The value of having jelled teams in the company or working in one is pretty obvious. Such teams are more productive and work more efficiently since they feel comfortable with each other. Can we use some magic trick to create a good team? Not really. For managers it’s usually easier to point out team killing factors rather than give a recipe for a healthy team.

The company life is all about communication be it direct, face-to-face or virtual and remote with colleagues, clients and company partners. Have you ever counted how many meetings you attend in the period of a month or a year? Many people’s work days consist of meetings almost entirely. After all these hours of discussing most of them say “Now I can get back to work and finally focus on my job”.

Do they not treat meetings like part of their work then? What does this sentence imply? Do they indirectly send the message that the time spent in a meeting was simply counter-productive?

http://www.pongoresume.com

The beginning of a new year is always a great time to start moving your career in a better direction. It’s pretty common that at that time many employees set Workplace and Career New Year’ s Resolutions.

This is also the time for looking back on what you achieved last year, what failures you faced and what lessons you learned. Based on that many of us start planning their career paths all over again.

But can you actually plan it? Does a strict career path limit your perspective? Or maybe it’s just pointless since we are unable to control external factors that affect us?

The core function of each issue tracking system is to effectively manage tasks in projects. Unfortunately, defining issues in such a system can be a painful process. One task may hinder others  making the whole work plan more prone to all kinds of changes. If your team is working on more than one project, a proper tasks assignment without having the overview of all other projects is simply impossible. Due to that fact we have created our own schedule plugin, which is not just another calendar tool. We have combined it with an already existing tickets management system, and added a few improvements to make tasks creation and assignment easier than ever. Check this out!

Recently, I attended a workshops for Managers.  I learned what qualities are required to be a successful manager. Of course, each industry needs its own domain knowledge but on top of this specific knowledge, the qualities that make someone a good manager are more or less similar. What do you think are the most important skills? What does it take to manage people efficiently and effectively and get the best out of them?

http://www.sxc.hu

In my previous post I wrote about the simple situation when incorrect agreements and lack of proper reactions leads to poor results. Clients always want to know two things. When the thing will be done, and how much it will cost. The rest is less important because they want to trust you. At least they should. Trust is very important because it usually makes the client come back with another order later on. In waterfall approach, trust is usually on the same level from the beginning to the end of the project. In Agile development, since you keep in touch with the client, there is a risk that trust will go away much earlier. Why does this happen? Is waterfall approach better?