Becoming Nimble the Agile Project Management Way

In dictionary terms, ?agile? means ?able to move quickly and easily?. In project management terms, the definition is ?project management characterized by division of tasks into short work phases called ?sprints?, with frequent reassessments and adaptation of plans?. This technique is popular in software development but is also useful when rolling out other projects.

Managing the Seven Agile Development Phases

Stage 1: Vision. Define the software product in terms of how it will support the company vision and strategy, and what value it will provide the user. Customer satisfaction is of paramount value including accommodating user requirement changes.
Stage 2: Product Roadmap. Appoint a product owner responsible for liaising with the customer, business stakeholders and the development team. Task the owner with writing a high-level product description, creating a loose time frame and estimating effort for each phase.
Stage 3: Release Plan. Agile always looks ahead towards the benefits that will flow. Once agreed, the Product Road-map becomes the target deadline for delivery. With Vision, Road Map and Release Plan in place the next stage is to divide the project into manageable chunks, which may be parallel or serial.
Stage 4: Sprint Plans. Manage each of these phases as individual ?sprints?, with emphasis on speed and meeting targets. Before the development team starts working, make sure it agrees a common goal, identifies requirements and lists the tasks it will perform.
Stage 5: Daily Meetings. Meet with the development team each morning for a 15-minute review. Discuss what happened yesterday, identify and celebrate progress, and find a way to resolve or work around roadblocks. The goal is to get to alpha phase quickly. Nice-to-haves can be part of subsequent upgrades.
Stage 6: Sprint Review. When the phase of the project is complete, facilitate a sprint review with the team to confirm this. Invite the customer, business stakeholders and development team to a presentation where you demonstrate the project/ project phase that is implemented.
Stage 7: Sprint Retrospective. Call the team together again (the next day if possible) for a project review to discuss lessons learned. Focus on achievements and how to do even better next time. Document and implement process changes.

The Seven Agile Development Phases ? Conclusions and Thoughts

The Agile method is an excellent way of motivating project teams, achieving goals and building result-based communities. It is however, not a static system. The product owner must conduct regular, separate reviews with the customer too.

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Proactive Preventative Maintenance: How IoT and Field Service Management Software Helps

FieldElite, our mobile workforce management software, has been key to several industries? return on investment. Whether it’s for plumbing, electrical, property management, cleaning, and maintenance, FieldElite has provided data centralisation for efficient management of these business activities.

Field service management software is important to utilise current workload, and also helps resolve future issues. We’re talking about a proactive approach to preventative maintenance.

How exactly do field service managements help in preventative maintenance?

The answer lies in how field service management is interlinked with IoT in predicting future jobs for the mobile service industry.

What is IoT?

Simply put, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of devices and sensors connected to the internet. These ?things? (e.g. your smartphone or smartwatch) enable data to be sent and be received without human intervention.

Fundamentally, IoT is about devices being connected to the internet to allow remote monitoring.

For many years now, remote monitoring for IT infrastructure has been widely used.

What’s new that we’re experiencing right now is even the smallest devices ? individual light bulbs and sensors ? can have a network and internet connection, allowing entire systems to be monitored in great detail.

Implementing IoT and accessing data can be challenging for most service organisations. However, when combined with predictive analytics and field management software, it can have a huge potential impact on individual businesses and the service industry as a whole.

What is Preventative Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance refers to regular, routine maintenance to help keep equipment up and running, preventing any unplanned downtime and expensive costs from unanticipated equipment failure.

The goal of preventative maintenance is to decrease the likelihood of a machine or an equipment’s failure by performing regular maintenance.

Preventative management can be very complex, especially for companies with a fleet of equipment or customers. It requires careful planning and scheduling of maintenance on equipment before there is an actual problem.

Also, preventive maintenance is evolving. It’s not just about scheduling the same work every month to prevent failure anymore. Today, working smarter with better information about equipment conditions is critical to ensure maintenance is effective.

That’s where IoT and field service management software, like FieldElite, comes in. Together, they organise and carry out preventive maintenance needs for service industries.

How IoT and FieldElite Helps in Preventative Maintenance

With FieldElite and IoT technology, you get the best in preventive maintenance management.

Evaluation of equipment or machines ? the condition of machines or equipment is evaluated in order to predict when maintenance needs to be performed.
Automated work order ? automated time-based work order creation
Full condition-based plans allows you to do the following:
- Right-size your maintenance work
- Lower costs
- Extend the life of your or customer?s assets

Quicker reporting ? due to its efficient and automated nature, IoT and field service management software can reduce a field technician?s average report time from two weeks to two days, therefore boosting your cash flow!

That’s the most important result a mobile service management software can produce (in connection with preventative maintenance). It’s cost-saving! This can be achieved over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, as tasks are only performed when they are needed.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and field service management software is changing field service as we know it.

Companies who adapt and utilise these technologies will benefit the most from the resulting competitive advantage of preventative maintenance.

Start elevating every field service experience now!

Our field service software, FieldElite helps you:

Accepts jobs in the field
Automate appointment scheduling
Manage scheduled jobs
Get real-time visibility into all operations
Have a clear and easy viewing of job locations
Resolve field service calls faster
Enable mobile workers to get the job done right
Keep customers updated at every step
Create quotations and accept payments
Analyse efficient reports from field technicians
Helps in proper preventative maintenance management.

