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Project Management is key to success for a business

Companies that are having a bad business record are now jumping on project management bandwagon and showing that how important project management is for the success of the business. In the today’s challenging economic world, the executive management needs to understand the important strategic role the project management is playing in the success of the business. If an organization wants to pursue their plans for the success and stability of their business so they need to know the worth of project management instead of considering them as a functional activity and they should place them at the core of their of business processes. At the same time, the responsibility lies with the project managers to engage better with senior management for the sake of the business. We are mistakenly thinking that project management is only important for industries such as engineering, construction, manufacturing. Indeed it is necessary for these industries but not only these. Project management requires a team of talented and skillful people. Those people are responsible for the planning and then executing that plan for the success of the business. The sound plan can mean a difference between the success and failure of the business.

Why project management is important

Project management deals with the unexpected before it becomes a bigger problem. It helps you to focus on the bigger targets of an organization, let them be more productive and allow you to spend less time on a low value-added task which allows you to concentrate on the high-value task. It leads to overall efficiency and if your project team is efficient and if it works efficiently so it will reflect all parts of your project. Project management team leads to better monitoring of the overall project, this overall overview, available activities, and resources helps you to make the right decisions. This helps you to use your resources to more ambitious projects. The most important factor is that Project management helps in enhancement of team management, as the human resource is the important asset of an organization. This allows your team to share knowledge and work in synergy throughout your business project.

It is essential for every business whether it is small or established. It helps the organization to reach the goal within the predetermined budget and time. It is a big challenge for the small organization as they have to deal with projects with limited resources. It involves the identification of the right project management and then applying it to the desired project.

Primavera helps you as a team of project management. You can rely on it for a project manager. Primavera personnel are experienced project management professionals having experience and leads your projects to the successful outcome. It includes planning, development, innovation, initiation, execution, and control. Primavera has a team of skillful and talented personnel that are having expertise in manufacturing, refinery, medicine, high tech industries, hospitals, aviation, office building, and renovations. Primavera has been supporting companies in long and short-term projects. It supports when your project is near the deadline with scarce resources, Primavera helps you with its highly experienced and qualified project management professionals.

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How portfolio management increase operational efficiency and drive growth

Every organization must be built, not only on sound business plan but also on the company’s ability to make decisions. Have you ever thought that how proficient is your company in decision making for small or large projects? So this is the main purpose of having portfolio management to take the right decision on right time. The main goal of portfolio management is to make sure that all projects are working in the same kind of harmony as one member of any one team. The portfolio is like the system that organizes the entire forest as a whole, and make sure that every part of the forest is working harmoniously and efficiently as possible. Project portfolio management gives the business owner overlook at the business projects. In this, you can see all the running projects of your company. It demonstrates that which project is successful and which needs to be cut. Portfolio management will help you to know ROI of a project and also informs about that how much efforts and company resources are needed to completed the projects before its completion. It also helps to know, will the project be profitable or not. Portfolio management not only helps you to identify the bad eggs of your company but also the golden eggs that sure to turn long lasting profits because portfolio management focuses on the big picture.

Primavera project portfolio management is the most powerful solution for the planning, managing and executing the projects and portfolios of an organization. It provides the solution for the management of the projects of any size and any level of complexity within a project and provides the scales to meet the need of any kind of role, functions or skills that are needed in your project. It enables your project to achieve competitive advantage through portfolio management. Our management has confidence that they will fulfill their strategic commitments since they prefer to easily evaluate and initiate to create and promote a resource-optimized, portfolio. Our management assures that all the projects and programs are aligned with your organization goal. Primavera helps organization unprecedented level of control on corporate portfolio and enable them to make investment decisions, and decide that how to use the resources efficiently. Primavera helps the organization to do its portfolio management. With Primavera, it would be delivered project on time and within budget. It responses in time when the conditions are changing constantly. It gives you access to the information whenever needed. Primavera personnel helps you to get accurate data so that it would help you in decision making in time.

It proves the value of your projects to the stakeholders. Portfolio management keeps your investors happy. A company investors are enthusiastic about the financial goals of your company. If you show them that how your’s company projects are going on successfully, o that your investors will feel confident in future investments. A portfolio management does more than providing a snapshot of your company profitability activity, it can also help you to plan future profitable plans by providing an overall rate of return figure. It can help you to make a better decision by shedding light on where the company is heading right now. Portfolio management helps you to make better decisions and plan for more profitable future projects.

