Any single person, who has ever worked as a PM, realizes the amount of work and tasks they should perform in a rather short period of time. That is why, modern project managers refer to cutting-edge project management tools.
The abundance of such tools on the market can confuse everyone and even a hard-hearted PM. But in case you are a fresher and it is your first experience of being a project manager, you may happen to be heaped under the number of PM solutions and their peculiarities.

Here are tips for a “chicken” PM about selecting the most effective tool:
-    At first, select a few tools that you seem to like and consider them. After that define your goals and mind what exactly you expect from a project management tool. If you want it to track issues and time, or to offer graphic planning, do make a choice about the tool that offers all necessary features.
-    Secondly, after choosing some of the software that really can suit your demands apply for trial or demo versions of the solutions. They are usually free, and you have about a month testing them and making your final decision about any of them.
-    Thirdly, conducting a demo, be careful to use all the features of the project management tool. Pay attention how quick they work; how they present the results; if there are any bugs or malfunctions. When coming across any trouble, you had better contact the support team of every tool.
-    Fourth, paying attention to the fact how the company works with clients.  Tech support of the software is crucial, as you never know what problems can turn up. It is excellent if the company offers some tutorials, a knowledge base, guides etc.
-    Fifthly, the price of the chosen solution may seem too heavy to purchase it.  Then, you should continue searching the market for the tools that offer the same, but at less price.

Having picked up a tool that fully corresponds to your demands and that fits the price budget; consult the team you are working with. They are supposed to approve the software as well, as they are working with you and they should feel more or less confident about it.

To increase your chances, it would be a good idea to complete an IT Degree Program at a college or university. They will help you learn the skills needed to work in the field.

A Microsoft Office Specialist is a person who has taken a special exam from the Microsoft Authorized Testing Center on one of the company’s products.

Getting the certificate to be a Microsoft Office Specialist means that many opportunities become available to you. Many companies work with Microsoft Word and Excel.  You could be responsible for day-to-day running of the software, assisting in solving various technical troubles, and possibly training the staff.

As soon as you realize that you are in need of this certification, it is time you knew about the exam itself.

All the tasks for the exam are practical and you will be pushed to show a deep understanding of the Microsoft Office programs. The usual exam lasts for about an hour and includes various tasks dealing with the Office suite.

This exam is similar to ones you may take when you complete a Welding Program in that they are both technical and hands-on.

Surely, some time is needed to prepare for the exam even if you consider yourself a specialist already by your own standards. You will have to learn all tools in the Office suite. There are numerous sites on the Internet where you can get a lot of useful information to get you ready to learn at school.

After you feel like you’ve prepared enough, purchase a voucher for the exam. The exam is done electronically, and you know the results immediately. You must pass with a score of at least 80% to receive your certificate. In a matter of weeks you will receive a certificate by mail.

In the event that you fail the exam, you can always study again and then retake the exam.

Having this certificate shows that you are certified by Microsoft, one of the most valued and famous companies in the world. It will surely upgrade your career to a new level giving you the chance to apply for jobs with the certification on your resume.

And having a list of processes doesn’t mean that your project is protected. Some processes are so bad that it’s better to have none of them.  So here are some features of the processes that need to be improved and changed.

1. Difficult-to understand, bulky process

Some companies are so happy to have their processes that create too many of them, each consisting of many steps, sub-steps and alternative paths. As a result people can’t follow them. Such processes don’t help to make a right decision but may even confuse people. They have to spend a lot of time to study all that procedures and road-maps but this doesn’t influence their productivity and efficiency.

The only way to leave this trap is to simplify the processes. Sometimes it’s even easier to develop them from scratch. Doing this be sure that every process helps to achieve goal, that all the roles and responsibilities are described. It’s a good practice to involve your people in it – their feedback will be very valuable.

2. Purposeless processes

Almost every company existing for more than 2 years has such processes. Some time ago they had clear purposes and were very useful. But goals have changed, market has changed, tools and instruments have changed, company structure has changed… And today these processes are nothing but a waste of people’s efforts and time.

To avoid having such processes in your portfolio you need to review them at least 2 times a year. You need to be sure that every process impacts the project or company goals in the best possible way. Also make sure it isn’t possible to reach a goal a better way.

3. Untraceable processes
Traceable or trackable means capable of being tracked or suitable for tracking. As a manager you need to have an instrument to measure the effectiveness of every process to understand when and what should be improved. So your processes need have identification procedure, so as the way to monitor their progress on every step. It’s good to use a process tracking solution that is flexible and customizable enough to fit your needs and goals.

