Conscientious business owners and team leads worry about the adequacy of their digital tools long before potential shortcomings turn into disruptive problems. But worry is only the first step, and fruitless if you don’t proactively go beyond it.
This article will help evaluate whether the tools you’re using support your business’s continued operation and development adequately. It also offers guidance on which tool types and categories to focus on based on your findings.
Diagnosing Workflow Bottlenecks
Diagnosing workflow bottlenecks requires meticulous attention to detail. Start by assessing current processes to identify when and how delays occur in handoffs, approval requests, and other time-consuming activities. See how long it takes tasks to be completed on average, noting which steps show inconsistent timing and could be optimized. Finally, assess whether team members are forced to juggle too many tools to complete simple tasks, as this may disrupt their flow state and ability to concentrate.
If bottlenecks primarily result from a lack of accountability, you may need a more effective project management tool. These help visualize and simplify complex processes. They outline roles, responsibilities, current deliverables, timelines, and dependencies.
Meanwhile, automation tools address concerns related to manual work. Eliminating repetitive tasks is a major benefit, but not the only one. Automation also helps with overall standardization and data syncing. This reduces the need to switch between tools while providing guidance on next steps.
Understanding Collaboration Needs
Collaboration issues often show up when someone cannot find the latest versions of a file, or when feedback lives in three different places. Different documents about the same work are around, but there is no clear way to tell which is the “final-final” version. This unnecessary clutter and confusion can be easily solved with a cloud file-sharing setup, since you can set sensible folder permissions for shared drives and easily track version history. Cloud tools also make handoffs and offboarding less painful.
Another collaboration problem nobody enjoys talking about is credential sharing. If teammates are passing logins around in Slack or sending them over email, you have both a security and an accountability gap. Password managers solve this by allowing teams to share access without exposing passwords. With these tools, you can quickly grant and revoke access. This way, only those who need to access the password can do so.
However, if you’ve got a small business, password managers can feel expensive. If budget is a concern, check out the deals most providers release from time to time, like NordPass coupons that have been circulating online.
Identify Communication Gaps
The lines of communication break down when employees and teams that need to collaborate aren’t on the same page. The logical first step is to assess if there’s an excess of communication channels and determine whether this leads to information loss. Then, measure response times and observe escalation procedures. This will help identify communication delays and expose whether there’s confusion regarding proper procedure.
Problems with day-to-day communication and messages getting lost in the noise require cutting down on communication tools. Using a single business messaging platform ensures every message is accessible and documented. Team members can still talk privately or create project-specific chatrooms without losing the benefits of centralized communication.
Troubles in this area can also arise when employees aren’t sure what policies are in place or need to look for information that’s either inaccessible or siloed. In that case, competent technology advice to follow would be to utilize a centralized knowledge or documentation system. This will serve as the trusted source of truth for everyone, reducing confusion and enabling better cross-team collaboration, whether in real-time or asynchronously.
Assess Security Needs
Your company’s security posture needs to be up-to-date and comprehensive. On the one hand, this means ensuring that data is stored safely and in accordance with industry standards and related regulations. Access to it should be monitored and enforced via rigid controls. On the other, an audit of devices and network security will help assess your readiness to thwart cyberattacks.
Companies with a remote or distributed workforce should prioritize controlled access to their networks from potentially unsafe external sources. There are several ways to do this, which brings up the VPNs vs. proxies debate.
VPNs are effective because they encrypt incoming connections, ensuring that communication or data transferred between employees and the network can’t be monitored or exploited. Their ability to connect via specific IP addresses also acts as a dependable access control measure.
Conversely, proxies may be implemented if you’re experiencing issues with on-premise employees not adhering to policy and accessing unsanctioned websites. A proxy can limit exposure to the wider internet, promoting both security and productivity. It’s also useful as an outbound traffic monitoring tool for compliance reasons.
Ensuring Growth Readiness
Regardless of use, tools that work adequately now may become inadequate as the business expands. To that end, determining whether they can meet future demand at scale is crucial. This doesn’t only mean greater throughput, but also the tools’ potential to integrate with new systems and automate tasks that will become increasingly harder to manage manually.
Which tool category you’ll want to focus on for this aspect depends on your industry and department. CRM scalability is invaluable for marketing teams, while finance will want to make sure that the revenue platform they use can keep up with the demand for automated invoicing and detect anomalies in a large number of transactions.
Growth isn’t just about having adaptable logistics in place. It also hinges on timely insights that help identify and seize opportunities. If that aspect of your long-term strategy is lacking, you’ll want to shift focus towards analytics tools and their data-driven decision-making and prediction capabilities.