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Understanding Agile

A major thing when managing a project is understanding agile, which is very important for adding value to the business.

Agile + project management or project management + agile; as project delivery methods have evolved over the time. It has changed a lot of things; the special focus is now on leadership, different approaches have emerged. Such as hybrid approach, in which traditional waterfall approach and iterative agile approaches are used together. The reason is today the project managers need to contend with budgets, financial forecasts, release schedules, as well as business case benefits. Another big reason is aligning implementation of products with other projects across the organization.

agileSo one way or another, project managers today need to have a sound knowledge of what is agile and how it effects the product development phase. A frequent question that comes up is whether the industry needs a project manager who knows agile, or some agile leads who can handle traditional project management practices.  In today’s world we need both.

Agile development is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies.

It should be kept in mind that a project manager will oversee an agile delivery process. So it is very important that a project manager start their journey with competency, this journey may include beginning with training in agile methods. As the journey continues shadowing an agile lead to see how the iterative process works is also very crucial.

As you advance in the process, you come to the understanding of terms such as agile metrics, alignment of agile both to testing and to release process. As well as the people factor, that is also very important.

Agile leads needs to understand project management as this may lead to more successful projects and adds value to business.

What’s your take on that? Do you think organizations today need agile leads who know project management?

As the journey continues, a project manager will soon see what sort of projects can be best delivered.

Regardless of the delivery approach, a linkage to enterprise approach is required. Experience with iterative methods used to quickly deliver and shape solutions. They have a strong business analysis background. That is majorly shown when defining user stories on the team member’s part. In the near past these abilities or skills were sufficient but as the time changes many of the things that were once part of the waterfall model, needs their agile counterparts. The things like schedule, budget, product quality, and business case realization are of great importance and are necessary tools in agile process. These include the complexities of the contemporary delivery.

These all things compels the people in agile lead role to acquire skills in traditional project management as well as agile methods in factors like estimation, forecasting, resource management, technical requirements, as well as testing and the development tool implementation practices. Developing these skills the people in agile lead roles to give better quality and successful projects that will enhance the business value.

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What Does Enterprise Function Support Means and Why it is Needed?

erpSome common enterprise functions of any enterprise involve the efficient management. The management of organizational resources, such as finances and other such entities. Other resources such as employers, suppliers, customers, and partners are also included. And assets such as equipment, material, parts, supplies and properties. While it can be safe to say that technology intensive systems,  such enterprise resource planning commonly known as ERP, have come to represent the most cost- efficient way, these are the functions that chief executives and business leaders turn to in the hour of need, widely known as ‘back office support functions’.

In what circumstances they are needed is a question, commonly asked, when the top priorities for an enterprise are cost containment, cost avoidance and efficiency improvement. These are the functions widely worked on.

Other enterprise functions may include,

Business value alignment, business process optimization, shared services and outsourcing advisory, information system for enterprise function etc.

The most important of these are information system for enterprise function; enterprise resource planning can be understood by these,

The first and most crucial one is business process re engineering and requirement definition.

Others may include steps like, project management of ERP implementation.

Enterprise architecture and technology integration consulting, organizational change management, transition to steady state operations.

Now the question arises why these enterprise functions are needed and how they have a big impact on project management, as discussed above the things like project management of ERP implementation is very important.

As the approach of hybrid product delivery is enhanced, the consideration of adding value to one’s business is widely implemented through alignment of resources. Most important of the considerations include, speed at which the iterations are produced by agile process, the other things include business and technology complexities, as well as the increasing expectations of customers.

The reason for their need is such enterprise functions are considered as the key to success by today’s agile heads. The enterprise functions as mentioned above, such as resource management and portfolio management etc. there are other traditional enterprise delivery disciplines that are considered as key to success. Other frameworks such as scaled agile framework commonly known as ‘SAFe’ are also considered key to success in today’s project management practices by the people leading the agile processes. The agile heads today are people who have sound and impressive knowledge of both new and traditional knowledge of processes needed for project management.

Talking about “safe” as the new big thing, it is indeed the nest generation thing for project managers and it has enhanced the prospects of managing processes. And why is that so?

