What if…?
Hi Everyone
So as promised here’s a blog… I’ve not been blogging recently because I’ve been in “The Zone”; not metaphorically, literally in The Zone helping to run our student enterprise hub due to staff absence, and it’s these experiences that have prompted this blog; my top five tips for sharing information that will keep your business moving even when someone unfortunately can’t make it into the office.
1. Files – We have a group drive, but I frequently use an encoded 250GB portable hard drive to move files around (something which scares my boss silly). To keep this backed-up on the group drive so all my files are available to my colleagues I use SyncToy everyday to clone my drive…it’s simple, quick and effective and means that if anything does happen all my files are there…although that’s only part of the problem.
2. File Systems – This sounds simple but does anyone know how you save your files, you might be great at backing them up but if you don’t have a standard office system then you need to let people know how you save your files and where to find what’s important.. in our office we talk regularly and make sure we understand each other’s systems, what do you do?
3. Passwords – Recently we put together a secure password file to hold all of the passwords we use…including some pretty odd ones, this has been central in keeping the department running. There are loads of great programmes that can do this; I like KeyPass, but there are others out there, the key is to pick one and make sure you use it and keep it up to date.
4. Contacts –How do you share your contacts …there needs to be a system, We use a mixture of Outlook (as we have to to through work) and Google and of course a good old fashion Rolodex.
5. Projects – Finally do you know what should be going on? We plan our projects and produce action charts which clearly show what should be going on; we then save these in agreed locations so that we can all easily find out what’s happening and by using linked calendars we can check if this is working to the right schedule.
Someone being away from your team can be hard, but as long as you are open with each other, share information and talk regularly you should be able to get past it.
Peace
Matt