My conclusion: working without processes is a bad fashion but following bad processes is even worse because this way ruin any perfect idea or project.

In this article, we are going to investigate what attracts people to the IT industry.

First and foremost, individuals in the IT industry must have a passion for technology. They have a strong interest in different types of computer hardware and software in support of modern networking solutions through platforms such as Microsoft, Cisco and Linux applications.

For those men and women who complete an Electronic Engineering course, they receive education in advanced technologies that have serious impact on our lives. For information systems and security professionals, they work with cloud computing, mobile, security, business intelligence and big data issues.  More and more educational institutions offer training courses to cover these areas. The popularity of such training courses is obvious, because of their immense influence on our society. We cannot imagine our lives without computers, smartphones, and even cloud services. All of these technologies impact our lives both personally and professionally at some point.

Many people are attracted to the fact that IT firms are known for retaining and developing their IT staff. Having an opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies is also a major draw for those interested in the IT field. Because of the lack of physical activity needed to complete the work, many IT professionals feel they can work well past normal retirement age and still apply their skills and knowledge part-time after they retire.

If you or someone you know has a passion for technology, computing, or engineering you should consider looking into some of the Western Tech programs that cover IT training or electrical engineering as a possible first step in acquiring the knowledge and skills needed in the demanding world of technology.

As a company top or senior level manager you don’t just need to manage several people or even several teams. You are responsible for the general results generated by different departments. If this statement is about you than I’m sure that you face the situation when some organizational issues can take much more time than expected. People from one department waste their time waiting for the information or documents from the other departments. And they have no right to push the other department and even to set higher priorities. This decreases efficiency, doesn’t it?

The situation may be even worse. People from the first department may have no information about what the other department people are working over. Two departments may be doing similar things not knowing about it.  This decreases efficiency as well.

I think that you’ve got what I want to say. To increase the efficiency you need to think about the decreasing of information gaps between departments. I suggest to create a collaborative environment to keep the information up-to date for every person involved in a process or a project regardless of department or position.

This information might be accessible from everywhere using any technical device including mobile devices. But a company need to think about security and mobile file management as well. There should be a corporate policy for BYOD and mobile device management.

Also I believe that it’s very important to create a set of workflows for all the procedures that involve the people from more than one department. If you have such workflows you will decrease the information voids between departments. People will understand who will use their results. This creates additional incentive to do everything better and meet deadlines. Also this creates a sense of accomplishment. And additional motivation will be helpful on your way of improved efficiency. Do you agree?

Here are some of my recommendations. Will you add yours?

Everyone knows how annoying it is to track bugs and take care of defects once the process is completed, and that’s why it’s so important to organize your project management system in a way so it would be quality-oriented right from the start. So today we are going to discuss how to make project manager’s life easier and fix issues in shortest time possible.

Whether you are developing software or creating new marketing campaign, you need a project management solution that would help you track issues and deal with them right away. It’s been already mentioned that we can’t think of everything in the beginning of the project, that’s why it’s better to use project management solution that would allow you start working on the project even if number of required steps are still missing. Systems that enable you adding steps later on allow you to save time and start working on the project right away instead of waiting till last minute to get started.

To avoid mistakes it’s also highly important to use systems that allow you adjusting your project workflow. It’s especially crucial if you are working with a market that is extremely fluid. Software market, for instance. It may happen that in the middle of the project you are going to have to change some things simply because the current project has lost its relevance. And with flexible project management software, like Comindware Tracker, for instance, you won’t have to redesign your workflow completely or create a new one. You can apply any changes to your existing processes – additional steps, new assignees or new assignment – all within the user interface. The best thing is that you will be able to do this in real time without having to involve IT specialists.

Another thing that causes a lot of issues during project execution is absence of visibility and centralized communication platform. When all the messages and requests are scattered across email threads, Skype chats and IMs it’s hard to control the process. Once you have all your collaboration on the project captured within one system you will see that it takes a lot less time to figure out issues.

And lastly, if you want to prevent mistakes that can cost you project, it’s very important to be able to control your project in real-time, because if you are able to track immediate statuses and get visual analytics on what’s currently happening you will be able to make better and more qualified management decisions.

Every profession has certification, but there are jobs where a person cannot work at all without special certificates e.g. doctors, teachers, pilots, lawyers and so on.

Your professional certificates make you feel more confident while applying for a job. It also shows your possible employers that you have enough skills to perform particular work at a great level, bringing benefits to the company. Besides, if you are chosen among other candidates, you will be given some preferences because of the certification availability. Your salary can also depend on the certificates you have.