The answer to this is it had identified the critical need to have all the enterprise functions in place. The enterprise functions are all engaged for all kinds of deliveries that are need of the existing hour.

Enterprise functions can be of great help for both project managers as well as people in agile leads by helping them in developing successful projects.

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Project Management for Newbie’s

project-maangementProject management is a serious business. The reason for using this title is I believe the new entrants to software development don’t realize or take it serious what a serious and stressful job project management is.

The newbie’s these days think that it is a cool job as in the TV series, “the apprentice” where in each episode each project manager is given a single task for a week but that is not the case in reality, the project management is far more adverse and hectic job. It is indeed a tough job, no matter how big or small the project is.

The most important key factors in managing projects are:

  • Evaluating what is done
  • Determining where you are on the way of getting things done.

When the project management was started in the early days, risk wasn’t the issue that was being focused on. Only focus was on time and budget, the job of it was just to deliver what was being asked by the stakeholders. But with the passage of time things have changed radically which is a positive thing and should be acknowledged. The process of risk management is given importance and the project evaluators as well as the stake holders give due importance to this factor.

The most critical and soft skill is understanding the psychology. Projects and most importantly successful projects are all about teams, successful teams make successful projects. And successful team is made by a project manager who very well understands the psychological needs of the members. Understanding the psychology is very important while dealing with the stake holders understanding the needs of the business sponsors.

Here I present an analogy, a lighter one for a better understanding of what project management is,

To understand this analogy let us compare IT with Golf;

There are four factors that are compatible between golf and IT.

  1. It looks simple but believes you me, it is not.
  2. A very little mistake can lead to major problem; an error is the last thing you might want to encounter.
  3. Second guessing others is easy, when it’s in your hands, its easy being an expert with hindsight.
  4. Very difficult thing to do is to sustain a consistent level of performance.

A very important question asked these days is where and how the education should be started these days as there are few industries where the project management  is taken seriously, to name a few, the sectors like banking, aerospace and pharmaceuticals are some. But there are still some smaller or bigger ones where the term project management hasn’t made an impact or the due importance is not given.

The questions arises from where the education should be started, the answer is from the stake holders, they should be made to realize not everything can be handled by the same

Old traditional way where everything was decided in a board room and people followed what was discussed , now every stage needs supervision.

PSGINCS

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Why a Good Team is a Primal Virtue for Project Success

project-succssA team, a dream team to be precise is a quality that can defeat any obstacle or hardship experienced during project making. Yet more on the soft skills. It has always been impressive that how people work effectively if they are given confidence and respect, with these two powerful tools things can never get out of your hand. Project management is all about keeping things in your hand. What is happening and how things should go the right way is the primal virtue a project management should focus on. Knowing your stuff and being able to share your expertise while not being utterly persuasive or slightly dominating is a virtue for a good team, a capable team with the right professional attitude goes a long way.

A good project team is always better then a spectacular team. Micro managing a team is never a good step; it will always add mess and might deviate you from the right path where you need to focus on important basis. If you try to become a super star, micro managing everything, trying to get every little detail, interfering, dominating, the superstar will get carried away. You just need to be focused and humble at the same time. There’s a famous saying;

Fill your bowl to the brim

It will spill.

Over sharpen your knife,

And the edge will soon be blunt.

More on soft leadership, pushy project managers may think they are being effective but they are not. Believe you me they are just losing a member. Surely a bad impact on team. Better to be relaxed and go with the flow. For that way, the team will be positive and motivated. That’s not to say you can be incompetent and get away with it. The team will soon find you out. Just be fair, respectful and honest, and you might earn all the respect in the world.

A wise project manager will get all the respect. He must be like water who gets its way easily. And goes anywhere freely. It is yielding and flows naturally. He doesn’t push things or get carried away momentarily.

Enlightened leadership:

A leadership that is soft isn’t selfish and thinks of collective progress. A good team is lead by these. Continuing the theme of soft leadership.  The main quality is selflessness, a project manager who is selfish and thinks only of himself either alienate the rest of the team or worse the team that is the correct way. And start to behave in the similar way adapting to similar characteristics.

The reason is a good project manager who is supportive, builds confidence and makes space for other people to grow and progress as he progresses.

