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Setting clear priorities is essential in achieving success in any project, whether it's a personal or professional one. Identifying the most important tasks and allocating resources accordingly helps the focus shift to what matters most and prevents us from getting bogged down by less important tasks. The same can be said about setting the stage for priorities, clients, and your staff. We’ll discuss how covering all of your bases BEFORE you start a project equals success.

Misunderstanding Collaboration (Intro)

People tend to retreat from collaborative opportunities for many reasons, not least of which is the memory of doing group projects in school. The goal of such an exercise was to understand the importance of teamwork, but many of us walked away from the experience with not-so-pleasant feelings. There are very specific scenarios that we tend to think of when talking about collaborating in a group. One scenario is where one person does all of the work and everyone else in the group gets to take credit. The flip side of that is when one person refuses to let anyone else in the group help with the project. In these situations, no one wants to be taken advantage of and no one wants to feel like their contribution is unwanted, so they’d rather not collaborate at all.

Another scenario is that of the “divide and conquer” strategy where everyone gets part of the project to complete and then comes back at the end to put it all together. This is arguably the most common way people think collaboration is supposed to look like. It makes sense because this scenario fairly divides the work so no one is doing it all alone, but the lack of communication makes this strategy very risky. What if someone doesn’t do their part? What if everyone had a different understanding of the project? This has happened to many of us in school and no one ever bothered to demonstrate what true collaboration actually looks like. The first time you work on a team in a truly collaborative way…it’s life-changing. You’ll see that true collaboration is built on communication, trust, and understanding, and it starts with the environment and culture of the workplace.

A growing necessity for organizations large and small is the utilization of a password manager. Password Managers have the ability to harden your security as you navigate the internet, protect vital information through secure storage, and make it possible to not have to remember every password you’ve ever created. There are several password managers on the market that provide roughly the same services, but as data breaches become increasingly more frequent, choosing the right password manager must be prioritized. Now we cannot tell you which password manager to choose, but here are 3 security features that you should look for to make your decision easier and more informed.

Data, for a business, is one of its most valuable assets. Therefore, protecting it and keeping it readily available is extremely important in today’s world. Cyber attacks have increased in frequency in recent years and many companies have found themselves victims twice; once because of the initial attack and again when they realize that they have lost untold amounts of data as a result. It is more important than ever to make sure you have a data backup solution in place. Data backup is the practice of copying data to a secondary location, to protect against human errors, hardware failures, virus attacks, power failures, and natural disasters. Should you experience a loss of data, a data backup platform would be able to restore your system with a copy of the data that was present at the time of the most recent data sync.

When it comes to threats to cybersecurity, human error is most often the main cause. It’s obvious to most people that they should not share personal information like social security, credit card and ID numbers, but many of those same people are surprisingly lax when it comes to protecting their passwords. How many people have you shared your Netflix or WiFi password with? Of course there are people out there who are looking for ways to access sensitive information, but the reality is that people tend to use some variation of the same password therefore making it very easy to guess. This is especially dangerous when those passwords provide access to sensitive information in a business setting.

Cybersecurity is THAT topic that is still not as prevalent among businesses as it should be. To many, cybersecurity is viewed as a ‘big company’ problem, however, over the years, and with more opportunities, cyber attackers have shown that smaller organizations are the easier target. Smaller businesses typically don’t put aside the same type of budget that larger organizations do, but a small budget is better than having no budget. Not to mention that most of your customers are increasingly aware of the cybersecurity risks and their expectation is to have their data protected at all costs.

Cybersecurity falls into three main categories: network, cloud, and physical security. While many would argue “I don’t have an office space, we work remotely”, the need for cloud and network security are still a necessity.