Global

By Dr. Shree Nanguneri • April 18th, 2012

Part II – Effect of High School on Final Board Examination –The Analytical Treatise Dr. Shree Nanguneri and Co-Author-Project Lead Contributor, Ms. Reethika S. Iyer*     Background: In Part I, we shared our experience on how parents make decisions to selecting high schools. Once the students graduate they are then again faced with the [...]

In the last 5 years or so, we have realized that comparing these two roles is like comparing Apples and Oranges. Not many companies now overlap these roles. These roles over the time have evolved from being janitors of products and projects to management of them. Product management has learned a lot from project management. Let us examine what project management can learn from product management?

About one generation ago, management styles focused on the concept of a “happy worker is a good worker.”  Organizations focused on providing employees the amenities they needed to feel valued, in hopes of it leading to higher productivity.  The Hawthorne experiments by Elton Mayo found that changes in the workplace were welcomed and improved morale.  [...]

In my timezone I’ve got just a bit over one more day to go in 2011. Personally I always welcome the end of one year and the beginning of the next. It feels like a fresh start to me. It’s been a great year in many ways, but now that I have worked with people [...]

How might we apply the observations Richard Nisbett made in his book Geography of Thought to the project-driven workplace? Is there a Workplace of Thought? And, if so, can our understanding of the Workplace of Thought help us manage our project stakeholders more effectively? During my career, I made the transition from engineer to project [...]

Recently one of my clients sent a team of engineers to Japan. For most of the team this was their first visit to that country. Before going, they asked me to brief them on some of the cultural issues they might encounter. There is a long list of things to watch out for, from beer [...]

Did you know Project Management is having a birthday? Well, sort of a birthday. It was 100  years ago, in 1911, that Frederick W. Taylor published Principles of Scientific Management. Early pioneers of project management, such as Henry Gantt, were followers of Dr. Taylor. Now, for historical accuracy, it should be noted that Dartmouth College [...]

Project managers work on various projects, sometimes traveling to various clients’ sites. You juggle many emails, calls, faxes and meetings during the week. When do you find time and how to prepare yourself mentally to learn something new like a foreign language? You’re on the road and you think you can’t learn a foreign language [...]

1.  If I just use music and media, may I give up studying grammar and vocabulary and quit my language classes? If you are still a beginner or intermediary student, you absolutely have to keep learning grammar and vocabulary. They are the foundations of any language. Using music, TV, radio and film as additions to [...]

Do you think of foreign language learning as sitting in your boring, stuffy high school Spanish class repeating “Yo me llamo. Tú te llamas. Él se llama” in Spanish? Boring, right? Having labored through many dull language classes, I have seen how ineffective rote memorization techniques alienated and discouraged students. Foreign language learning, as discussed [...]

Unfortunately, in many countries, especially English-language ones, foreign languages have not been taken seriously by educational institutions, parents and children. People who learned to speak a foreign language were few and far between and sometimes couldn’t use their languages professionally. This is changing. More and more students are learning “hard” languages like Mandarin and Arabic [...]

Time is running and we’re all focused on getting the job done. When working on international projects, the speedometer is going 24/7 as distance and time zones create a relay race around the world. As the global project manager and tour guide, you have your project check list in hand. Clear objectives? Check. Roles and [...]

New advances come up all the time, even in the area of “do-it-yourself”. The combination of the internet, wireless connections, and powerful search engines allow people access to more information with little effort or time investment. Armed with this information, people are more likely to “do-it-themselves”. Unfortunately, the consequences are as bountiful as the information. One of the consequences to small businesses may be a loss of a potential client.

Until recently, it was an article of faith with me that I could not work remotely from my teams and be an effective program manager.  I relied on my ability to influence and cajole and evaluate in face-to-face interactions.  I rarely worked from home, because that would separate me from what was going on.  To [...]

Now it is time to explore how these services and capabilities are viewed by the enterprise in terms of true business value and competitive advantage. Corporate development concerns itself with the management arm of the enterprise, setting the strategy and priorities, and ensuring that the enterprise wide investments are aligned with future strategic goals.

Now that the linkage between the delivery and operations of the service has been established and the PM understands how the service enables a capability, it is time to make the connection between the delivery team and the organization.

I believe that helping the PM understand EA and its links to Business Architecture (BA) will help to crystallize the role that their delivery team plays in the broader scope of the enterprise.

Linking Project Delivery in the early stages to business value can be challenging at best, due to changing strategic goals of the enterprise. Also, understanding the full life cycle of the delivered service, including the total cost of ownership and the end-to-end life-cycle of the service can be a difficult task to assume and communicate.

To continue to add value to the enterprise, I believe that the PM role needs to continue to evolve more in the direction of a strategic business manager, linking the project delivery to business value. Excelling not only at delivering a project to the stakeholder, the PM needs to understand how the service delivered, as a result of the project, accelerates a business capability and helps the enterprise leverage current services in-place, as well as the life-cycle of these services, skills that are immensely important to the enterprise success.

Kris Kringle had been wondering about a way to brighten up the winter season, and at the same time reward all the world’s good little children.   He wanted to delight them, and exceed their expectations, making all their dreams come true. He wanted to do all this in secret, surprising the Children on Christmas morning! [...]

I am a professional worrier.  Yes, at times I actually feel like I get paid to worry.  What could go wrong with this, what could go wrong with that, what are the mitigation plans?  This was true when I was a project manager and an engineering manager. But, with those positions I was also responsible [...]

A joint post from EarthPM and TenStep: Last time we introduced this series and outlined the focus for the topic of green project management using the Deepwater Horizon disaster as motivation. In this post, we’ll cover how we’d work ‘green’ project considerations into the Project Charter, Project Scope Management, Project Integration Management, Project Management Plan, [...]