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Top Tips On Managing A Complex IT Project

While project management can be quite a flexible job and different managers take different approaches to guiding their team, there are a few key areas where a lot of project managers miss the mark. With complex IT projects there is a lot that can go wrong and without a clear and decided game plan a project can quickly become disorganized.

Get priorities straight

With complex IT projects there is often a lot to do and organize. Sometimes each task has hundreds of different stages and deadlines don’t allow for much leeway. When the work is piled on this thick, it can often be difficult to maintain motivation or stay organized which can impact the success of the project as a whole.  That’s why one of the first things you need to do when you begin to tackle a project is get your priorities straight and plan out the order in which you need to complete these tasks.

The planning stage of any IT project is the most important part. This is the stage where you can put together a clear picture of how the project will be completed. You should never rush your team into a project if they aren’t certain about what they’re doing. While it might feel like you don’t’ have enough time to plan, putting aside a few hours or a couple of days to get a few strategies going can potentially save you double that time later on where you might be stuck resolving issues you didn’t see arising or backtracking.

When your project is laid out step-by-step, tasks don’t seem as overwhelmingly big and, once you have decided which stages of your project need to be completed first, you can distribute them amongst the team early and get them done. At the end of your planning and organizing stage, you should be able to see your project as a flowchart, with stages set out consecutively and flowing into each other. A waterfall based methodology like PRINCE2 is a great tool to utilize during this stage of the project and can help you turn big, complex projects into more simple, manageable ones.

Places on PRINCE2 courses are becoming increasingly popular in the tech industry and IT sector because this project management methodology was designed specifically for these industries and their respective types of projects. PRINCE2 teaches you how to break up big tasks into smaller, more manageable ones as well as learn how to organize your time to meet small deadlines that lead up to your ultimate deadline at the end of the project.

Get on top of change and risk management

As great as it would be for your project to exist in a bubble where nothing changes and goes wrong, that’s probably not going to be possible. Complex projects that run on for months or years often run into little hitches and sometimes developments that can completely halt work altogether. When a spanner is thrown into the works, teams without proper guidance and management can feel overwhelmed and find it difficult to get back into the flow of the project. As much as you would like to prevent these issues completely, the best way to be prepared is to put together strategies to manage these risk and changes in order to get the project back on track.

Identify the risks early on in your project and assign responsibility of each risk to a person in the team. With each of these risks you should plan appropriate responses to tackle them, which will minimize the amount of time spent fixing problems. You can also better manage risks and changes by setting aside enough time for accurate testing. There’s little use in meeting a deadline if the end product isn’t functioning in the way that it should.

Monitor the team as well as the project

That isn’t to say that project managers should aggressively micromanage and leer over people’s shoulders while they’re trying to work. Monitoring your team isn’t about making sure that they’re working 24/7, but rather about checking in on their progress and keeping communication open. By having regular meetings and catch-ups you can recognize the team members that are struggling with their workload and reorganize tasks to take off some of the pressure. By regularly talking with your team you can also catch and discuss any problems or issues they may be having and bring the team together to discuss solutions. The right kind of project manager is one that gets involved with the team and doesn’t sit on the side lines and in order to stay informed and keep track of progress, regular conversation needs to be have between the team and project manager

How To Backup Windows 10

Hi, this is Jacob with pctechguide.com and today we’re gonna be talking about, “How to Backup Your Computer,” specifically, “How to Backup Windows 10.” I’m gonna be on a Windows 7 computer here but it works the exact same and I’ll kinda walk you through my process of what I recommend most people use.

Here is the Video:  This post is a transcription of the video.

Now if you’re looking for a 100% free method, that, you know, you can go that route, it’s not gonna be supported, it’s not the route I recommend I go through, I’m gonna talk about some free data backup tools too as well. But let’s take a look at my set up of how I have it going so you get familiar with how those who are more professional backup their data.

It’s your data, right! It’s important to you.

So, I recommend you spend the money and do it right. First here I have my C: drive, you’re gonna see yeah, it’s almost full. I need a bigger hard drive there.  I have an SSD drive here just 120 gigs, and that would be my C: drive. Now, for most people your C: drive is going be your default drive in which Windows is going be installed on, that’s pretty much across the board of how it is.

Now, what I recommend you do is you use an image backup software. And in this case, I have Nova BACKUP. That’s what I’ve been using for a number of years now. It only gets better with each new edition, it’s gotten a lot easier to use and I’ll kinda walk you through my settings of how I use that. And when I say an image backup, what I’m referring to is backing up this entire drive, so it’s gonna take a snapshot of everything on the C: drive. So, all my documents, your pictures, all the programs are installed. So, if that C: drive crashes, it’s not a matter of, “Oh, I’m just gonna pull my pictures,” or this or that.

