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Is your company striving to break the glass ceiling?

Breaking the glass ceilingCompanies striving to break the glass ceiling can deploy several tactics to promote transparency in hiring and retaining women and minority employees. Large public companies including Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have led the way in this promotion by revealing internal data concerning the racial makeup of their workforce.

One of the key ways that corporations can remove the glass ceiling is by demonstrating behaviors that value diversity. This can be accomplished in three steps.

  1. To respect cultural, religious, gender, and racial differences.
  2. To manage and work with individuals from different racial or cultural backgrounds.
  3. To promote overall demographic balance within an organization; one that relates to the demographic makeup of a company’s broader geographic area.

Being a diverse company has several tangible benefits. Ethnically diverse companies are 35 percent more likely to outperform non-ethnically diverse companies, and gender diverse companies are 15 percent more likely to outperform their non-gender diverse counterparts. Studies also indicate that a company’s earnings rise 0.8 percent for every 10 percent increase in racial and ethnic diversity they deploy.

The University of Ohio in the United States has produced an interesting Infographic about The Glass Ceiling frustrating Women and Minorities in Business. Although statistics pertain to the US only, it’s very insightful, especially the reference made to the Success Stories of the Tory Burch and Sheryl Sandberg Foundations. Sandberg’s book, Lean In, made a big impression on me when I read it a few years ago and it’s a book I would recommend to all young professional women.

 

 

The Glass Ceiling Frustrating Women & Minorities in Business

The Glass Ceiling

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Are you Facing these Agile Challenges?

It’s only in recent years that I started working on Agile projects following the Scrum approach. And what a journey it has been so far! Challenging that traditional way of working mindset of being a PMP (Project Management Professional) for 14 years working mostly on ‘waterfall’ type projects.

You find yourself facing common struggles while going through the motions of changing your mindset which really is essential for successfully adoption an agile approach.

Companies who provide consultation and training around Agile, realise that teams are faced with many challenges when making the transition to Agile. At Knowledge Train they have published an e-book with stories from Industry experts who shared about their challenges with Agile and the solutions they use to overcome it.

Below is an Infographic with some of the most common challenges!

Please click on the Infographic to reach the article where you may download the e-book: “The Challenges with Agile”.

The challenges with Agile

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Social Media as a Customer Service Tool

Social Media on projects

On the Virtual Project Consulting blog we have discussed various topics around social media and it’s uses for project management. Lately, we looked at use cases and research about shaping social media for better collaboration on projects and using it to make project management more future fit.

However, social media have multiple purposes in the business world, especially as a means for customer service that will serve companies well.

SM for customer service

Customer Service Channel

Social media is a unique customer service channel because it allows you to engage with consumers in a way that was previously impossible, and despite this marked advantage, the technology is easy and cost-effective to implement. Moreover, leveraging social media for customer service allows you to build a strong relationship with your audience and discover previously unnoticed market opportunities.

As more people take to social media platforms, enterprise customer service activities will become increasingly transparent. As a result, it’s important to make sure that you get it right so that you don’t lose brand credibly or alienate your customers.

Social Media Customer Service in Practice

When using social media as a customer service channel, it’s important to make sure that your staff members are well-versed in using designated platforms as well as your product or service offerings and company policies. You should start your social media customer service initiative by clearly defining what services your organization will provide and estimating how much traffic volume your employees will manage. By establishing initial parameters, you’ll have a foundation to measure the performance of your new initiative. Furthermore, if your team meets their assigned goals, you’ll have quantifiable proof of your return-on-investment.

To learn more, view this Social Media Infographic, created by USC’s Online Master of Science in Applied Psychology program.

It covers different use cases for social media as a customer service channel, reasons for using it and the benefits you can expect.

SM as a customer service tool

 

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Top 10 Qualities of a Great Project Manager

When taking stock of 2017 and setting your goals for 2018, it’s a good opportunity to remind yourself of the top 10 qualities that will help to make you a great project manager, according to Brandeis University.

In the Infographic below, you will also find tips from experienced project managers. For more articles on project management skills and best practices, click here.

