Those days are gone when office is just limited to the four walls and the employees are only supposed to work in the office premises. Nowadays offices are adapting open workflow culture which is encouraging and facilitating for the teamwork and collaboration. Now businesses are outsourcing their work by providing remote jobs which is an effective way to complete your work when you are already overloaded with other work.

The Engagement model is the framework that governs the way in which a vendor provides its IT services to its client. It basically describes the process of engagement of both the parties including duration of the contract, obligation, responsibilities and commitments as per the perspective of both the parties. There are various engagement models depending upon the type of contract and an organisation has to follow one considering the business requirements.

Let’s have a look on the different client engagement models and for the scenarios they fit in:

The Fixed Price Model:

This Engagement model is completely dependent upon the pre-determined project cost. It is considered as the ideal model to be applied if you have a pre-defined set of requirements about the application that you wish to develop. The project cost and the scope is clearly defined at the time of signing the contract and as per that the execution is done. The project costs in these types of projects have their pre-defined payment milestones as per the course of completion of the part of the project. This arrangement enables the client to have an idea on the continuous progress of their project as per the time and the payment due to which the risk can also be minimized. It is better to be prepared that scope may slightly change during the course of project as per time. In such cases management process is changed where the time and cost is revised with the approval of both the parties.

The Time and Material Model:

This Engagement model is generally used as its abbreviated form, T&M Model. This model is involved in the situation where the project scope is dynamic and can evolve with time. The vendor agrees to provide pre-defined skill sets and time-based billing rate for each resource type. This generally comes into the scene where we have continuous product evolution programming, complex large-scale projects, research and consulting assignments, solution designs and support and maintenance contracts.

Many times this engagement model is considered as a Requirement Analysis exercise in order to reach the defined scope and to push it into the Fixed Price Model category. The most important facility that this model provides is to change the project as per the technology and market trends or business priorities.

Off Shore Development Center:

This Engagement model involves teams that are an extension of the client’s team that is placed at different location. This can be maintained by the offshore team that has proven offshore delivery capabilities. This provides benefit as the team can be scale up and down as per the requirement. A team provided by ODC offer a set of resources with relevant and predefined skill sets of which the client has the full access to monitor or change or trach the work.

• The SLA/ Milestone Based Model: In this client engagement model the vendor aims to deliver specified milestones of the project. This proves to be well in term of delivery as the milestones are predefined and with no ambiguity and the roles and responsibilities are clearly demarcated by the parties.
• IT Staff Augmentation: This model allows clients to spruce up their in-house team with resources supplied by vendor company. This model allows flexibility in scaling up teams as per seasonal demands and also proved to be cost effective as there is no need to hire a full-time employee. It is good when you have to go with a QA requirement with the work done by the in-house teams.

There is no “best” universal client engagment model to match every company’s needs. We offer a full spectrum of engagement options to suit your business needs; to help you enjoy the benefits of external expertise, cost management and risk mitigation.

Highly engaged employees think, feel and act in ways that reflect greater levels of commitments towards the company and higher employee encouragement. They always contribute their full extent of knowledge and skills in the path for achieving success for the organisation and motivate others to do the same. They develop a better understanding about the company’s mission, vision, services and workflow so that they can work along the process with a qualitative work.

Every organisation wants the overall employee engagement. There are majorly three components for employee engagement:

• Intellectually Engaged: With a notion of a positive view of their relationship with the company, employees tend to improving the company with their new, creative and innovative ideas.
• Emotionally Engaged: Employees are proud, passionate and enthusiastic about the company the work they do in there.
• Behaviorally Engaged: When the employees are emotionally engaged with the company, they can go above and beyond the company, customers and their team members while advocating on behalf of company while being loyal.

Elements of Employee Engagement:

When we talk about Employee Engagement in an organisation, there are several factors of employee engagement process that we need to look upon:

• Commitment: Commitment is the degree to which the individuals are associated themselves with the job, responsibilities, and the company’s objectives. Engaged employees means the individual who are committed to face every challenge to achieve the goal. They are reliable and accountable for what they do.
• Motivation: It is believed that achievement is the biggest motivation and vice-versa. When the employees put their maximum efforts to the company the attained motivation plays an important role in success. Proper recognitions play an important role in achieving the success to the next level.
• Loyalty: Those employees who are more engaged to their work are more loyal to the organisation. The positive part of that is they are completely accountable for what they do, they do not need the attention of the managers to do their work.
• Trust: Successful employee engagement can be prevailed when trust is fostered from both the sides. An organisation that shares an emotional bond with the employees should trust their abilities. Employees should be given the autonomy to perform their task in their own way so that the creativity and the innovative self of theirs should also be motivated.

