Project Portfolio-Program Management

Egyptians left a mark of the civilization in the form of pyramids. pyramids are symbol of high integrity. Pyramids tells a story of time and  built symmetrically in layers. Pyramids have been built over a period of long time and not easily destroyed. Organizations development is a phenomenon which encompasses human potentials to be explored and directional in nature. Lets look at the pyramid again with help of a mirror, moving up from flat to top from concrete to transcendental and moving from flat to bottom reflects. Organization development OD is contextual again based on relevance. OD evolves on group and team purpose and objectives. OD Types  likely hood are hierarchical ,bureaucratic, matrix, ,pyramidal, entrepreneurial, flat, team oriented etc. in nature. Size of the organization also determines the type of development. OD reflects the culture of the org and it will encircle the overall vision and mission of the org by operating procedures. OD in recent times of gl

budget (Photo credit: 401K ) What is earned value : It measures cost , schedule, and work done .Its a way to measure projects progress and provide budget variances. Its a indicator of schedule, budget,and milestone.It also gives us percentage of work done, budget spent, and time consumed. So the units to measure it is dollars and and work hours. So whats the next step to calculate EV: Prepares a WBS (work break down structure) to quantify each task as phases and then phases into modules, modules into more detail units as it descends with time-frame for each task have fixed time which gives us a baseline structure. Lets understand some terms: BCWS - Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled ACWP - Actual Cost of Work Performed BCWP - Budgeted Cost of Work Performed From above terms earned value will be defined as "Cost incurred to accomplish the work that has been done to date." Derived metrics known as Schedule variance and Cost variance, if they fall into ne

Risk Management road sign (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) So what is a risk ? First understands and identify a risk is most important part of risk management.A risk is a probability of uncertainty associated with executing certain item/task/process/work etc.  A risk generates out as soon as we initiates a task. A critical resource in terms of skill set, in a team is a potential  risk of leaving the project in between because of unavoidable reasons. So a risk is inevitable, only thing we can do is ; manage and mitigate. Just like handling/catching error in software program . Always plan for the element of risk in project from the start and reiterate control over it for any contingencies. Steps to assess risk: Identify---------->Analyze--------------> Set priority to each risk Steps to control risk: Mitigate------------>Plan for contingency----------> Quantify it and Set a control process Design a Solution process at the team level: Taking help of the experts inv

software_sin_medida (Photo credit: elprosumidor ) What ever it takes to execute a project whether it is a fixed bid or Time and material based what matters is how you are managing your finances in terms of billing. Lets take a closer look to difference between fixed bid and time and material based project.  A fixed bid project is the one which is having a fixed budget from client and defined set of scope. So, in a fixed bid project the ball is in your court. You define how efficiently you can manage on resources to utilize them fully to balance on your margins. There is other side of the coin also by having a scope creep if you really blow up your work. Obviously a fixed bid project later can managed by the delivery team and driven by project team. While a time and material project is like a billing of resources involved on hourly basis for actual worked performed with agreed on terms and conditions. Also here one can get reimbursement for overheads. Here there is one possibility of

Cover of Six Thinking Hats Discussions leads to solutions , mistakes leads to innovations, As part of innovation , solution approaches, models quite often used technique in healthy discussions on day to day basis is Brain Storming , mischievously known as blame storming. To the extent organizations build competency around subjects of real time situations, till it takes to materialized very few of them make it to the concrete implementations. Take for example Google revolutionized the way we use internet with countable team, that storm sustained and now second wave coming from Facebook, Linked etc. Questions asked about their revenue models but skepticism will always there, social networks are strong tools not only for marketing but of communication, collaboration, and increased productivity and realized intangible benefits. Discussions are full of Arguments, counter arguments, statements, facts, thesis, anti thesis etc. Contextually the term devil's advocate can be dis

Over the years inspiration and motivation to out do something which creates spark in the genre of concurrent times is always been challenge for all of us, to make things happen requires a plan, an out of the box solution to rationalize its existence. More often than not inspiration are unknown to us, which may leads to different scenarios of multiple ways of looking at things differently and indifferently also, anyways there are always n-1 degrees of freedom to think differently for n+1 different ways looking at things. Inspired by a spiral which is coincidentally a galaxy in our spatial system gives us views like --if one start from a point from outer end to reach at center, will reach from outside-in and if one starts from the center and circle outwards move than that will be inside-out thinking. So again its up to individuals, which way move. Traveling by we see stars and other objects binding each other with gravitational forces. Galaxy One of the many management stra