Brandeis University M.S. in Project and Program Management Online

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The Top Management Models for Fast-pacing Change in Business

Business executives believe that organizations need to adapt to change in order to have a competitive advantage. Change management programs involve organizational buy-in, design of change initiatives and seamless implementation of those initiatives. In a survey of North American executives, 54 percent stated they have successfully rolled out change management initiatives at their organizations. However, employees can be weary of change if they do not fully understand the initiatives and have experienced past change program failures. In fact, 48 percent of employees think their organizations lack the capabilities to sustain change initiatives.

For businesses to be successful, executives have to create management strategies that promote staff retention, revenue generation and a positive workplace culture. All employees have to support the change programs for business to have success in the future. Some of the common change models include Holocracy, the McKinsey 7-S and Kotter’s 8-step change initiative.

#1 Holocracy

Holocracy philosophy is the distribution of power to specific teams and employees at all levels are subject to the same rules. Organizations using Holocracy are more adaptive to change and have a clearer company mission with built-in reassessment to address future issues.

#2 McKinsey 7-S model

The McKinsey 7-S model uses strategy, structure, management activities, core values, style, capability of employees and competencies to see how the organization works. The model eases change transition and equalizes staff roles.

#3 Kotter 8-step Change Model

Kotter’s 8-step Change Model creates a sense of urgency, builds change teams, forms a strategic vision, enlists volunteers, empowers action, produces short-term wins, supports acceleration and incorporates change. This model is easy for businesses to adopt even in traditionally hierarchical systems.

Traditional management practices are bogging businesses down and make them unable to compete in today’s global market. Executives have to prepare their teams to adapt to these change models so they can control the implementation process and enhance business benefits. To learn more about the top business management models for effective management, check out the infographic below created by the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Online Master of Business Administration program.

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Project Managers – Find a Beginners Guide to Scrum

Agile management frameworks are growing in popularity across many industries. Scrum is an agile framework that helps teams manage product development. The core principle behind Scrum is the understanding that customers can often change their mind about what they want at any stage of a project. For some teams, this can generate a lot of rework particularly in the later stages of development, which wastes time and money. Scrum manages this by delivering quickly in increments, gaining feedback early and adapting the product as necessary.

As with all agile frameworks, Scrum encourages team collaboration, frequent communication and continuous improvement. You can download an A0 size poster version of the graphic to print and display in your office!

If you’re interested to learn how Scrum typically works, take a look at the graphic below designed by Knowledge Train.

The Scrum methodology: a visual guideINFOGRAPHIC

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Project Managers – Find a Beginners Guide to Kanban

By Alison Wood

It is no surprise that many organizations are adopting agile methods to manage their workflow. Kanban is one of the methods under the agile umbrella. Once understood, embraced and adopted successfully, you can expect significant improvements to your workflow and team collaboration.

The principle behind the Kanban method is to decrease and manage blockages in workflow, which can disrupt the entire team. It is a beneficial choice for teams that deliver frequently and for software development teams, even allowing teams to deliver daily if required. It is a very visual management method which usually revolves around the use of a whiteboard, coloured sticky notes and markers. Working like this allows the entire team to view the work progress and easily spot problems if they arise.

If you’re interested to learn about how Kanban works, take a look at the graphic below designed by Knowledge Train.

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How Project Managers Manage Virtual Teams

managing virtual teams successfully
Managing Virtual Teams

With more companies expanding globally, the trend to work on projects with virtual team members who are remote workers, is growing. I have now worked on a project spanning three countries across three different time-zones. Despite having cloud-based tools for project plan sharing and logging test defects, the latest communication technology like Skype for Business in addition to everyday emails, it has been severely challenging.

Challenges in handling virtual teams

Project managers face a variety of challenges when handling virtual team members who work from different locations, who are permanent or freelance workers, who come from different backgrounds and cultures. It can be difficult to schedule a meeting with all members at a fixed time, especially with a 8 hour time-zone difference as was the case with my project. It impacts the decision-making process negatively.