Learn how to schedule jobs to field workers with ease. Check out FieldElite!

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Cloud Computing Trends: Where is the Cloud Headed Next?

Cloud adoption has been quick and painless at the consumer level. For instance, everyone’s on Gmail, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis yet most think nothing of the fact that they’re already using cloud-based services. Small businesses have also discovered how cloud solutions have raised efficiency in the workplace up a notch or two, while also bringing about significant cost savings. Cloud applications, particularly those for communication, file sharing, office software, backup and storage, and customer management, have rapidly grown in usage among SMBs.

In the same manner, large corporations are starting to see the potential of moving some of their IT department, whether its infrastructure or network management, to the cloud. By all indications it would seem that whether we are ready for it or not, cloud computing technology is here for the long haul.

So where is the cloud headed to next? In this post we examine the trends in the world of cloud computing and what likely lies in store in the near future for cloud users.

Focus on Security

Security has always been a key concern in the cloud computing industry and this will not go away anytime soon. If anything, data security in the cloud will only get to be in the limelight even more as cloud adopters grow in number. That’s why we expect professional cloud services providers to start implementing measures that will help slowly build up confidence in cloud security.

We should soon see more advanced security techniques and protocols that would increase the overall level of privacy and protection for cloud-stored information. Tighter security for login encryptions and prevention of unauthorized access are priority although there are a lot more issues that may need to be addressed. Now it remains to be seen whether these moves are enough for corporate clients to put their full trust in the cloud. But then again, they can always find ways to stay secure while making use of cloud computing where they can, which brings us to the next cloud trend.

Hybrid Approach

Large businesses are taking a longer time to get used to and actually use cloud services, and understandably so. After all, these companies have more at stake when it comes to dealing with such valid issues as security, compliance, outages, legacy systems, and more. However, they also cannot ignore the very appealing characteristics of the cloud. For big companies that have substantial IT needs, scalability, business agility, and faster deployment are listed as the biggest draws of the cloud.

This is why analysts predict that as as these businesses look toward leveraging the benefits of the cloud while at the same time maintaining control over mission critical data and systems, the use of a hybrid approach, i.e. putting some services in a public and at the same time opting to utilize a private cloud for other applications, will see enormous growth.

Mobile Cloud Computing

The BYOD or Bring Your Own Device business policy is another emerging trend that would not have been possible if not for cloud technology. This practice involves having employees bring their mobile devices to work, allowing them to access company files, data, and applications from their personally-owned gadgets in and out of the workplace.

As with any new business practice, the concept of BYOD can be both advantageous and disadvantageous. On the one hand, some believe it helps increase employee productivity and lifts their morale, while reducing overall IT costs. On the other hand, BYOD also opens up a whole new set of problems that are quite consistent with what many businesses take issue with with cloud technology: security. Do the pros outweigh the cons or vice versa? This much isn’t clear yet but what is evident is that more cloud apps are going mobile.

Efficiency, Innovation

While cost savings has always been one benefit that cloud proponents are quick to point out, its capability to improve and streamline business processes, thereby increasing efficiency and agility within the organization, is another key opportunity that the cloud offers. This is evident when you take a look at the most commonly used cloud services: backup and archiving, business continuity, collaboration tools, and big data processing.

Moreover, the cloud is making it easier for individuals to create new products and produce new lines of business. With access to higher IT capacity at lesser cost and at faster deployment rates, businesses can scale into more innovation without having to worry about the availability of computing resources.

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Which KPI?s to Use in CRM

Customer relationship management emerged in the 1980?s in the form of database marketing. In those tranquil pre-social media days, the possibility of ?managing? clients may have been a possibility although Twitter and Facebook took care of that. Modern managers face a more dynamic environment. If you are one, then what are the trends you should be monitoring yourself (as opposed to leaving it to others).

If you want to drip feed plants, you have to keep the flow of liquid regular. The same applies to drip-feed marketing. Customers are fickle dare we say forgetful. Denizon recommends you monitor each department in terms of Relationship Freshness. When were the people on your list last contacted, and what ensued from this?

Next up comes the Quality of Engagements that follow from these efforts. How often do your leads respond at all, and how many interfaces does it take to coax them into a decision? You need to relate this to response blocks and unsubscribes. After a while you will recognise the tipping point where it is pointless to continue.

Response Times relate closely to this. If your marketing people are hot then they should get a fast response to sales calls, email shots and live chats. It is essential to get back to the lead again as soon as possible. You are not the only company your customers are speaking too. Fortune belongs to the fast and fearless.

The purpose of marketing is to achieve Conversions, not generate data for the sake of it. You are paying for these interactions and should be getting more than page views. You need to drill down by department on this one too. If one team is outperforming another consider investing in interactive training.

Finally Funnel Drop-Off Rate. Funnel analysis identifies the points at which fish fall off the hook and seeks to understand why this is happening. If people click your links, make enquiries and then drift away, you have a different set of issues as opposed to if they do not respond at all.

You should be able to pull most of this information off your CRM system if it is half-decent, although you may need to trigger a few options and re orientate reporting by your people in the field. When you have your big data lined up speak to us. We have a range of data analysts brimming over with fresh ideas.