Whatever the industry, managing a business can entail dealing with extraordinary amounts of paperwork, from work orders to invoices, contracts to receipts. Even in today’s technology-driven business world, many organizations continue to keep hard copies of paperwork; others have embraced electronic record-keeping, yet put minimal effort into ensuring that things remain organized and easily accessible at all times. In the average workplace, in other words, record-keeping rarely takes high priority. And yet, paperwork has a number of hidden costs where workplace productivity is concerned.

Indeed, much like a junk drawer in the home, a stockpile of old records may not seem worth organizing—that is, until you need to pull up a record and can’t locate it. In addition to being burdensome to store, managing the variety of paperwork that any given business produces can lead to dramatically reduced productivity. The average office worker wastes an astonishing 40% of the workday owing to lack of organizational skills, and sifting through paperwork can be a major contributing factor to this time sink. Even more staggering is the American Demographic Society’s conclusion that workers in the United States waste an excess of 9 million hours daily looking for misplaced articles—and, in turn, waste resources such as paper and printer ink creating duplicate copies of these same documents.

Managers suffer from the paperwork plague to an equal if not greater extent. While employees spend approximately four hours per week in meetings—and report that at least half of this time is wasted—managers spend nearly twice as much of their workweek in time-wasting conferences. The note-taking and brainstorming sessions that routinely transpire in such meetings generate a great deal of paperwork that is promptly stuffed into a drawer or the recycling bin, never to be seen again. Combined with the $37 billion lost annually to unnecessary business meetings in the U.S., these lost ideas and opportunities are a major managerial shortcoming.

So, how can a business keep track of an ever-growing collection of important paperwork while ensuring that it is organized, accessible, and beneficial rather than burdensome to operations? With powerful yet user-friendly project management software such as ConductorLIVE, you can leverage the power of the web to say goodbye to filing cabinets and move all of your paperwork to a centralized web-based location.

A web-based project management platform provides a dynamic, convenient means of collecting, tracking, and indexing paperwork, from simple work orders to complex project files. This means that workers can not only locate exactly what they need when they need it, but also correspond and share with teammates and managers in a paper-free format—eliminating both the need for time-wasting meetings and the risk of misplacing a great idea. This increased productivity applies to managers, too, enabling them to divert time spent in meetings to more important endeavors, easily search for and retrieve files, instantaneously share information with peers, and conveniently solicit and implement employees’ ideas. An online project management solution can also help managers reduce unnecessary expenditures on printer maintenance, ink, and perhaps most importantly, paper—10,000 sheets of which are utilized by each office worker annually.

Web-based project management software such as ConductorLIVE empowers you to increase productivity by taking all of your paperwork to a centralized online locale. Seeking a better solution to storing and sharing your business documents? Consider a powerful yet easy-to-use project management platform for all of your communication, collaboration, and organizational needs.

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Relocation is a common scenario in the corporate world, where employee mobility (or lack thereof) can make or break a business. Many companies routinely transfer employees between offices or facilities based on evolving workplace needs, while others require workers to relocate in order to consult on a particular project or work with a special client. Company growth and dearth of local talent are likewise strong motivators for relocation, which represents a viable means of expanding both the geographical reach of a business and the roster of industry talent employed by an organization. In 2015, nearly half of all companies witnessed a growth in employee relocation, with financial and manufacturing firms seeing the most significant increases.

Worldwide ERC data indicates that the average cost of relocating an executive-level, home-owning employee is $85,700. Given that this is a substantial investment, many companies have support systems designed to help relocating employees ascertain the lay of the land in their destination cities. A company can dramatically reduce the possibility of a failed relocation by providing housing resources, assisting in locating jobs for employees’ spouses, and helping to evaluate public and private schooling options for employees with children. Where many organizations fall short, however, is in providing relocated employees with a means of maintaining communications with team members and managers at their “home base.”

A 2012 survey conducted by Atlas Van Lines found that 48% percent of relocated employees were existing staff members rather than new hires. It stands to reason, then, that many relocations are lateral moves that require the employee to continue with his or her regular duties in addition to taking on tasks in a new location. The relocation of a single employee can thus have major consequences for his or her entire team or organization—and these consequences can be positive or negative, depending largely on whether a system that facilitates efficient, effective communication and collaboration is in place.