A famous proverb is;

Heaven and earth are long lasting

Why are they long lasting?

They use no personal agenda.

So they last long.

There are a number of courses available online on how to be a good project manager.

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Handling Your Nerves While Doing a Project

project-management-on-your-nurvesStaying calm while handling your projects is the most important thing. There can be a lot of pressure while handling project specially when the deadlines need to be met and resources need to be balanced. Other factors can be the nature, task or inter dependencies. Top management always want it quicker, is it isn’t cheaper and better.

Things are not well versed if the project manager responds to the management pressure by interfering with the team and pressurizing the team, the efforts and skills of the team gets demoralized. The lesson we learn from agile approach is to sit back and let the team do their work. While the pressure prevails. It helps a lot as the team gets confidence what they are capable of and results in a lot more motivation. If this isn’t done the pressure is build up and with tour interruption in pity things wile you lose your focus the team loses their way too. Even the scrum master is there to facilitate. The team gets motivated, the results are great and the projects gets successful, and what you get, satisfaction, a new energy to get things right as well as appreciation and support from the top management.

A wise project manager is guided by the way he feels. The most important of the factor is believing your gut instinct and not to get effected by what is happening around. Staying calm helps you focus and realize what’s going on inside your head and collaborating with your gut instinct. The rest of the team will get on it , pick up the pace and stay centered. The old thought which is practiced by every successful individual. Pause and take time to reflect, the way become clear, and acting the right way becomes easier. Agile project management is all about empowering your team, which is very much in line with the team. When the members of a project work together, there is a inner space created among them, the team then collaborate, grows, work hard, collaborate and make successful projects in that space, while doing this the only thing that matters and what makes it a success is confidence and believe on each other’s skills. A wise project manager always give importance to the silences, silences that prevails within the inner space of the team, which tells a lot about the happenings. It reveals team’s essential mood.

The most primal virtue is to not to take sides or getting involved in any kind of conspiracies. Squabbles are the worst thing that can happen to a team. A correct approach is also very important while resolving the issues or negotiating with people who are not motivated enough.

A leader is persuasive but not dominating, you can make other’s work for you only if they listen to you and not find your behavior dominating or interfering, they never like the project manager to take all the credit for their work, which is ethically wrong too.

PSGINCS

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Project management – What Should be Kept in Mind?

project-managementThe first step for an organization is to see whether the project manager has the necessary skills.

Skills required managing the project or in any adverse circumstances moving them to a place where they do less damage to the organization. And when we speak about the organization:

Certain things should be kept in mind. Considering the needs of the organization itself is a very important step. Business needs today includes the business to be agile, it should change quickly and as per the need. Adapting rapidly to the changing environment is a key factor. These factors make your business project driven.  Which means the business should have a project focus. This means embedding project management into business strategy and making sure the organization understands it.

This includes doing projects right. And that begins with making your team with the cream people who do the things with their best skills, putting your best people. For a couple of years as part of the practice the role of good managers may be stretched and blossom to some additional roles which may take their project to new heights of prosperity. Not just their projects but their skills, knowledge and expertise. Which help them as an individual as well as whole of the organization?

Two of the most important things which should be kept in mind is only those projects that are most critical to the organization takes place and secondly are measured as per actual benefits delivered to the business at the end of the project.

Decisions like these are made by the high level managers, (business executives).

According to some experienced project managers they work on a three year focus with a quarterly review of the portfolio and the strictest rule that nothing is bullet-proof. Business critical projects should always be prioritized and rests of the projects are delayed as per the need of the business. This is the most important way of getting top management support. Worldwide very few organizations have implemented portfolio management support. And among them mostly are suffering from “project amnesia” this term refers to “approve and forget” by some people. Explaining it may include:

“The (executives or top management) approve a project and then seem to forget all about it”.

Reviewing what we discussed in this article, step one was the skills of the project manager, step two were the needs of the organization, step three includes considering the projects that are critical to the organization. But we can’t just stop there even if we take the important of the projects, things might still go wrong. Which can be eliminated using the review technique, which the fourth and most crucial part.

It includes putting processes into place considering all projects are reviewed at set times during the project life cycle.

What is needed is the some kind of a peer review process where a team or an individual carries out a review against a standard check list of the project at hand.