Still, there are a lot of specialists, who doubt the necessity of certificates, and they refuse all the opportunities to upgrade their professional skills. But, at the same time, numerous researches show that the possession of the professional certificate and not only one speeds a career in many times.

Fortunately, there are lots of companies all over the world, which try to encourage their staff to raise their professional knowledge and take various training courses.

As soon as you decide to take on a training course which supposes obtaining some certificate which will prove your professionalism, study what courses and certificates are available and what is in demand one the market.

The best and the most expensive way to become more competitive on the labour market is to get an international professional certificate, which is accepted in every country of the world. It will increase your chances of getting a perspective job 100 times.

After you have made you your mind to get a professional certification in your field, remember that the certificate itself does not mean that you will get the best post immediately. Your hard work is also welcomed.

As far as the unstructured processes are concerned, they involve making decisions, discussing and cooperation made to get certain results. Because of the fact that such processes are hard enough to depict from the point of view of the framework and to automate, anyone can enjoy slight variations within such processes.

The policy of BYOD can be a nice example of such unstructured process. This very type of policy will give the staff a chance to bring any their own devices to the office and it involves the choice of the necessary IT security rules; how the CIO, HR and CTO cooperate while doing it. This process will be fully displayed after it is over.

At the same time being unstructured, this process can be portrayed, improved and automated by using a bit different approach to it.

Those processes with some structure have been managed with the help of Excel files for a long time, but such way has proved to be inefficient enough to refer to such systems as ERP or CRM, which make them automated.

Alongside with this, many unframed processes are left without any attendance and improvement. But they can be managed, monitored, improved by choosing another type of approach to them. This very right method should involve three basic elements:

-         Reveal the process

-         Improve it

-          Select the necessary software to automate it

Revealing the processes that are not framed

Unframed processes are hard to reveal and run because of their unpredictability, lack of diaphanous abilities and outdated ways to perform them. The usage of emails and meetings are the most common ways to manage unstructured processes. Surely, that we are able to examine emails and meetings that you have to manage, but it is much better to analyze the activities describing unframed processes.

Every unstructured process, nevertheless, can be depicted, improved and automated.

The basic element of any unframed process is making decisions i.e. human-related processes.

Such areas as compliance and policy, audit, project management and decision performance processes involving unstructured processes.

Improving unstructured processes

As soon as you discover such a process, you are not able to improve it instantly without agreeing every process stakeholder. The improvement can be fulfilled with the help of advice and by e-mails or short meetings or even by any online collaboration tool.  You may implement special process management software while optimizing the unstructured process.

Software for unframed processes

The usage of traditional software tools can be expensive and time-consuming because of the system complication and shortage of flexibility.

Comindare tracker is enterprise-scale process management software which is formed on the base of an absolutely different type of databases. In general, this solution adjusts to the process and becomes ideal for any unframed process.

Comindware tracker proposes a set of professional templates and solutions for unstructured processes.

The first misunderstandings between clients and developers can sometimes arise as early as the stage of gathering requirements. It’s not exactly uncommon for clients to not know for sure what they expect as the end result and change their requirements on regular basis. In this case it’s very important to have Agile software development solution that allows reacting to the new requirements.

Scheduling and estimation is another quite common issue among software developers, since due to such reasons as limited budget or lack of experience project managers sometimes cram too many tasks within too little man-hours. Bad scheduling can poorly affect such stages of the software development life cycle as development, testing and deployments. To manage tasks with more productivity and efficiency and to control the process better managers can use specialized task software that would allow creating, assigning and managing tasks and activities and set up deadlines, which will help to bring more discipline into the process both for managers and developing teams.

Development is arguably the most challenging stage, because that’s where all the previous miscalculations and misunderstandings start causing serious issues. And it’s often happens that once development has started clients decide to request for adding some “minor” features that on practice can seriously mess up the whole process because all the roles have been already assigned and everyone is busy with their part of the job. Unfortunately, such changes are practically inevitable since software development is the field that is highly responsive to the changes on the market. That’s why it’s important to be able to react to the competitors’ moves and add or remove some feature in the process of development. If you want to make these changes without having to stop the whole process and starting all over again it’s quite important to have flexible workflow management software that would allow editing already active workflows.

Once it’s time for testing stage we might once again face issues caused by bad scheduling. It’s the fact that there is no such thing as bug-free software development, which is why overly optimistic schedule is never a good thing – you simply won’t have enough time testing, fixing and re-testing, and these processes are absolutely crucial for successful software deployment.

Overall, most of the issues in software development can be either avoided or minimized with a healthy doze of careful planning, task management and communication, so make sure you don’t forget about these factors while launching your new project.