Better Team Performance with Free Tools You’ve Probably Never Used

All business owners seem to struggle with the same things: not enough time in the day, getting all of your employees to treat each customer as you would, and making sure that tasks are done the same way every time.  A lot of the time it comes down to getting the right information out to all of the members of your team.  At Extreme Networks, we have implemented some low cost solutions that have helped our company greatly.

Firstly, we installed a Wiki, using Mediawiki, the software used to run Wikipedia.  It is free, simple to use and can be installed quickly.  We use our wiki to store many of our policies and procedures.  It keeps track of who makes edits so you can see who contributes.  Changes are simple to make.  We chose Mediawiki because it is quick and easy to edit.  We find the team will now make changes to the P & P manual on the fly as circumstances change, and Mediawiki has all of the approval processes built in.

 

 

 

Secondly, we created a dashboard of all the most important information in the company.  For us, it is client tickets open, the status of customer web servers, phone calls that need to be made, new opportunities and a few other pages.  The pages rotate through every 5 seconds so within 1 minute, anyone can get up to speed with what is happening in the company.  We pull data from 3 different databases, as well as some Excel spreadsheets.

Lastly, there is Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010.  SharePoint Foundation is a FREE download and provides an incredible amount of capability, including blogs, discussions, and the capability to share and collaborate with Office documents.  It is a great way to share information like a calendar for holiday and sick leave, company document storage, links to common websites, the company phone list and it can also be used to display KPIs for the company with a bit of tweaking.

It’s an old adage that what gets measured gets managed, and we have found that within our company.  By surfacing the right data, we can get our team to work together better, provide better outcomes for our customers and to be less stressed in the process.

It is all about taking all of the data that you have within your company, and turning it into knowledge.  Downloading and playing with these to determine which is right for your company is the first step.  Picking the right KPIs to monitor is the second, but once you have it up and running, sit back and watch.  You will be amazed at how much of a difference it can make in your company.  If you are interested in how surfacing KPIs can help your business, please call (03) 9785 7162 and ask about our business consulting services. We are the only IT company on the Mornington Peninsula with an MBA graduate from Mt Eliza Business School on the team.

Mediawiki can be found at:   http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

SharePoint can be downloaded from:  http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5970