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How Internet of Things(IoT) relates with Project Management

For understanding first we need to understand, what is internet of things (IOT), It can be understood as a proposed development of internet in which everyday objects have connectivity through networks which allows them to send and receive data hence communicating through a channel.

internet-of-things

In some years the bigger projects will need a project manager that will not only handle the flow of work but also control a large number of some programs, understanding this by an example.

Amazon plans to deliver packages using drones, this includes a number of issues to be resolved. Firstly these drones would need to communicate with customers, corporate office, and employees and at some point air traffic controllers. Starting from research and development and going through up gradations this whole process indeed needs a project manager. A NEVER ENDING CYCLE.

Some people would say that the IOT is still embryonic or amorphous. It would be a disgrace to internet and the speed with which it is progressing that the IOT is not in a clear or definite shape.

But there are already a number of project managers working on IOT. And there would a huge impact OF IOTin the coming years McKinsey Global Institute.

Researchers estimate the potential economic impact of IoT technologies to be USD$2.7 trillion to USD$6.2 trillion annually by 2025.

The large organizations will have an overlap of projects that includes IOT. A program manager is neededto drive the strategy that effects the bottom line of company in a beneficial way. It will take years for companies to determine what IOT will do and how they should drive it, in order for them to produce successful business projects.

The internet of things is so broad. It will be the project managers who define the benefit realization plan and tells whether the program need to be sub divided taking into view its huge value.

The main strategy will be set by the company’s CEO, providing what will be needed and how things will be implemented, the responsibility of execution will be of the portfolio management. For example the task at hand is modernizing delivery. A better understanding of this can be perceived with the collaborative efforts of portfolio manager and the company’s chief executive officer. The portfolio manager in return tells what should be kept and what should be discarded to make this project a success for the company. Portfolio manager will have assistance of a governance committee led by CEO or any of the executive officials.

The internet of things and project management is a broad perspective that can be implemented in any or every field whether it’s construction, energy, medicine. You name it and it proves to be of great success.

Internet of things will provide a number of opportunities in the years or decades to come. Fasten your seat belts, and hold on for the new adventure and wave of jobs. Hence providing a greater step towards a brighter future.

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How Project Management Training is Important?

Training is a very essential tool in any kind of resourceful work. If you do not train your employees in right way; there are more chances of work go wrong and can cause downfall to your organization. The presumed goal of training software project managers is to equip them with the knowledge and competencies that will help them to be successful in different domains regarding the domain of Software project management.

project_management

These will not guarantee success but make success more likely. Over the years, the notion of success has expanded greatly from simply meeting requirements, delivering on time and not exceeding the budget to include a plethora of other success criteria. In fact, what success is; often changes many times during the project. This and many other facets of software project management frustrate and perplex untrained software project managers since most enter into this role untrained.

This article presents what anecdotal and experimental evidence has shown software project managers need to know that can be conveyed via training programs. Today’s software project manager can also benefit from this information to overcome many of the misperceptions about nearly everything regarding software project management.

The need of the hour is managing adequate issues of software engineering projects that cannot be done without the use of software project management. The importance of adequate management is becoming more apparent with each passing day. Usually in organizations the project managers are not trained at all or are poorly trained. This article examines what we now know is needed to successfully manage software engineering projects and how education can help transfer this information.

Software project management represents a paradox within the software engineering community.

It has been described as being more vital to software project success than all other factors combined, yet there are still no conferences or journals devoted to this topic. In fact, international conferences on software engineering rarely list software project management as a topic in the call for papers topic list. Finally, we are slowly realizing what other knowledge work related professions have known for a long time – project managers are not born, they are made – through education. The problem is that there is no general agreement on what knowledge and skills a software project manager needs in order to be successful. In fact, we have yet to agree on just what success in software engineering is. This article examines what software engineering project managers need to know, what skills they must possess and how these may be acquired through education. The resources cited are not restricted to software engineering alone as there is a lack of research in this subject.

Before we move to the training part we need to know what software project managers actually do. The tasks they carry out are.

According to a very successful and renowned CEO Robert Townsend, the most skillful and capable person in a team should be made a manager. Because of his caliber of carrying out the underlying tasks and managing what needs to be done when.

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