Best Practices to Optimize Project Management Communication

Agile project management is highly crucial in today’s remote-first, digital-first workplace. The remote work culture has emerged as a potential solution for handling various operational aspects across companies. Remote work management brings several benefits to the table, but it is not devoid of challenges. One of the biggest concerns in managing remote teams is effective communication.

Without consistent and effective project communication between the teams, it can be challenging for the managers to execute actions as planned. Likewise, lack of proper communication will make it impossible to ensure that everyone is on the same page about the project’s status and what changes have been made to it. Ineffective project communication can lead to transparency issues between the teams, affecting their productivity and overall results.

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Common Challenges in Project Management Communication

Most managers fail to drive the optimum outcome when managing remote teams. It is because they do not start with a well-planned communication strategy. Remote work and project management should always have a robust communication strategy so that no unwanted scenario pops up. It prevents project teams from using ineffective channels at inappropriate times.

For instance, while dealing with an urgent customer request, email communication alone may not be effective. You may have to use telecommunication, video conferencing, or instant messaging platforms to solve the customer challenge immediately. At the same time, an everyday instant messenger may not support screen sharing or file sharing. Hence, it is crucial to adopt Digital Workplace Orchestration platforms like InfinCE to manage your projects. 

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE 

Communication gaps in project management can also arise when some team members are not updated with the project’s progress. For example, suppose someone is handling the design aspect of the project and fails to update the design status to other members. In that case, the production team will have to wait until they receive notification regarding design completion. This can lead to trust and transparency issues and minimize employee productivity. 

Another challenge in project management communication is that managers often do not have the means to fine-tune their strategies as per the project’s progress. Even though the project communication management approach fits the implementation needs, companies may need to accommodate frequent change requests from the customer. It’s crucial to refine the communication and collaboration strategy to match the changing project management demands.

Read more: Business Process Management Strategy for your Small Business 

How to Ensure Project Management Communication Success

When developing the project communication plan, you need to determine how you can pass on the relevant information to the team members in due time. It’s also important to decide how you can share the necessary files and documents with the appropriate parties for carrying out their jobs. InfinCE’s project collaboration software can simplify all these processes.

How to Choose a Project Management Platform

An all-in-one project collaboration platform like InfinCE can come in very handy in team management, as it gives you an effective communication channel for different purposes. InfinCE’s project management software helps you handle knowledge management and data sharing functions. It allows you to oversee the progress and status of various project aspects on a unified dashboard.

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer 

By adopting a reliable project management platform like InfinCE, you can rest assured that a proper communications workflow is in place. InfinCE helps deliver the data that your team members require to perform their job roles at every stage of the project. Moreover, it can also serve as a channel to collect feedback and improve the project management communication system to guarantee optimal results. InfinCE helps build trust among the team members by making your process more transparent.

Read more: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow 

Best Practices to Handle Project Management Communication

Along with an all-in-one project management platform, you also need to implement the best project management communication strategy. The next step is to confirm if the strategy works as intended. As a business owner, you should regularly monitor the strategy. It includes conveying insights generated at each point of the project management process, how and where the data is processed, and how the team members apply insights to improve their work. 

Analyze the efficiency of your project communication strategy at regular intervals to identify any communication gaps and take steps to address them. Keep an eye on how your team members use the project communication platform. Review how project managers use the digital workplace platform to share team and project updates and dashboards. Project management software like InfinCE also helps encourage virtual socialization among team members. You can also use it to assess the performance of your project communication strategy and make changes if needed. 

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce 

Tips to Manage External Communications

An agile project management tool allows you to communicate with all the parties involved in a project to ensure that you can reach your target outcomes on time. For instance, InfinCE OpenProject enables you to grant access to external users like your clients and other stakeholders. This improves the stakeholders’ visibility over the project’s status. They can recommend insights relevant to the execution of a specific project process. 

You can also manage access to the communication funnel for document sharing internally and for other purposes externally. This will help the team members find the required information instantly, which leads to improved transparency and productivity. On the other end, having a unified communications channel will make collaboration with clients and suppliers much easier for your team members.

Read more: 5 Must-have Features In A Project Management Tool For Small Businesses 

The Closing Note

Besides a robust communication strategy, you also need to ensure appropriate communication at the end of a project. Project management communication will help you confirm that the results meet the intended quality. You can also refine the approach and the process in due course.  

Communication should continue even after completing the project. Employee recognition, social conversations, and casual interactions go a long way in boosting remote team morale, which will eventually lead to high-end productivity and performance.InfinCE is a digital workplace orchestration platform that offers a vast array of collaboration apps, productivity tools, custom dashboards, centralized and private IT infrastructure, custom branding elements, a curated app marketplace, and a host of other features. Talk to us and find out how InfinCE can be your best project management companion.

Choosing the Right Pricing Model for Enterprise IT Services

The recent trends in digital transformation have paved the way for ensuring optimal business growth for enterprises. With the rates of public cloud adoption going up, it seems that leaders have recognized the potential of modern IT tools and technologies for generating better revenue. Simultaneously, organizations have also started to find alternatives to traditional IT infrastructure models and achieve improved agility in their operations.

Today, the cloud has become ideal for businesses to build enterprise applications at much lesser costs quickly. Cloud also allows them to utilize advanced technologies to scale their operations and stay competitive in the market. As new IT solutions are entering the industry every day, organizations need to identify the right platform to manage their workloads.

