional backup and in-house disaster recovery.

Fewer Necessary Resources

DRaaS recovery data lives in the cloud, cutting on-premises hardware requirements. It can protect a single server or a whole group, letting companies resume limited operations much faster than with traditional DR.

Cyberattack Mitigation

Cyberattacks like ransomware and phishing pose huge threats. With DRaaS, you can invoke your DR plan to bring applications live in the cloud from a clean copy of your data, then replicate back once your production systems are clean — beating negotiating with an attacker for your data.

Lower Cumulative Costs

Since the provider owns the hardware and software, your initial investment is small compared to buying and maintaining your own backup servers.

Easier Testing

Failover testing becomes as simple as pointing and clicking, with good tools for monitoring and an easily verifiable audit trail.

Flexibility

DRaaS lets you choose recovery scopes for different disaster types — server failure, human error, power loss, data tampering and more.

Rapid and Immediate Recovery

Every second of downtime costs money. A DRaaS solution can restore normal operations within minutes of a disaster.

Reliable Security

Choose a provider carefully — look for regulatory compliance, physical data center security, encryption in-flight and at rest, and automated health monitoring with reporting.

Streamlines In-House IT Needs

DRaaS lets businesses without deep IT expertise leverage a provider’s specialists for a more effective disaster recovery solution.

Small and medium-sized businesses juggle a lot: acquiring customers, avoiding inefficiency, managing costs, hiring, and keeping up with industry trends. Technology can help, but it brings its own challenges — which is where managed services come in: specialized IT support delivered under a clear service-level agreement for a low, predictable cost.

Stability and Expertise

Predictable IT costs replace unpredictable break-fix bills with a stable, budgetable schedule. Legitimate training and real-world experience mean a managed service provider has likely already seen your problem before, unlike a narrowly-focused in-house hire.

Reduced Risk, Leveled Playing Field

A trusted MSP absorbs much of the risk that comes with fast-changing regulations and technology, giving small businesses enterprise-level solutions and compliance support (firewalls, audits, PCI standards) they couldn’t otherwise afford.

Break-Fix: High Cost, Low Value

Many small firms drift through stages: an untrained employee handling IT on the side (‘Hey, Margaret!’), a part-time contractor stretched across many clients (‘I got a guy’), a reactive one-off repair shop (‘Call in the Geek Squad’), and finally a single in-house hire who’s perpetually stuck reacting to the next fire.

Managed Services: Low Cost, High Value

A proactive approach identifies problems before they affect productivity, applies the right-skilled resource to each issue, and enables fast response at multiple support levels — improving both immediate productivity and long-term technology literacy.

The break-fix model has failed to meet the needs of small and medium businesses and strained the relationship between technicians and the businesses they serve. Only a shift toward managed IT support can deliver greater efficiency at a lower, more predictable cost.

Office 365 is the next level of the traditional Microsoft Office package — a subscription-based virtual office that goes beyond Word, Excel and PowerPoint, adding dynamic tools like OneDrive, Skype and Yammer.

New Applications Are More Office-Friendly — beyond the traditional apps, Office 365 adds OneDrive, Skype and Yammer to help you get the most out of your potential.

Use the Latest Version and Save Money — applications update automatically for free, with no need to buy pricey new software.

Mobility Matters — work from anywhere, anytime, with tools like Skype video calling making remote meetings productive.

No Platform Restriction — Apple, Android and Windows all work flawlessly, with up to 15 licenses across mobile, tablet and PC/Mac.

Sharing Is Caring — real-time co-editing and sharing across every app, with Yammer working like an internal social network for discussion and review.

Award-Winning Security — work with confidence behind a robust, award-winning security layer.

Superb Storage Solution — OneDrive gives you a staggering 5 terabytes of space.

Boost Your Productivity — Office 365 is built to keep you productive all 365 days of the year, helping you stay a step ahead of the competition.

Microsoft SharePoint is a web application platform built for document and content management. It handles huge amounts of data with flexibility and support for add-ons, and each version brings enhanced capabilities for managing business operations.

Complete Management — SharePoint works as an intranet supporting document management, project collaboration, workflow applications, and a portal for posting key metrics and performance indicators.

Workflow Improvement — SharePoint’s cloud solutions handle almost any business workflow, integrating well with the Microsoft Office stack, Outlook, and even natively with SQL Server.

Collaboration in the Workplace — instead of passing a task from person to person, a procedure manual can be uploaded once and edited by different people on a single platform.

Easy Customization — store files directly on SharePoint instead of emailing attachments, restrict or grant access to specific users, and share a directory with a simple link.

Security — individual team sites can be locked down so only members of that team even know the site exists, making SharePoint sites extremely secure.

Support Services — SharePoint support services are especially useful for small and mid-sized organizations that lack a formal document management or business automation system.