XFER Blog

When you started your business, you had a specific goal in mind. You wanted to prove something, to create something worth sharing with the world. We all have goals and aspirations, but it’s not always clear what the best path toward those goals is. Using a simple framework, you can maximize your odds of success and set great goals that you are much more likely to achieve long-term.

From an employee’s perspective, one of the most frustrating issues that could be present in the workplace is leadership that proves to be inconsistent. This lack of managerial consistency can wind up causing some serious problems and is often demonstrated through a variety of repeated behaviors.

Software is a major part of doing business nowadays. Not only do you depend on it to manage core functions of your business, that software can be purchased in multiple different methods. When choosing management software, your business needs to choose one that fits your needs, returns long-term benefits, and provides a platform that will help you build your company. Let’s go through some considerations you’ll need to consider when choosing management software.

In business, building a strategy that produces results is the goal. If you are looking, you can find all types of stories about entrepreneurs changing the tried-and-true methods and finding abrupt (and sometimes sustainable) success. These stories may even have you questioning the way that you do business, especially if things aren’t going terribly well. Rest assured, that the best thing that can happen is to build processes that promote consistency. 

“It’s time to do some spring cleaning! It’s been put off long enough!”

It’s easy to let things pile up to deal with them at a later time, especially when you are on strict timelines and only have so many resources. That’s why my desk can look like a disorganized disaster some of the time (but in my defense, it cleans up very well when it needs to). 

Do you know what drives me crazy? It’s the fact that, of all the lists of things you can do to improve your business and boost your productivity and optimize something or other… it seems there's not much to be said about how your employees factor in.

To build anything great on a budget or a timeline, you need to have good coordination. At the helm of these projects is the project manager. A job that is extraordinarily stressful and often equally thankless. After all, most customers take the positive resolution to any order for granted. This month, we will take a look at project management and the tools that are used by them to produce the best results possible. 

Have you ever wondered how colleges and universities function at a technological level? With so many students, you might start to think about how these institutions secure data, ensure timely completion of degrees, and closely monitor student retention efforts, all in addition to the normal IT operations that you would see at any business.

In a sense, your business relies on its vendors to provide the goods and services needed to make your organization function. Think about your Internet service provider. They provide you with a service that connects you to important assets. The software your business utilizes is also provided by vendors, and work probably can’t get done without it. Therefore, it’s natural that you will want a good relationship with vendors… provided they are actually decent vendors themselves.

Meetings rarely go as planned. The issue is that meetings generally aren’t planned as well as they can be, meaning that they run the risk of going on longer than necessary. If you find your meetings could be managed more efficiently, then read on; we’ll discuss three tips that you can use to improve the quality of your meetings.

How does your business fare with employee engagement? Do you find your employees have trouble staying on-task, or they simply aren’t interested in the work they do? This is more common than you might think, and you can help them improve the quality of their work with certain kinds of technology.

Technology is an easy thing to take for granted, especially in an office that has countless solutions that are utilized on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small retail establishment, a large organization with multiple offices, or a factory to produce consumer items. Today, we’ll look at the various ways your business is changed for the better thanks to the use of technology.

The Star Wars saga has many recurring themes - the struggle between desire and destiny, good and evil, impulse and discipline. However, a theme that particularly stands out throughout the series is the examination of the relationship between student and teacher. This theme is similar to the relationship that an IT provider should strive to have with their clients.

Businesses exist to make money. Regardless of what that money is intended for, be it to sustain someone’s lifestyle or to bankroll a cause, a business will cease to be without an incoming cash flow. Unfortunately, unpaid invoices can make that cash flow stutter and slow to a trickle, and many businesses experience this problem as billed money doesn’t come in.

Downtime is something that no business wants to imagine, but it’s something that is practically inevitable if you don’t prepare for it. You’ll be forced to wonder how long it will take to get back in business, but how this problem occurred is also important to discuss. Understanding how IT downtime occurs within your organization is the first step toward making sure that it can’t happen again.

How many emails does your organization receive every day? Chances are that you can’t find time in your day-to-day operations to maintain and manage your email solution as well as you’d like, and in a world where threats to your organization’s network lurk around every corner, you can never be too careful. How can you make sure that you’re taking proper care of your business’s email infrastructure, without sacrificing the time and manpower required to do so?

 One of the most frustrating technologies for most small to medium-size businesses  is cloud  connectivity.

 Connectivity is getting faster and faster every day. As speeds increase, prices are decreasing,  resulting in a virtual race to zero dollars in the marketplace. Of course, prices will never reach the  zero level but they are decreasing on a rapid basis. This means that more bandwidth is available at lower cost for all companies in the market. The problem is that faster Internet speeds do not necessarily translate into better performance for the end-user. This typically occurs because the local area network (LAN) is not properly configured to the usage patterns of the company. It also can occur if your provider is not delivering the speed the contracted for, and numerous other reasons that are not so easy to identify.

Using email to conduct important business always starts with the best intentions – saving everyone time. Just think back to the last time you used email to solve a significant business issue or answer detailed questions from an important customer.

But sometimes email creates a disaster of miscommunication. Tone, intonation, and emotion get lost in translation. Messages and ideas are misunderstood. Nothing really gets accomplished.

So, what's your obvious next step when email isn't working?