Maximizing Productivity with Remote Teams

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Working remotely is now becoming a necessity. The global health emergency we have all experienced over the past few months has expedited the transition to virtual teams across all types of organisations who have until now been reluctant to commit to such a radical change. It has now become a critical factor for business continuity in addition to the already known benefits of accessing the best talent wherever they might live and increasing flexibility and productivity for colleagues.

That said, managing projects using remote teams brings its own set of challenges on top of an already difficult task. There is an extra dimension to the standard procedures for making assignments, managing resources, tracking progress and updating stakeholders when they may be in different countries and time zones.

Virtual project management is the process of managing projects via remote or virtual teams. When teams are distributed across different time zones, they still need to get assigned tasks and that work must be monitored and tracked to make sure it stays on schedule. As more teams work from home, virtual project management has become more defined.

Not having physical contact with your team creates new obstacles that project managers must overcome.  The good news is that project management tools have for some time been moving from analog to digital, and with that transition increasing efficiencies and productivity. So, the move to virtual project management is not the great leap it might at first appear.

As organisations become more accustomed to working with teams who are not co-located, they’ve also warmed to the idea of virtual project managers. This has been facilitated by technology advances that have made it easier to manage remote workers. The development of a virtual office has made the transition to virtual project management that much smoother.

The generational change of workers is also at play in the rise of virtual project management. New workers are entering the workforce, but older workers who are able to adapt are staying in with the help of virtual teams. This creates an even more productive team, one that is energized by youthful enthusiasm and new ideas, but anchored by the experience and skills of older team members.

The acceptance of virtual teams has now reached a tipping point but that’s not to say that we are in unchartered territory. Many organisations globally have been early adopters of the virtual cool-aid and there is a wealth of expertise and experience available to organisations now making the journey. iEngageIT’s project managers have been managing virtual teams and delivering virtual projects successfully for over 25 years and offer the benefits of that experience to any organisation whether  just making the transition now, or planning to extend their existing capability.

Web scrapping – Is your business benefiting?

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What is Web Scraping?

If you’ve ever copied the data off a website and used it then you’ve scrapped the data manually. When you automate it to get data intelligently and efficiently you use a software tool called as Web Scrapper.  Once the data is scraped, web scrapper will usually then export it in a more convenient format such as an Excel spreadsheet or JSON. Depending upon suitability, content of a page may be parsed, reformatted, searched its data copied into a database etc.

Web scraping or web harvesting solutions range from the ad-hoc, requiring human interactions, to totally automated systems that are eligible to transform entire web sites into structured data.

Web scrapping typically involves two stages

  • fetching pages (by crawler)
  • and extracting data from it (by scrapper)

web  crawling is an important component of web scraping, to fetch pages and data for later processing. Once fetched, then extraction can take place.

Why Web Scraping?

It’s a common knowledge that Data is ‘King’. The true power of web scraping lies in its ability to build and power some of the world’s most revolutionary business applications. ‘Transformative’ doesn’t even begin to describe the way some companies use web scraped data to enhance their operations, informing executive decisions all the way down to individual customer service experiences.

Some obvious examples of their frequent use are:

  • Real Estate listings scraping (in the real estate industry)
  • Scraping product data to build price comparison tools
  • Scraping website for new lead information
  • Using web scraping to assist with website transitions
  • Social Media scraping for sentiment analysis
  • Scraping stock prices for market analysis

 

Conclusion:

  • Web scraping is legal in general and won’t get you into trouble.
  • follow some basic rules like
  • Don’t overwhelm an online server
  • Don’t steal content
  • Give due credit to source of information
  • Do not download copies of documents that are clearly not in public domain.
  • If the information you scraped is not within the property right please take due permission to share it. Then share it out there for others to reuse it.
  • If you wrote an online scraper to access it, share its code (e.g. on GitHub) so others can have the benefit of it.