Phases of Employee Engagement Process:

As it is evident that Successful Employee Engagement is the long-term process and goes through various phases describing the level of engagement belongingness, attachment and involvement between the organisation and employees.

The phases are:

• Attract: the very initial phase of employee engagement process is attracting the best talents from the industry. Attractive and a positive work culture plays a key role in this step. It’s all about the creating a genuine, authentic and crafted image of the organisation.
• Acquire: This phase of employee engagement process involves more than one thing. The first thing is the way the potential candidates are interacted while advertising the position. The second thing is the keeping up of the promises that are done at the time of hiring them and the third thing is to provide the new joiners a positive and a well-managed work culture.
• Advance: This step includes promoting the employees to the higher designations with the higher salary which is the most important phase of employee engagement process as it is depending upon the work that the employee does and this also motivated them to work more harder, efficiently and leads to employee encouragement.

3C’s of Employee Engagement:

• Career: It is very obvious that when an employee joins the organisation they expect to build the career with it. If they will constantly be provided with the support and help, they feel improving and engaged at the same time. They should be given a specific level of authority to take their decisions on their own so that they should feel independent and valuable.
• Competence: Competence simply means the ability to grow. There must be small workshops and training sessions for the new employees not only in terms of work but also as the perspective of personality development. This competence is important for them to grow their career as well as promoting themselves in terms of designation, wages and perks.
• Care: Care is the finest art from the managers that can be done towards the employees to make them feel that they are valuable and worthy for the organisation. This also helps in building emotional engagement. The management need to be empathetic and sensitive to understand their personal problems so that they can have a bond and can share their problems.

Outcome: So, what you get out of all these processes:

• Proficient Work
• Team Interaction
• Customer Satisfaction
• Highly Productive
• Increased Company Performance

Finally, this can be summed up as in order to make your organisation successful in the fast paced era, we must value the most important resources that is, employees of the company and should focus on employee engagement strategies for successful employee engagement.

Every organisation has their own individual or a team for formal mentoring scheme. For delivering a qualitative project with a given timeline requires a perfect synchronised project planning and a project management life cycle

Project planning is not a one day process, there are several parameters which needs to be kept in mind while managing a project. All the situations that come on the way of the project development needs to be analyzed and then planned for resolving them.

“Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised.”

Let us understand the complete cycle of monitoring project one by one:

Scope Management:

The scope of the project is the primary step that is set at the very beginning of the project management life cycle, even though we cannot believe that it cannot change. It is better to be prepared that the scope might also change with the changes in requirements.

Well Versed Vocabulary:

During Project Management, there are tons of technical terms that are being used from the client-side. So this is the responsibility of the project manager that he/she must be well versed with all the vocabularies so that in case the team does not understand any of them, then the manager can explain all the know-how of it. This also plays an important role in team building. The manager who can explain all the points in detail makes the best team because this makes easy for the members to work.

Continuous Success Review:

The project managers are responsible to take up the meetings where the points can be checked that went well and if anything does not, it can take up and the team can plan for the possible and efficient solutions.

The best way to review the success of project cycle management is to incorporate an Agile methodology. The continuous discussion about the success and the points are hindering the further process that can be done. In this way, the changes required can be done at the same time which can also result in cost-effectiveness.

A Common Goal:

To make a project successful, it is important to make the team understand what they are working and why. This will help you in achieving more efficient results. There should be a clear view of the output that needs to be brought by the team.

Short Tasks:

Keeping up the project cycle management altogether can be time-consuming as well as a bit boring. It is better to divide the entire cycle into a few smaller tasks which can not only be easy to achieve but also to track the success of the project.

Identify the Hurdles:

Hurdles are the issues that may come up and hinder the achievement of the success of the project. Some issues are not that big but some can leave a huge impact if not detected on time.
So during the project management life cycle, it is good to spend a short span of time on analyzing all the possible factors that can cause problems.