Now, I get everything. All my programs that are installed, so if I have Office, if I have any games, if I have any specialized software installed for my business, anything I have is gonna be backed up with a full image backup. So, I’m kinda taking a snapshot of everything on the C: drive. I then take that copy, and it’s very important you don’t put it on the C: drive, you put it on another drive. And you’re gonna see that I got three external drives right here that I’m using. Well, one of them is external, the F: drive is. The other two are inside my PC itself.

But I just bought, for $100 bucks, I bought a external drive and I’m backing up everything to my F: drive. So, if the C: drive crashes, I have my full backup right here on my F: drive. And there it is right there, it’s called, ”My Media,” and we’re gonna see that it’s roughly 47 gigs, so it’s about a third or less than a third of what the actual size of the drive is.

So again, what I’m doing is that I’m copying everything here on the C: drive over to the F: drive and it’s all done automatically. I scheduled it for once a week and I’ll walk you through those settings here in just a second. First, I’ll reiterate the reason for doing it is because I just don’t want, just my pictures, right? I want everything. If it goes down, I can run out to the store, I can buy a new hard drive, slap it in, install, I use the boot disk that NovaBACKUP has for me, I can boot to that disk, I can point to this F: drive, say clone it, and from going to the store, installing the hard drive and I’ll be up and running in like an hour and a half. And, it’ll be as if nothing ever happened. So, I can carry on with my day and my work day and not have to worry about anything. For me that’s worth a lot of money.

I’ve done data recovery numerous times for people, sometimes it’s successful, sometimes it’s not and most people don’t have these image backups. Have the image backup. I just had a friend whose PC went down, he lost everything. Everything. Because he wasn’t even backing it up via the cloud or anything which I’ll talk about. Because I don’t want you to just use an image backup. I want you to use a secondary backup too as well, that’s online.

So, this is the first line of defense and this is going to be an offline data backup. So, we’re doing a full image backup, to another hard drive that you have. You could run out to Best Buy or go to Amazon, buy an external hard drive, hook it up, install NovaBACKUP and you’re good to go. You got your image drive taken care of so it’s image you’re good to go you never have to worry about it.

Now let me cover some of the settings that I use with NovaBACKUP. And so, recent job was just done on 3/19/ 2017, I stopped this one, this one had an error, it’s going to happen. But I’ll just run you through kind of a setup. So first I’m gonna go to backup, and I’ll tell it what I wanna backup. And right here all I just did is I just selected the C: drive. So, I just select the C: drive, and basically. it’s gonna take everything on my C: drive. That’s what I want. I want that full backup to go. Then I go ahead and I click the backup to, and I choose the media where I wanna back up it to, and I chose the F: drive, my media. So again, that’s the external drive that I have hooked up on my system. In case I have to, you know, leave my house for some reason for an extended period of time, maybe there’s gonna be a fire, maybe there’ll be a flood where I’m gone, something. I can just take my external media either with me, hand it over to a friend’s house, something like that. So, I have that full image backup. So, I’m good. Or you know, if I’m paying for cloud storage, I can just upload it to the cloud too as well, fairly easily.

Next, we’ll go ahead and cover a schedule. I recommend you do the schedule. Go ahead and set it up for weekly and that’s what I would recommend. And you know the time, you know, depending upon when you don’t use a computer. You don’t want it backing up when you’re on it. So, just leave it on overnight, you know, on a Saturday, set it up for every Saturday that way, you know, “Okay, I’ll just leave my computer on on Saturday.”

And then you’re gonna have your, you know, run as a specific user, which I recommend, you know, just put in your username and password to run it as an admin on the system. And then getting over to the good part, we’re gonna go on to settings. And under settings here I usually select, “compress the backup files,” so it’s smaller. I have it, so it’s gonna verify the backup afterwards. I want it to…I don’t want it to automatically eject media at the end of the job because it’s not a CD or anything I’m backing up to. I do have, “enable open file backup,” so, for files open, it can still back it up, and then backup empty folders. So, you know, I just want everything. Right?