Read more: Private Or Public Cloud: Where Should My Business Invest? 

Choosing the right pricing model for enterprise IT services

Partnering with a reliable IT services vendor like InfinCE gives organizations the option to run workloads on-premises and on the public cloud. This works to bolster the security of sensitive company data further while ensuring superior operational efficiency. Although adopting the best IT models is always the goal of a business, leaders also look for responsive technology partners that can offer IT solutions at the best costs. So, it’s crucial to choose the right pricing model.

There are predominantly two types of pricing models for enterprise IT services – subscription-based models and consumption-based pricing. Choosing the right pricing strategy allows a business to scale their IT resources up or down as needed while saving some money in the process as well.

The consumption-based approach is usually the go-to option for companies that want to make their business operations more agile. On the other hand, a subscription-based model suits those who want to keep their budget under control while benefiting from the potential of modern IT tools and technologies. 

Read more: 5 Reasons For Small Businesses To Adopt SaaS Model 

Listed in this blog are three principal business areas that are primarily affected by your IT pricing model’s choice.

1. Enterprise IT Operations

In the past, launching a new IT project required considerable hardware and software investments. Sometimes, it also needed months of planning and execution to get it right. Today, businesses demand faster solutions that will allow them to launch an IT project on the go. It can be facilitated easily by collaborating with an agile IT services provider.

A subscription-based model means that you will need to pay upfront for receiving the services, be it cloud solution or on-premise. Some vendors also allow customizing the features in their subscription models so that you can decide which elements you will need to optimize the IT operations of your company. As the costs are determined based on the length of the subscription, long-term plans often mean lower business costs.

On the contrary, the consumption-based IT model allows you to pay for the services you use. While this can be a good option for those who have trouble keeping their IT systems updated with software updates and patches, it will need you to cherry-pick the required tools and technologies every time you want to launch an IT project. So it is vital to choose an end-to-end IT solutions provider when going with the consumption-based pricing model.

Read more: InfinCE – A One Stop Technology Solution for Small Business 

2. Running Workloads

Working with a reliable IT services vendor that will take care of everything from equipment maintenance and on-site configurations to training and support for your in-house team is always the best choice to stay ahead of competitors. That’s what InfinCE does for its customers. InfinCE’s technical concierge allows businesses to access IT support via phone, email, or live chat. The concierge helps you resolve the problem either by yourself or by arranging for a technician, depending on the challenge’s complexity.

When the IT vendor manages everything, a fixed recurring invoice can lead to better savings than paying every month. As subscription-based models are evolving, it gives you greater control and flexibility when choosing IT plans.

It also means determining your workload requirements adequately before choosing a pricing plan so that you can avoid all kinds of risks and keep a check on the costs. You can also use both public and hosted private clouds as per the plan to explore better opportunities to develop enterprise applications and services. Meanwhile, if you go with consumption IT plans, you can easily and quickly scale the IT resources on your terms and effectively run the workloads.

Moving between public clouds and on-premises setups can also be much cost-effective when it is consumption-based pricing. Enterprises can easily choose the business-critical applications necessary to improve performance or deal with any latency issues. Likewise, it can also be beneficial to pull back the workloads with highly sensitive business data that cannot be left off-premises.

Read more: How can modern IT management software empower companies to be more agile? 

3. Capacity Planning

IT capacity planning needs companies to evaluate their resource utilization, workforce needs, and application usage before buying the servers, storage, and network infrastructure from a vendor. In this case, using a subscription-based service works out because businesses can have a predictable expense to manage their revenue stream. Moreover, subscription models also save on the costs of full purchases to gain access to the IT tools required to cover their demands.

On the contrary, the consumption-based model, or the pay-as-you-go approach, allows organizations to make an immediate purchase for their unplanned IT decisions. This can help deal with sudden demand peaks that cannot be managed with the existing infrastructure. This also means that those who are not adept with capacity planning can benefit from consumption-based IT pricing strategies. A reliable vendor can also help you determine future capacity requirements and see if the resources are enough to meet those upcoming demands.

A subscription-based model can be a boon to businesses that need an all-in-one platform for their enterprise needs. For instance, InfinCE offers a vast pool of features to support the business’s changing needs for fixed pricing. Customers can also personalize the plans with added resources to match their current and planned needs, which will lead to better operational efficiency and productivity.

Read more: 5 Points To Consider While Choosing Your Enterprise Collaboration Software 

Selecting the right pricing model 

Choose consumption-based IT model, if you:

• Prefer maintaining a more agile business operations approach
• Need to shift too often from public cloud to on-site system
• Cannot determine future peak demands precisely
• Want scalable IT resources for unplanned potential workloads
• Do not have dedicated personnel or the resources to manage any software updates or IT maintenance work

Choose subscription-based IT model, if you:

• Need a greater level of control and flexibility over your IT plans
• Prefer to have a predictable monthly expense
• Have the capacity planning done right based on the predefined budget
• Do not want to look for the required tools and technologies every now and then for new IT projects
• Want a comprehensive solution for managing everything from IT systems configurations to training and support

Choosing an all-in-one business management solution can help you become flexible and responsive to meet the customer demands and ensure optimal growth for your business in today’s competitive environment. The final decision to go with usage-based models or subscription approach should be based on your business’s actual requirements.

Want to know more about the flexible pricing plans offered by InfinCE for businesses of all sizes and capacities? Contact us!