Buying new technology

Technology plays a vital role in project management, but it is not always easy to know what to buy. Richard Walters offers advice.

Cloud, on-premises, hosted app rollout. Do any of these terms cause you confusion? Making technology decisions can be difficult even for IT teams, so for a project manager who is not a technology expert, it can be downright scary.

You know that investing in this area will help you, but where do you start? There are so many different tools, particularly in project management, that claim to be the best, brightest or fastest, so you need to know what matters when you’re buying technology. There are five key areas to focus on that will help you obtain the efficiency you need as you shop around.

1. Where is technology crucial for your business?
You know, as do most project managers, that you need to invest in technology, but it’s hard to articulate exactly why and where. Ask yourself questions, such as ‘Which parts of my business need to work better?’, in order to narrow down your thinking. Beyond email, everyone uses applications differently, so figuring out your areas of need can prevent you from wasting any investment.

Additionally, consider your demands for technology. Does your team only need systems from nine to five, with minimal-to- low usage outside of those times? Were you aware that certain applications, especially those that deliver services directly to customers, always need to be on? Understanding your needs helps you to know whether to seek guarantees about downtime.

These may seem like technical areas, but really they’re business questions – and that, ultimately, is the key to buying technology that meets your needs.

2. How can technology help project managers to work?
Once you know the systems that you need, you should work out how your team will use them. Are they usually on site or co-located, or do they work in the office?

Managing a mobile workforce requires different tools than managing one that occupies desks. Either form of management can be done with equal simplicity for you if you have the right tools in place. But you need to get the design right – from the technology infrastructure down to the specific applications.

One of the crucial things to think about is the level of control that you want to maintain over authorised mobile devices, such as phones and tablets. Specifically, how do you plan to maintain a level of security over your important documents? Mobile device management (MDM) applications let you have a final say over the information on a device, including remote wipe if you think that it’s been lost or stolen.

3. How important is access to and storage of your information?
This may seem like a strange question, but actually the laws around document management, security of information and cost are all affected by the answer.

Knowing how often you need to access or back-up your documents will determine what type of storage you need. If you had paper documents, would you put them in a safe or a shoebox? Would you keep them in your office or in the garage? You can apply this same type of logic to determine what type of digital storage you need. Maybe you can store important documents or contracts on site and store other not-so-important documents in the cloud.

Then there are legal requirements for document storage: seven years for bank statements, three years for payroll, etc. There are also industry-specific laws, for example around contracts. And just one document missing could cause hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage.

4. How can you make the most of your spending on technology?
This seems obvious, but it’s not just about watching the pounds now – it’s watching them in the future. Don’t rush out and buy all the kit, as a lot of what you need is available on demand.

Cloud solutions, where documents are either stored somewhere else or operated by someone else, are accessed over the internet and give you flexibility of use, ownership and cost. Pay for what you use, no up-front investment, and add new people when you need to. Most importantly, you stay up to date. You don’t have to replace your investments every six months; instead, the cloud provider executes the necessary updates.

Operating this way also helps you save on your day-to-day resources. When someone else owns and operates the majority of the technology, you don’t have to pay someone to maintain it. With support coming from the cloud providers, your technology burden is eased.

5. How can you avoid being ‘that company’ in the news?
You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Security threats are everywhere – and worryingly, research has indicated that 95 per cent of data breaches have human error as a factor. It’s not just the likes of national governments or multi-national corporations like Sony that are affected. The vast majority of hacks and breaches are small – sometimes unnoticed. But over the course of time the impact is significant.

Email is one of the easiest ways for a hacker to get into a system, so make securing email a high priority and don’t take it for granted.

Equally, make sure to instil security into the consciousness of every team member via single sign-on identity management, for instance. They don’t need multiple passwords to remember, so keeping the system secure is much easier. Security is a big deal, so check out the credentials of anything before you buy it.  

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 Richard Walters is general manager of Intermedia.