A growing number of organizations are turning to the power of the web as a means of keeping their in-house and remote team members connected. Online project management software such as ConductorLIVE empowers individuals to stay in touch no matter how near or far apart they are. Whether an employee is moving across the hall, the building, the state, or the country, a powerful yet user-friendly online platform that facilitates communication, collaboration, and sharing can boost productivity by keeping everyone in the loop.

Web-based project management solutions provide a centralized online portal that can be accessed anywhere, anytime. A suite of dynamic online collaboration tools makes collaboration easy by enabling users to review the progress of individual tasks and entire projects, as well as to communicate in one-on-one and meeting formats. Files can be shared with users and designated non-users alike at the click of a button, and may be viewed or downloaded instantly. Moreover, diverse organizational tools allow team members and project managers to schedule and prioritize tasks, as well as to monitor a project’s history and progress at a glance.

Relocating an employee costs substantial time and money. It can also kill productivity. An online project management solution can help you achieve a return on your investment by encouraging and enhancing communication and collaboration even amid the chaos of a big move.

Web-based project management solutions such as ConductorLIVE offer a dynamic platform for streamlining communication and collaboration between team members near and far. If you’re seeking a productivity-enhancing, cost-effective means of keeping your employees in sync, consider a project management solution that leverages the power of the web to keep your team connected.

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The United States economy takes a surprisingly high hit from failed IT projects, with Gallup Business Review estimating a loss of $50-$150 annually in this area alone. A number of factors can influence the viability of an IT project, but some of the most common reasons for failure include overspending and the extension of projects past deadline. With only 26% of projects succeeding as reported by the Project Management Institute, many companies are scrambling to identify and rectify the sources of cost overrun and poor time management.

As it turns out, many of the issues at the heart of project failure are related to subpar organizational, communication, and management structures. Organizational failures can yield both scope creep and the over-allocation of resources, both of which commonly lead to projects spiraling out of control. Scope creep, which refers to unplanned changes, can cause a project to exceed established time and budgetary constraints, and thus a failure to produce a service or product in a cost- and time-effective manner (or at all). Likewise, when employees are over-taxed or lack managerial oversight, they are missing the direction they require to achieve maximum productivity.

Poor communications is likewise a project-killer, and can manifest in a number of ways. Ambiguous managerial input leaves team members unable to conceptualize and fulfill their roles in a given task or project, and lack of feedback likewise leads to confusion. Relatedly, team planning and cohesion are vital to a project’s success. A team that possess no means of efficient, effective communication or collaboration is scarcely a team at all.

Finally, unsupported project culture is a major contributor to failure, and this is perhaps especially true in the IT industry. Project culture refers to both the education and technological tools required to successfully complete a given project within the parameters of established time and budgetary constraints. Oftentimes, team members lack the necessary training and technological support to do their jobs efficiently, leading them to waste precious time (and thus monetary resources) attempting to overcome complex problems that arise.

McKinsey & Company report that large IT projects run on average 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while still delivering 56 percent less value than predicted. The Harvard Business Review reports even gloomier numbers: they found that one in six IT projects have an average cost overrun of 200% and a schedule overrun of 70%. Nevertheless, as PricewaterhouseCoopers reports, 97% of all organizations identify project management as critical to business performance and organizational success.
One of the most viable—and affordable—means of increasing your chance of project success is to invest in online project management software such as ConductorLIVE. A web-based platform can solve many of the problems that accompany IT project management by offering a dynamic online environment for all of your communication and collaboration needs. Employing leading-edge technology, online project management encompasses a powerful suite of organizational tools that enable managers to schedule and review tasks, and team members to communicate and share files instantly. By making time and budgetary constraints evident, expectations clear, and communication easy, a secure online portal is the ideal IT project management solution to dramatically boost your chances of success.

Web-based project management software can help you eliminate some of the top barriers to project success by facilitating improved communication, collaboration, and efficiency. If you’re seeking to streamline your processes and achieve optimal productivity, consider adopting a powerful, cost-effective, and user-friendly online collaboration solution such as ConductorLIVE.

The post Tired of Delivering IT Projects Late and Over Budget? appeared first on ConductorLive.

