The to do lists of a typical online business owner can quickly overtake you when it comes to the amount of time spent focusing on the items that enhance your business versus the tasks that simply must be done on a day to day basis.

One way to end this time management battle is to begin to build a team of people to help you with the more tedious types of items. With the ability to outsource this type of work relatively cheaply, managing hired help has never been easier.

One solution that you will want to use to help monitor your employee or team of people, would be some type of a tracking employee time software tool.

Clunky physical machines used to be the norm when it came to the old fashioned punch card system. Today, there are so many great web based applications that an staff person needn’t punch into a machine at all.

By using a solution to monitor the time keeping of your hired help, you will greatly enhance the quality of your company because you can focus on the items that will grow your company, knowing that you have a team of people and a quality solution set up that will help with the more boring to do lists.

This solution can be completely web based. Your hired help can login from anywhere in the world as long as they have access to the Internet. There are total employee performance management software options that also include specific project management modules as well as simple web based timecard systems.

You will easily be able to monitor your hired help in real time so there will be less stress about the integrity of the billable time that the hired help are submitting to you. Having access to this information in real time will allow management to inquire about any problems sooner rather than later.

Many of these web based time and attendance solutions also include detailed options for reports. You can easily pass on these timecards to your payroll department or others within your management staff. Staff can also create reports for themselves at the click of a button.

There can be a great reward in clear communication between you and your hired help with regards to hourly expectations and project commitments. Even though you may have outsourced your work overseas, your virtual staff can be clear that you are monitoring their hours of performance.

As your company grows, you will have more of an understanding as to what your outsource needs are. There are many web based time tracking solutions to choose from so you should not have a problem finding one that will meet the needs of your company.

Lean Six Sigma is an altered form of the Six Sigma process. Although it has the basic fundamentals of Six Sigma, Lean has a few differences that set it apart from basic Six Sigma Training. Knowing the difference can prove to add more to your quality improvement projects then you would have ever thought possible.

There are eight elements of waste that Lean Six Sigma focuses on. It has been proven that once these areas are removed from a company, their quality has improved. The following is a list of what the Lean process considers to be waste and examples to each area.

-Wasted Human Talent: This category includes any employee that is not pulling their weight, thus slowing the process down. It also includes anyone without a specific job function within the process.

-Defects: This refers to any product or process within your company that is not properly functioning. Prior to eliminating these defects, however, a solution to fix them needs to be put forth.

-Inventory: Too much product waiting to be worked. This can also refer to too many patients in a doctors waiting room, for example.

-Overproduction: You never want to have to much of something before it is needed. This can get in the way of a well-organized operation.

-Wasted Time: many times you will find that you can not go any further until you receive a product or piece of information from someone. Instead of sitting around waiting, this time would be better spent on processes or activities that may need some extra assistance.

-Motion: Simply put, too much unnecessary movement by people. For example, a clinic that sends patients to triage when they have booked appointments is wasted movement because they can go straight to the exam room.

-Transportation: Ineffective transportation that moves people and products can be wasteful when it isn\’t needed. Imagine a warehouse using a forklift to deliver items across the factory to a truck, when the production line could be streamlined to deliver right into the truck off of the line.

-Process Waste: Process Waste refers to any that a company requires to be complete, however it has no impact on the process, product or service that the company offers.

By utilizing Lean Six Sigma and understanding the areas of waste, you are sure to improve the quailty of the product that is produced by you company.

Create the most of your business skills with six sigma training. Getting green belt six sigma will benefit yourself in addition to your business. To learn more log onto www.sixsigmaonline.org.

If you’ve found yourself yearning for a document format that makes it easy and flexible to exchange data across the Web, then you should learn about XML, or Extensible Markup Language. . Computer software of all kinds already use XML for data organization and presentation.

Because of the way the XML language is structured, it is possible to exchange data in many different forms. Users find that XML makes data access simpler than is possible with HyperText Markup Language, more commonly known as HTML. Consider that XML programming has the capability to display one web page in either a mobile or regular format, depending on the user. Developers then could make one page instead of two. The ease and efficiency of XML should be becoming more clear.

It isn’t necessary to have extensive prior experience with HTML in order to operate well using XML. The two do go hand-in-hand in many respects, since they are both descendants of SGML, another markup language.

The purpose of a markup language is to organize, categorize, or otherwise label content, and the markup describes the organization. Markup contains the content, which is what you are looking at when you see an XML page rendered.

The need for XML emerged when the limitations of HTML became clear. In HTML, users cannot add new markup elements. With a need for greater flexibility, XML evolved to meet the needs of document and data handling in a web environment.

This is just a short introduction for those who wonder just what the heck XML is. For those who wish to make the most of web development, it’s a great idea to put learning XML on your list of things to do.

Like any great project manager, you are in charge of a number of resources (staff, project assistants, and team members). It could be two people. Or a large team of 20. Or if it’s a huge project, or even a program, you may have a hundred or more resources assigned to help you.

And your boss thinks all you need is Microsoft Project.

Do Enterprise Tools Make You an Effective Project Manager?

No dig against MS Project – I use it almost every day to manage my large, complex, enterprise-wide projects. It lets me manage the dependencies on tasks, and get into the nitty gritty details of how much each resource is assigned to a task, and what those resources cost the project, and how much “work” those resources can do, and how much value they add to the project in terms of billable hours. I can develop a highly complex plan that shows how 10 tasks are dependent on 20 other tasks, and weave a giant web of inter-dependencies.

So, what usually happens is that after a few weeks, you end up spending more most of your time trying to make your project schedule work every time you make a change that impacts a dependency. Been there? Groan..

In summary, your project management tools have taken over your life. And chances are, you just want to get organized, be able to assign tasks, and stay on top of what they are doing.

You have to really credit the companies who develop robust, highly complex project management tools. Something big like Teamcenter or MS Office Project Server has everything, does everything, and reports everything. If you have time to figure out how to make it work so that you can actually become productive on your project.

Great – you can now produce very detailed earned value management reports detailing just how well your project is tracking against the planned schedule and the planned cost.

But what if your project management tools put your project at risk because you have to spend all your time inputting all the data that necessary? What if you just want to get organized? What if you are doing a simpler project that is on the fly and requires a lot of flexibility to remain competitive? What if you want to have a real life, in addition to being a project manager?

Take Back Control of Your Project

What you’d like to be able to do is start over with something small and simple, that gets the job done. You’d like to start over, defining small tasks and handing them off to people who can get them done, getting status reports when you can use them instead of when your software thinks you need them — of feeling a sense of accomplishment when you get something done, not when your project management tools leave you alone.

Choose the Right Project Management Tool for the Job

It’s time to take a step back from your project and look at it from a new perspective. Or perhaps you want to start a new, smaller project, or a fairly simple and flexible sub-project. With the right tools, you can start small, and grow from there.

Pick the project management tools that treat you like an adult. For a highly flexible, dynamic solution to managing competitive project, check out Basecamp.