And then, once again, there’s my destination and here you have the type that you’re going to do. So, I choose, generally, “overwrite media.” If you do “append to media,” the problem you’re gonna have there is it’s automatically gonna append to the next [inaudible 00:06:55] and your drive will fill up. I just overwrite it, I mean chances of something going wrong while it’s being overwritten are fairly small. So, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. So, I choose the “overwrite media,” and then right here for the backup mode, I choose, “incremental backup.” So here are choices you have, “full incremental, differential or snapshot.” You can browse through each and every one of these, I don’t want to make the video too long. But I choose, “incremental.” And what this is going to do is it backs up selected files that have changed since the last backup and marks them as, “backed up.” So, it only copies over…this basically makes it go a lot faster. Once you do the initial backup it might take an hour, or two hours, or three hours, depending upon how big your hard drive is. But, once it does that, the next time round it’s just gonna look through and say, “Okay, did any of these files change? Nope, I’m not gonna back ’em up. Okay, these, you know, 700 files changed. I’ll just back up these.” And so, it goes a lot quicker and it’s great and it makes it nice and fast. So, I choose the “incremental backup.”

Next, we’re gonna go ahead and go over to notification, and this is cool. So, you can just go into, and select “email settings,” and then right here you just put in okay, use the NovaBACKUP alerts, put in your email address right there, and what’s going to happen is, is once a week, you’re just gonna get an email if you schedule it for once a week. If you schedule it for every day, you’ll get an email every day. I do it for once a week, and what happens is, is when I go back to my computer on Monday you know, there’s an email in my inbox saying, “Hey it’s been backed up,” either successfully or not successfully, generally successfully, and I’m good to go. So, that way I always know, “Okay, it’s being backed up,” you know, it’s something I can just look for, I don’t have to look at my computer or wonder, “Oh is it working, is it not working?” So, I really, really like this and I recommend you set it up just like that.

Now, I do have a far more in-depth review that I did. So, if you go to the pctechguide.com website, just look in the description below. So, in the description below I have links going to our data backup software so all the reviews that we’ve done on data backup software. And then I have a link going directly to the NovaBACKUP review. And then like I said, I’ve been a fan of Nova for quite a while. It’s pretty much one of the number one recommended data backup programs that I’ve recommended over the years. And it’s good, it’ll do the job for you and you know, get you what you need to get.

So, moving on here, let’s quickly talk about the other types of backup that I do. So, the other things that I recommend you can try out here, is going to be the remote data backup. And that’s important just in case something happens to both your on-site computer and the backup drive at the same time. We’re talking fire, we’re talking theft, we’re talking water damage, electrical surge, and you know surge protector, something crazy, right? Well, I always recommend that you can open up free accounts at dropbox.com, you can open up free accounts at Google Drive, you can also open up a free account over on, OneDrive, live, and it’s gonna be, onedrive.live, just Google OneDrive, Google Dropbox, Google, Google Drive, and it’ll all come up for you and you can create accounts and generally and all them they’re gonna allow you like up to five gigs.

And from there, all you have to do is just set it up, install the software and just say, “Okay, I’m gonna backup my documents, my music, my pictures,” something along those lines, and you know, that way you’re backing up the files that you use the most, or your pictures or something that means something to you. And all these sites will give you a certain amount of gigs for free, that you get a backup.

Now if you want, you could also pay. So, if you pay for ’em, what you’re able to do is you’re able to backup more. So, you know, you might be able to back up 200 gigs or 300 gigs of data. And if you do it that way, that’s great. You can just do, you know, the same type of backup just set it up to back up those you can also go in and say, “Okay, you know what, backup my image backup.” And, so that way you’re just putting in that one big file and just say, “Okay, just keep this one backed up.” And in that manner, you’re always gonna have your image backed up online, which is fantastic.

And if you’re a business, and you actually have a lot of files, that, “Okay, if I lose this, my business could go under.” And you know, think about that for a second. If you’re a real estate agent or something like that and you were to lose all your things, would you know, how bad would that be for you? And you know if you have a lot of baby pictures, how bad would that be for you? So, I really recommend you do both. So, you have your image backup, and then you know, depending upon if you’re a business, yeah, I would pay for something like, Dropbox, Google drive or OneDrive Live, and set that up so you can back up your image backup. Otherwise you can…you know, if you wanna be cheap and you’re like, “Well, I don’t care if my PC crashes, I’ll just buy a new hard drive, I don’t care about my programs, I’ll reinstall them, but I really want my pictures backed up.” Well, that’s, you know, that’s what these are for, right? And they can do a great job of just backing up your pictures, if you have like an iPhone or something like that, you can use iCloud 2 as well. And so, there’s a number of other services out there, just for your phone too as well. If you’re interested in those, you can go visit the App Store, there’s plenty of stuff there. So, that’s going to be it for this guide, I hope it helps. And if you have any questions, just feel free and ask. Happy to answer ’em.

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