2 Tips to Improving Information Productivity

Introduction

Information Productivity is an informal term that refers to how efficient we are at organising and storing our information, emails, documents and in fact any content that relates to our work and processes around our work. Many organisations have systems and formalised processes for these kind of activities, but they usually cater for the storing of information in its traditional forms of documents and some very linear processes, while not offering much in the way of how we share and collaborate in real life.

Sharing

This is by far the most common task that we need to perform with our organisation's information, and not all of it is easily catered for. Depending on your industry you could need to share with co-workers, suppliers, clients and sometimes the public and that is not so easily done. Email tends to be what most of us rely on for sharing, but it comes with many disadvantages, namely size restrictions on mailboxes, aggressive spam filters, receipt confirmation, missed emails and the worst of all... 'email time'. Coming back to your desk to countless emails is not something anyone looks forward to doing. Systems to allow the secure sharing of files will greatly increase productivity levels over a period of time, these range from the relatively simple to far more complicated and expensive alternatives. Bottom line is it should be very easy to securely share and collaborate on information without using email.

Collaboration

Sharing might be the most common task, but collaborating is the clear winner on taking the most time. The process of sending information to 1 or more recipients (see sharing), getting their feedback and then sifting through that feedback, giving feedback on the feedback, incorporating the appropriate feedback and then having every recipient eventually agree to the final form of the information accounts for an enormous amount of time. It doesn't end there, how painful is it then when months later one of the parties wants to question a specific point? How do you find who said what, when and why? For many individuals that accounts for a large part of their day to day responsibilities. There are not many systems that cater for this, but as a bare minimum multiple comments from multiple parties needs to be supported, along with an easy way to compare the comments/changes, accept certain changes and approve final 'versions'. Structured workflows are also not the answer for every eventuality, they might be ideal for some tasks e.g. processing of an invoice, but for day-to-day collaboration a far more fluid system is required.

 

Summary

There are some systems out there that facilitate sharing and collaborating, Synetec have their own, but the purpose of this article is not try and promote a particular system, merely to share what some  key areas are that if focused on could improve productivity. After all, who wants to spend their life reading emails?

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.

Case Study: Investment Manager Renovates Legacy System

Industry: Financial Services

Introduction: This Investment Manager was frustrated with an old legacy system they had in place, it was not aligned with their business processes and making changes to it in its current form was proving expensive and taking too much time. Team members were wasting time finding workarounds to reconcile the way the business was functioning in the present versus how it was in the past. They wanted a system that would be adaptable in the future, delivered for a reasonable price, within a guaranteed time frame and that wasn't going to impact other projects nor day-to-day operations.

Challenges:

• The business had progressed and the processes had been improved over time, but the old legacy system functionality was not reflecting that. This made the improvements less impactful and more costly to try and retrofit into the old way of doing things that the legacy system had been built around

• As the business was continuing to evolve any small changes that were needed to improve productivity and efficiency were costly, the business needed the system to be more responsive to new requirements going forward

• Many of the key business systems that were required for the business to function relied completely on a few people, which significantly increased the key-man dependency

• Naturally the amount of data had increased over time, but this had a negative impact on the performance of the old legacy system

• Technology that the legacy system was based upon was outdated which made support, maintenance and enhancement expensive and sometimes near impossible

Objectives:

• The project needed to be delivered in a guaranteed time frame in order to meet certain high profile business milestones

• The client had a perfectly capable development team in place, however with other projects and the responsibilities involved with day-to-day operations, they needed a short-term increase to their development capacity in order to get this project delivered, without increasing the head count in the long term

• New business functionality required and likely future requirements had to be quicker and cheaper to implement going forward

• Improve the stability and performance of the system

• Leverage the new functionality and capabilities of updated technologies

• Reduce key-man dependency through use of additional resources and improved documentation

Solution:

The Investment Manager partnered with Synetec in order to deliver a system that retained all the necessary features of the old legacy system while implementing enhancements that team members needed to improve productivity. Not using internal developers allowed the potential risks of systems development to be mitigated and ensured that their business as usual activities were not impacted. The agile renovated system is now far more adaptable to future requirements, which would prevent hesitation in potential process change and reduce expenses going forward.

Benefits:

Forecasts indicate that the maintenance of the system in the future should be reduced by an estimated 20%. The internal developers gained through knowledge transfer from the Synetec development team and are in a better position to incorporate best practises into other projects. System performance has improved by approximately 150% in some areas where users could search and manipulate large data sets, this has been attributed to the redesign of the underlying architecture and the improved performance of the current technology frameworks.

 “Through moving to recent Microsoft technologies we have not only improved performance of the system, but have access to new capabilities that will make delivery of future requirements far more cost effective. Mixing internal and near-sourced developers also proved extremely beneficial for business risk as well as knowledge transfer and I am sure those benefits will be reaped for a long time to come.”

 – Gregory, Technical Director

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.

Criteria for Successful Software Vendor Selection

The success of selecting a vendor really comes down to one thing: can they deliver? As you seek a vendor keep that in the forefront of your mind at all times.  Any cost savings or operational efficiencies you generate can be quickly negated if your organisation can't get what it really needs on time. Rarely as straightforward as it sounds. The points below are what I categorise as key in terms of what you need to consider when selecting a software vendor?

Good Fit

The software needs to not only meet your key business requirements, but to be easily configurable to work within your environment. It has to be a good fit and that needs to be recognised from the beginning. Depending on the scenario, integration can take anywhere up to 50% of total project time (have often seen instances of longer than this). With that in mind, numerous real-life examples of the software working in a similar environment is extremely helpful and reassuring.

 

Quality and Expertise

That is where the expertise comes in. If the vendor has an experienced team they would have performed similar implementations numerous times in similar environments and they will be in a position to avoid pitfalls and make the process run as smoothly as possible. The quality of the team does not only relate to their technical ability. If the vendor is treating their team well, they will tend to retain them for longer which improves their experience and specifically from your perspective ensures that you are dealing with the same up-to-speed team members. How much wasted time and frustration results from having to explain your requirements or issues to different individuals who are being exposed to them or you for the first time.

Location, Language and Culture

As you seek the vendor for your organization, it’s vital to keep in mind the location, language and culture of their workforce - and more to the point, how it aligns with your organization. Communication issues encompass both language and culture and when dealing with communication of requirements, life is made a great deal easier when requirements that aren't thrashed out to the most finite detail, are grasped implicitly. Cultural sensitivities aside, the best vendor for your needs will have a team that can easily communicate and work with your organization and that usually entails an onshore workforce.

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.