Forbes.com recently declared business communication “broken” because most of the tools that are available “kill more productivity, time and money than they create.” That includes unproductive and unnecessary meetings, but it also includes email, which is the most-used method of business communication, but has also been called the number one killer of productivity in the workplace. And we all use email every day!

Business communication is the leading source of email traffic in the world, amounting to more than 108 billion emails sent and received every day, with unnecessary emails costing businesses an estimated $650 billion a year in lost time and productivity. Given that spam messages and “graymail” make up as much as 14% of received mail—that’s mail that actually reaches your inbox, not counting the stuff that’s caught by spam filters—you can see that workers lost a lot of time and productivity to the “convenience” of email communication.

That being the case, why do 8 out of 10 businesses of every size still rely on unstructured tools like email to drive work processes? The answer is simple: they haven’t found the right collaboration tools to take their place. Fortunately, you have: A web-based project management application such as ConductorLIVE can do more than take the place of email communication, it can provide a one-stop hub for empowering collaboration and building teamwork, boasting a wide arrange of customizable options that allow you to use a little or use a lot, whatever works for your organization and your team.

Even if all a web-based project management application did was reduce reliance on email for communication and file-sharing across an organization, that would still provide an enormous boost in productivity, resulting in a big savings in time and money. Reliance on email for business communication is rapidly becoming outdated and untenable simply because email inboxes are filling up with too much “noise.” In 2014, the average worker processed 121 emails per day. That number is projected to increase to 140 by 2018. With all that traffic passing through their inbox, it takes employees a lot of time to sift out the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

Fortunately, the right web-based project management application eliminates the need for reliance on email by providing a central hub for all team communications, keeping everything in one place so that it’s always available and always easy to find, without all the background noise that comes with other forms of communication. Not to mention the wide range of collaboration tools that allow team members to store files, share calendars, organize tasks, and tackle every other aspect of a project all in one place.

With the help of online project management solutions such as ConductorLIVE, organizations are finding new and better ways to empower collaboration that don’t come at the expense of time, money, or productivity. And that’s something we can all get behind.

The post How a Web-Based Project Management Application Can End Your Reliance on Email appeared first on ConductorLive.

As a method of business communication, email is probably here to stay, but there’s also no arguing that the way it’s used has changed over time, and is still changing. Don’t get us wrong, email is a great tool, and probably the most frequently used business application there is, but it’s also been called the number one killer of productivity, and for good reason! According to data from the McKinsey Global Institute, the average worker spends more than a quarter of their work week dealing with email. That’s a lot of lost time, and a lot of lost productivity!

It makes sense, though. All you have to do is look at the increasing number of emails that are being sent and received per user per day to see that any worthwhile communication is being lost in a cacophony of white noise. In 2014, business email accounted for more than 108 billion emails sent and received every day, making up the majority of the world’s email traffic. That’s an average of around 121 emails per person per day, a number that’s growing every year.

Every one of those emails takes time to read, respond to, or just delete, even the ones that don’t have anything to do with the task at hand. Businesses lose an estimated $650 billion a year to unnecessary emails, and according to data from technology market research firm The Radicati Group, spam messages and “graymail” make up as much as 14% of the mail that reaches your inbox. With even spam messages taking an average of 5 seconds apiece to delete, that’s a lot of time and money lost to unnecessary mail. When you take into account that workers take around 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks after dealing with incoming email, you can see that we’re talking about a big problem for productivity. So what’s the answer?

Online project management solutions such as ConductorLIVE offer organizations new and better ways to empower teams and enable collaboration without sacrificing productivity. Rather than an email inbox filled with graymail and white noise, you have a static-free resource for team members to communicate, collaborate, and share while staying focused on the project at hand.

No more distractions, just web-based project management software that puts everything about the project in one easy-to-access place.

When surveyed, 8 out of every 10 companies—both large and small—said that they still use unstructured tools such as email, spreadsheets, and even in-person visits to drive routine work processes. Yet when asked whether using email and spreadsheets to manage work reduces their productivity, nearly half said that it did. That’s where collaborative web-based project management software like ConductorLIVE comes in—putting collaboration and productivity together again.

The post Business Email and the Drain on Worker Productivity: A Growing Concern appeared first on ConductorLive.