Risk Management:

Risks are something that can harm your project, sometimes it can also improve but that is not something to be risked. The project manager is responsible for working out on the risks that how they can be removed and if it occurs how can their impact be reduced.
There must be a strategy and plan for risk management. Work with the team how can the risks be resolved and there can be many creative ways to solve the risks.

Coping with the Situations that go Wrong:

You cannot work with a complete solution to the project. Problems can hit and they will. What is required at that time is to deal with that problem calmly and professionally?
In such cases, the project manager cannot panic, what needs to be done is sit with the subject matter experts, figure what can be efficient ways to resolve the issue.

Understanding the Benefits:

Delivering a project is not the only single responsibility that a project manager should do, they must also analyze the benefits they will have from the project.
Make sure you have some benefits with each and every task achieved by you that align with the current business strategy.

“A Project is complete when it starts working for you, rather than you working for it”

These are some of the points that should be kept in mind while you are managing a project. Project management is a job that the external people from this part can never understand from have you been through. Project management is the most important part while the project is being developed. So be clear with the idea of the project and divide the tasks so that you can manage it properly.

Today Technology is touching both biggest and the smallest aspects of life.The technical upgradation involvement in the daily routines of ours make the use of technology in the field of sciences and medicines.The perspective of technology has been completely changed the things and they are looked up in the way looked in the old golden days.Technology now can be used anywhere and everywhere from the use of mobile phones to the internet and speedy cars.

Similarly, the use of technology in the fitness industry has upgraded the world of fitness and is becoming the boon for the both hosts and the guests.The use of new technologies is transforming a great impact on different aspects or points of the fitness industry , i.e extending from marketing section to the payment transactions and lastly to the amazing evaluation of biometric impressions.

The technology is rapidly changing the fitness industry and there are many ways for the changes in the fitness industry:

Generation of Leads Online

Some of the standard tools such as letterbox drops, banners, and newspaper advertising can be used for a membership drive, and these methods are still considered to be more useful, but social media has increased its reach to a new level in the fitness industry. Some of the social media such as Facebook pages account on twitter, YouTube and blogs are considered to be the great and most powerful method for connecting up with the new clients and making the fitness industry rising to the new level.

Instructions for the Fitness

Some of the techniques such as personal virtual training and YouTube videos on fitness websites offers you many new and different ways of delivering the instructions about fitness. The advantages of the web for giving training to their instructors are taken up by the fitness franchises and also making their fitness class more standardized by rationalizing with the new choreography and some videos on the portals of the web.

Different fitness communities

As it is commonly known that support from the social media encourages the long term adherence to the exercises, taking the fitness industries to a new level. The online communities of fitness can make the exercisers towards sticking to their goals of exercises and also pointing out towards providing the new sources of information. In order to connect with the clients for long, fitness industries can meet the clients online in the communities of the fitness professionals and share resources with them.

24 hour Access in Fitness Industries

Since gyms were not accessible for 24 hours, but the technology made the gym accessible for 24 hours due to the phenomenal success in the industry of fitness such as Anytime Fitness, making the members have access to the gym also after the closing hours.

Fitness related Apps are now available

As of now, there is the number of apps available for the fitness industry making the people encourage for having more responsibilities for their nutritional behavior and exercises they perform. Personal trainers which means that you don’t need to more available for the long sessions of a cardiogram. For example, apps take the users for the running programs of eight weeks, allowing them for spending their personal sessions on the activities where more guidance and techniques are necessary.

More of Wearable Gadgets are available

For becoming the ultimate fitness tracker sports gadgets are available which are embedded with sensors. The gadgets give the detailed description of the measurement of the heart rate and the activity levels, also valuable data such as the progress made by the user is provided by the sports wristbands. The gadgets encourage the users to reach out to their goals of fitness emitting out the negative reinforcements.

Different innovations in fitness Machinery

A simple treadmill in the fitness industry is taken to the new level in terms of surrounded sounds, integrated screens on the televisions, monitor for the heart rate and this is made possible just because of the increasing technology and more is about to come. Several more technologies such as testing VirtualU, 3D scanner for the body are designed and waiting to come into the fitness industry.

By Wrapping up at the end it is well known that looking forward with the more advancements will make your workouts more enjoyable and more effective for everyone.