Rocket Boost Productivity

As you build your digital workspace, you’ll likely notice small improvements in productivity. However, most of the bottlenecks and challenges remain, resulting in a lack of major improvement.

The truth is the technology isn’t transformative. It’s how you use it. Attempting to digitise inefficient or ineffective processes will often create more problems than benefits. The success of a digital workplace depends on new working practices and the way business problems are approached.

Here Are 4 Ways I Can Help Your Teams Increase Productivity

1. Deploy/Optimise Task Management Tools

Most task management tools are easy-to-use from a technical perspective. Knowing which methodology to use can be tricky. Will you go Traditional or Agile; Kanban, Scrum, Waterfall or hybrid? Using the right technique will ensure you achieve the intended benefits. I help you to “understand the buttons” and to apply that functionality for a specific goal.

Benefits & Features:

Live workflow visuals
24 hour task tracking
Clear communication of priorities
Productivity metrics
Automatic flagging of late tasks
Organise communication by project or task
Integration with email and other apps

Greater visibility of task information enables:

Improved oversight
Efficient management of flexible workers
Clarity of responsibilities and feeling accountable.
Greater task awareness and teamwork
Greater ability to collaborate and support colleagues
Faster response to bottlenecks and challenges

Tools range in sophistication, but even simple apps such as Trello (above) can show impeded work activities, priorities and assignees.

2. Build KPI Dashboards

Do you have important information in a spreadsheet or SQL file? You can create stunning interactive visuals from your data using business intelligence apps. Microsoft Power BI and Google Data studio are free business intelligence tools with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace respectively. If you are not familiar with business intelligence applications, think of them as spreadsheet pivot tables and graphs on steroids. Hours of work in Excel can take just minutes using Power BI. Interrogating your data will also feel more like a modern app experience.

Benefits & Features:

Drill into your data with ease
Automatic report generation
Identify important trends
Widen access to information among employees
Effective communication of KPI’s and progress

Example Power BI Dashboard

3. Organise the Digital Workspace

An organised digital workspace places all the information you need at your fingertips and makes collaborating with colleagues a breeze.

Most begin their journey with a secure platform and array of buttons. If you’re not sure of the difference between teams, channels and workspaces then I can help. If you’re team has an organised space for chat and files, but you’d like to explore integrating more functionality – then I can help.

I run workshops with small teams to develop a “Team Guide”. This is a small document that clearly states chosen best practices.

As an example, a team workshop on digital communication would cover:

Which tool to use for each type of communication,
How quickly team members should respond on each communication platform,
When it’s ok to turn notifications off,
The best method of communicating if a reply is urgent (usually a phone call for remote teams)
Each team or team member’s default configurations,
The purpose of @mentions, threads, direct message and feeds etc
The team’s chosen best practices.

A symptom of a digital workspace in need of organisation is information overload. If you can’t see the "digital wood from the trees” this is a great article to read - click here.

Benefits:

Information you need at your fingertips
A customised digital hub for each team
Deliver a virtual office-like experience
A clear written guide customised for your team
An organised platform for future integrations and improvements

An Example Workshop Activity

4. Establish a Continuous Improvement Process

Making small, regular changes over time is often more effective than a “big bang” transformation. Especially when changes are driven by insights from your people.

Armed with greater visibility and insight your people can easily spot key areas to improve. Using task management tools improvement actions can be structured into a clear plan. You can easily track metrics to identify the most successful changes.

For a simple example of how frustrations can be structured into a clear improvement plan – Click Here. Thoughts are brainstormed using a digital white board. Trello is used to prioritise and track improvement work.

The largest improvements in productivity usually result from a strong foundation covering: