There is really no room for inefficiency these days. There is so much competition that an inefficient IT department can impede your company’s ability to compete and make a profit. Inefficiency can cause many companies to lose market share and become irrelevant. This means that it is imperative to look for ways to improve the processes that your IT department is running for project management.
Cost overruns, missed deadlines, and buggy end results are all problems that arise from an inefficiently run department. When a team works efficiently then communication is improved and productivity soars. In this article, we will go over several ways that you can make your IT department more efficient.
1 – Use a burndown chart
One of the best ways for a project to be done is to break it into small sections that are easily managed. They should be organized to make sure that there are some overlaps between teams during certain parts of the sprint which usually lasts around four weeks for each section.
This is for a variety of reasons but one is that it is easy to see what needs to be done for the entire project by breaking it up into stages. Using a scrum burndown chart is a great way to make sure that everybody is on the same page during these sprints since it provides an easy-to-read chart.
Since the teams can work uninterrupted during each of the iterations, it makes things much smoother. There are far fewer bottlenecks when managing a project with this chart. As soon as the chart shows signs of a task stalling, everybody can see it immediately and will be able to react accordingly.
2 – Create a collaborative environment
Using silos for projects is unfortunately still very much in use today. This means that each team is working independently of the other and issues are going to be hard to spot. What usually happens is that bugs are not spotted until the final testing stage is done. This is going to cause setbacks.
Instead, silos should be torn down and collaboration between teams should be encouraged. When this happens, issues can be spotted right away and fixed when they are easier to do so.
3 – Continuous delivery
The biggest benefit to running a project centered around collaboration is that testing can be done continuously so that things can be fixed when issues are small and manageable. Waiting until the project is finished to run tests is expensive and time-consuming.
Using a continuous delivery system will allow project managers to make sure that the project is going according to plan at each stage of development. Segments of the project are deployed a little at a time and bugs are spotted right away. Projects generally will finish faster and usually on time when a continuous delivery system is put into place. Progress tracking is also far more accurate so you always know where the project stands.