It can be difficult to communicate a message correctly to remote workers. They may fail to understand the context or cannot grasp specific issues related to a project. They don’t always appreciate the consequences if they fail to have a same-day turnaround, that it can cause 2-3 days delays.

A risk I had to manage through-out was to keep team members aligned in terms of the project schedule, the latest decisions, new project baselines etc. Due to the fact that one team worked during another team’s night time and visa versa, it meant that any requests sent via email had to be very clear in terms of context and what was expected. If the receiver of the email had a question, they usually had to wait another day to receive an answer. This caused repeated delays in getting multiple requests fulfilled. As the project progressed, and especially during testing when team members in different time zones had to work together, we had to resort to different work hours to create more of an overlap between team members and to enhance the communication process and response times to issues and defects.

How to manage remote teams effectively

It’s important for project managers to effectively manage both remote and on-site team members to achieve project success. Have a look at the infographic below from Wrike Software, providing a checklist for managing Virtual Teams.

Go through our Virtual Team Management Checklist to see what your virtual team is missing! #infographic
Infographic brought to you by Wrike

Another recommended resource for Virtual Teams:

“The Ultimate List of Virtual Team Building Activities”

 

Please subscribe to Virtual Project Consulting not to miss future articles, tips and success stories!

 
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How Big Data Can Solve Leadership Challenges

Big data can be defined as ‘the large volume of data – both structured and unstructured – that inundates a business on a day to day basis’, according to research done by the University of Norwich. Data that modern businesses generate including web traffic logs, social media posts, blog posts, transactional data etc.

By understanding big data and analyzing it correctly, leaders can benefit greatly from the insights provided which will lead to better decisions and more strategic businesses. It can be used to extract insights on consumer behavior, market trends, revenue growth, as well as brand perception and reach; therefore solving diverse automation and leadership challenges.

Find more fascinating research on big data’s role and impact on organizational leadership and management in this Infograpic brought to you with compliments from the Norwich University’s Online Master of Science in Leadership program.

It explains the challenges posed by big data, how big data is utilized across organisations, how big data is fueling business growth, requirements for handling big data and some case studies.

Consider this research when you create your strategies for dealing with big data.
Big Data and Leadership DevelopmentNorwich University Master of Science in Leadership Online

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Why Goal Setting is Important to Project Success

Through the power of goal setting, project managers can set objectives for their teams and watch them accomplish their mission. Goals need to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

There are several benefits to SMART goals, like when project managers outline their expectations by keeping them out in the open. In so doing, they increase the probability of employees and team members being successful by up to 70%, thanks to regular check-ins, updates and group accountability. This statistic is supported by the recent research of Dr. Gail Matthews.

SMART goals help project managers effectively create the focus and drive that employees and organizations need to constantly operate as high performers. High-performing organizations successfully complete an average of over 80% of their projects.

Through SMART goal setting, priorities become clear. There is a clear and specific focus that employees of all levels are committed to. Along with clarity and focus, the motivation of being able to measure progress in light of milestones achieved, further bolsters the positive effects and total results of SMART goal setting.

For more on the power of GOAL setting see the Infographic from Brandeis University.

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Project Managers Discover Top Time Management Tips and Techniques

An important responsibility of a project manager is to manage time as a constraint which involves keeping an eye on the project schedule, ensuring team members are delivering on milestones, while having to keep track of your own time spent as well.

While your role is varied since you need to cater for every aspect of the project from cost management to human resource management, you are accountable for the overall delivery including all tasks tied to the project. This does not mean that the project manager must micro-manage everyone on the team as individuals are primarily responsible for various aspects of the project.

However, we find that a number of project managers spend time doing too much management and fire-fighting and then they are left with little or no time to work on strategy, leading the team and focusing on tasks that only they can perform.  An efficient project manager, therefore, should be able to effectively develop strategies for his/her team and perform oversight functions effectively all while being on schedule.

To support you to be more professional as a project manager, here is an infographic with very helpful time management tips with complements from Nutcache.

http://www.nutcache.com/blog/time-management-prerequisite-great-project-managers-infographic/