It’s been said that the biggest risk to any project is poor project management and nowhere is that more evident than in document management. Architecture or design projects soar or limp over the line based on organisation and the successful collaboration of a skilled team that can include external companies or specialist consultants. With so many elements to the project, teams can be fragmented and scattered across numerous locations.
This more open and fluid way of working has created fantastic results for modern-thinking businesses, but it’s not without its share of IT management issues and email has fast become one of the weakest links in the collaboration chain.
There’s a long list of ways poor email management can make life difficult, but the following five really stand out, because they’ve got the potential to damage any business that relies on email as an effective way to communicate between teams, gather project files and work on them effectively and efficiently.
- Document chaos
The beauty of solid email management is that project categorisation and context-specific tags mean every document’s purpose and place is clear - making information easier to file and most importantly, find, whenever you need it.
Even in small businesses, documents accumulate quickly and if everyone is managing them in a different way, project administration can be haphazard at best and a disaster at worst. Multiple islands of disconnected content with no context or version record make it impossible for anyone to file a document and trust the right version can be retrieved by another person who might need it.
- Wasted time and money
Good talent costs money and every hour spent searching for or recreating documents is an hour lost on the project, adding to your costs and potentially pushing out milestones and delivery dates.
Some figures suggest as much as 25% of an employee’s time can be spent looking for misplaced information. That’s one in every four people essentially working as a document hunter. A colossal waste of time, money and resource, and completely unsustainable.
- Sub-standard collaboration
The most efficient businesses leverage every trick in the IT handbook to ensure their operation runs smoothly, benefits from as many cost efficiencies as possible and always gets value for money.
On the other side of that, we see teams that have been formed with the specific objective of working together, struggling to connect and collaborate and only truly united in their struggle to deal with:
- Multiple systems, none of which talk to each other, clogging networks unnecessarily
- Patchy access, hindering simple searches and limiting who can see what
- A lack of categorisation and poor organisation
- An exorbitant amount of time wasted updating numerous project spreadsheets
A classic case of drowning in information, but failing to find anything that’s useful.
- Damaged relationships
Whether your customer is another agency, business or the end-user, chaos on the inside rarely goes unnoticed on the outside.
Projects that are dragged along and make life difficult for everyone involved reduce the chances of the talent you’ve hired delivering at the level you expect.
Smart, synergised systems, clever use of automation, well-designed management platforms and the efficient use of IT service or help desks are proven to bring teams closer together, allowing them to make more informed decisions in less time, collaborate across business units and deliverables, and provide a better all-round standard of service.
- Failure to meet regulatory obligations
Document control, safe and organised storage and appropriate protection aren’t just nice-to-haves. In many industries they’re legal requirements that could land a careless business in hot water, and the impending GDPR legislation means every business will need to have a proper system in place to take care of this.
Some regulators go as far as setting quality standards around management systems so there’s absolute clarity in terms of what’s expected when it comes to control, accessibility, usability and security of information.
Meeting requirements is a tall order for any business without an adequate email content management system. Compliance is a key element of any project and a system that not only allows you to work with best practice in mind, but keeps you on the right side of regulators, is a must.
The solution
For every IT problem, there’s a logical IT solution and restoring control to even the worst project mailbox is 100% possible in the right hands.
Experienced IT Specialists offer expert advice on business-damaging issues just like this. We work one-to-one with IT decision makers, offering two levels of professional service:
- Consulting on the issue, diagnosing and ring-fencing project information management (PIM) issues and
- Designing and building bespoke solutions that meet the business needs and strengthen IT infrastructure
Challenges to PIM we can help you overcome
Here are just some of the challenges we can help businesses overcome:
- Project-wide confusion over the use and functionality of shared folders
- No single view of information
- No archiving (fragmented and disorganised at best)
- Wasted time, money and resources searching for and duplicating lost work
- Problems sharing and transferring large files
- No remote access to information
- No synchronised calendars
- Poor project management collaboration
- Inability to systematically assign, log and track actions
- Network under pressure because of duplicated locations and files
- Difficulty meeting audit, compliance and legal regulations
- Missing project deliverables because of unsupportive systems
By making project information management more structured and controlled, businesses can make radical improvements around:
- Resource – freeing employees up to do the jobs they’re paid to do
- Delivery – setting goals and dates with more confidence
- Budget – managing costs more effectively and reducing overspend on delays
- Time management – with better task allocation and follow up
- Risk management – mitigating known problem areas and sharing accountability
PIM is a solution to the balancing act many businesses struggle to pull off, facilitating faster, cheaper project delivery, while improving the quality of service. And because it allows businesses to get through larger volumes of work with a lot less stress, the ripple effect can be seen across the board in terms of employee and client satisfaction.
Learn how pebble.it can help your business track and use project information effectively by downloading our Project Information Management eBook:
