Let us assume that we have sufficient funding and cash flow to maintain our operations for a 12 month horizon.  We should then be doing something to strengthen our infrastructure during the recession period so that we will become more productive or competitive when the first light shines through the cloud.  We herewith offer one such idea using low cost IT tools to improve team productivity.  Whether your team has 5 or 50 people, the scheme will work well.  It has a green feel too.

Compucon New Zealand has been as paperless as practical.  Our latest move applies to the monthly team meetings.  We use a data projector to provide a big view of agenda matters to be discussed on the wall.  The projection becomes the focus for everyone and we do not need to make photocopies of the meeting agenda matters for team members, they just take notes (on paper if not laptops) for their own use.  Many people think an ISO-9001 quality management system is full of paperwork and yes it has been until we started to go paperless.  We circulate all policy updates, performance reports, customer inputs etc via email and we keep all records in a common hard disk folder for shared reference. 

This change has saved a lot of time and resources on printing, photocopying, circulating, filing and archiving.  It also enhances the level of details to be discussed (we show motherboard details on the wall) and the effectiveness of discussions.  With this improved team coordination, the company will find productivity gains throughout the team leading to higher competitiveness.  What is more cost effective to fight off the recession blues?  Feel free to email your views to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .