Monthly archive: May 2010
My SPIN talk yesterday was a good event with around 50 people attending it. The program was well organized by Chandrakumar and his team. The venue was Henry Maud Slay hall in Mechanical engineering department where I was going every day for 4 years between 1986 and 1990. I am a B.E. Mechanical Engg. graduate from CEG. I recounted my life journey after I left the college and how I am trying to discover my personal hedgehog. I shared introspection tools from the books “Six hats thinking” and “FLOW” to find one’s point of optimal experience and personal hedgehog. This was in the context of the audience who were mostly SQA team members. I was telling them that they should use their unique strengths to stretch and contribute to PMO.
Dr.Gopinath keeps a detailed blog of his toastmasters projects which is an informative and interesting read. Here he is stressing the value of TM program for project managers. Right from the Little Rock days in 1996 I have attended Toastmasters meetings on and off and have enjoyed them. So I fully endorse the views shared of Dr.Gopinath.
The nice people at SPIN (Software Process improvement Network) Chennai have invited me to give a lecture on the topic “Synthesizing SQA and PMO activities”. Find below the mail their president sent to the 3000+ members today. The reason I am sharing it here is to see if we can have a discussion on the topic and gain some new learning that I can share with the audience. BTW SQA team here means the team that defines and implements repeatable processes through facilitation and audits, and not the testing practice. PMO means Project Management Office and not Program Management office or Prime Minister’s Office. Looking forward to going back to CEG campus after many years. But this time, for a change, I am going to bore a crowd (-:) It is a joke. Please do come and support me on this very special occasion. (See the summary of the talk and PPT here http://msacademy.in/wordpress/?p=654)
Sometime in 2004-05, I got a chance to meet one of the Senior Vice Presidents from Netherlands of the Bank I was working for when he came down to India. First ever one on one session with a senior person in the Organization and he came up with few questions to understand how we operate on the floor for a global migration project. When I informed him the process, he sounded surprised saying that he was not aware that we have been doing so much of efforts in the back end. I felt disappointed and I asked him, whose fault? He was frank enough to tell me, that he never heard my name nor the process I was talking about and said, it is a big question of visibility. And where was the gap- Communication!
Last week there was a discussion on usefulness of Project Management in product development in this blog. Umasree Raghunath added a detailed comment on the topic. I thought it deserves to be highlighted as a separate guest blog. Here goes…
I would like to begin with a vital way of we perceiving the service industry today. To most of us working in the IT industry, the applications we build is also considered as Products. And hence Product Management and Project Management widely go hand in hand.
Last week there was a discussion on usefulness of Project Management in product development in this blog. Krishna Shivaramakrishnan added a detailed comment on the topic. I thought it deserves to be highlighted as a separate guest blog. Here goes…
Project management:
Objectives:
1.Delivering Value (to all stakeholders)
2.Reducing the time to market
3.Early returns for the customers and vendors
4.Producing Scalable products
5.Reducing the wastes(including costs and defects)
6.Allowing for Co-creation and
7.Customer collaboration
PMBoK definition of “Administer Procurement”
David Kershaw, founder and CTO at eVisioner has shared some wonderful insights on leadership, organization and optimism. Don’t miss this one. Thank you David.
I work with people who teach folks how to lead both, professionally and by example. I also have the good luck to rub elbows with many individuals who help people learn how to organize. Leading and organizing are both very important skills, particularly for project managers. Talking to professors of leadership and governance makes me an optimist who believes that learning to apply organization and leadership skills can overcome the odds of failure. Along with optimism, that belief is also quite high on the list for project managers.
For a while now, I am been thinking about this….BTW, this is not an article. Want to use Ganapathy’s blog to have an open (and heated, if possible) discussion on this topic and learn something in the process.
We all agree that Project Management is different from Product Management. What I am curious is how Project Management is viewed in Product Companies vs Service companies and why it is that way.
1. Read the PMBoK 4th edition two to three times before taking the exam. In that, use mind mapping to take notes, once. On scope, quality and procurement knowledge areas, there will be some questions straight from inputs / tools and techniques / output; In risk management the order of events (the process flow) is important; etc. So reading PMBoK is crucial. If you can get someone to explain PMBoK concepts, from begin to end, with illustrations, you should grab that opportunity. Technical documents can be boring to read by yourselves.
