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.

Standardization and How it Effects a Project Manager’s Business?

project-managementThis article is written for the better understanding of how the standardizing of project management adds value to once business, in any industry, the growth is driven by standardizing project management across the organization.

Some key capabilities for standardization:

An enterprise must invest in standardizing, codifying and documentation of project management practices. It doesn’t mean one way of managing projects but a portfolio of consistent projects the enterprise.

Different business units and verticals may follow different methods or templates for following project management. Many variations are carried out in order to meet the needs of customers and specific markets.

For instance just think if standardizing is not done, it can reduce management’s ability to track and control price change requests and manage scope stuff, which may result in lower margins and increased project risks. Formalizing projects help scale your business. Fostering standardization of processed such as change management, scheduling, costing and project reporting is also very important.

Another major step in standardizing is consolidating and integrating project data. Project teams can also improve productivity and effectiveness.

Benefits of standardization are vast and far reaching, those organization that combined standardized project management processes with the right kind of technology get a significantly good result and successful projects. The outcomes include improved project team productivity, fewer project losses, the higher instance of projects that get completed on time, and are under their financial reachability.

Standardizing project management across an enterprise often encounters resistance. Because teams usually working as how they might be feeling but often you have to encounter adjustments one way or another. There is a positive side of creating consistent project management experience.

Standardization can have the following positive impact on a project manager’s life.

If you are a project manager, you can experience that your life may go from slow and steady to chaotic in a matter of seconds. , it is witnessed it would be helpful both for the leader and the teammates to work efficiently if you share a common way of working such as a framework or interface etc.

Considering an example, if the schedule of your project is built on the same tool as your teammate, it would be easier for you to grab what’s next on the to do list.

When hiring a new project manager, standardized project management, which is already implemented in the enterprise may help the new hiring in the understanding of how the work is done in that organization. Thus, drastically reducing the learning curve.

The cooperative continuous improvement is a very important thing and I have always been in the favor of improving. And the best way of doing this working along the other project managers, peers or pioneers both. This will help you in carrying out your tasks in more effective and standardized way. Thus making standardizing your tasks easier. Having someone to share your ideas and looking up to someone for some good experience is indeed a good strategy

How Outsourcing Adds Value to Your Business?

outsourcingBefore pursuing to the understanding of adding value to your business, first, we need to understand what is outsourcing.  According to our very own Wikipedia, this term refers to a practice used by different companies in which they transfer a portion of their work to different external companies, this is a cost effective way but the condition is, it should be used properly. The external sources or service providers ought to be Specialists in their related fields.

Leaders choose out-sourcing to enhance business value propositions to stake-holders.

The question arises how and why the need arises, some of the processes are temporary and the company does not intend to hire a professional for doing that task.

However, before that, it is necessary that you should think and study about all the advantages and disadvantages of giving the resources and time of your business to a third party vendor, which is indeed very critical for your business.

As every other strategy related to business, there are many pros and cons to outsourcing as well. If not done right, it can bring down your business and create a lot of unrest.

Famous outsourcing business streams may include,

Pros of outsourcing

  • Swiftness and expertise
  • Concentrating on core process
  • Risk sharing
  • Reduced operational costs
  • Reduced recruitment costs

Cons of outsourcing:

The disadvantages include:

  • Risk of exposure of confidential data
  • Hidden costs
  • Lack of customer focus

How it adds value to your business:

When outsourcing, making a strategy which is effective in lowering the cost is very important.

Project managers can help make one.  Considering this three part structure,

  1. Assess the current state
  2. Consider the “to be” state
  3. Consider the governance require to sustain the future state

Project managers can avoid some common pitfalls in their outsourcing projects:

  1. Add a legal team, consisting of procurement and legal outsourcing experts which will help you in making the agreements.
  2. If you have any senior leaders around you, invite them to your project, in this way you can steer the initiative this will also help align it to the business mission.
  3. Gather some leadership support from your seniors; they might help you abstain from committing some serious blunders.

The things that count should be on finger tips of a project manager while handling a process with outsourcing aspects. Leaders can capitalize business value by keeping the right things in mind and if the outsourcing is done with a defined end.

Just to get an idea, consider that Assessments can be made on few things, such as

  1. Associate labor costs
  2. Labor expertise
  3. Value and non value support services
  4. Baseline of operational measures and service levels.

Project managers can help in many ways make an outsourcing strategies that trigger capitalization.

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

Consultation Services for Primavera P6

consultingThere is a wide range of consultation services available for primavera p6. Solutions that are most critical to your project are offered.  Consulting while solving some ambiguous problem is a way to minimize the effort and work and go in the right direction while you still have time.

In this article we will provide you with some of the most successful and known consulting services providers related to primavera P6 portfolio management. This would be indeed of great help for companies who are still in deciding phase whether to opt for primavera services or not, whether they will be able to implement them successfully in their organization for their crucial projects. Would it be a source of uplift and progress with making the projects which are critical for their business, a success?

These all questions are definitely answered by consultations service companies.

Few of them are listed below.

CBA: critical business analysis inc.

A short about the company includes, that their history goes back to 30 years. Since then they have been committed to advancement of project and program management expertise.  Decades of real world experiences offering a wide range of professional services in a variety of industries.

CBA inc. is seasoned with professionals that provide you with the best of assistance. Giving you a variety of project management. The services and support is given with the best of knowledge. The expert knowledge comprises of portfolio project management. That is re enforced with real world experiences. Based on skills and aptitude of people involve in your project. The most important thing is their training services for primavera.

The processes they use include:

  • Business process development
  • Software implementation
  • Process documentation
  • Custom training development
  • Report writing

The people involved in consultation services are

CBA has been helping preventing project failures since the past 30 years of their services. A highly recommended one.

EBS:

With more than 12 years of experience, EBS gives integrated services for IT solutions and project management market. Part of the Insynchro group of companies, they have extended their operations across Asia pacific region providing services that range from complex implementations across the world.

Their expertise include oracle and Microsoft stack of project related solutions, services and trainings as well as their very own project centric board room solution also known as IXD.

The IXD is basically designed to serve the neglected project business stakeholders. Supporting large capital intensive projects in oil, gas, utilities, miming, telecommunications, aerospace, and infrastructure, transportation, public and construction sectors.

Their oracle product suite includes:

Their services include:

  • Consultations
  • Planning
  • Integration
  • Earned value management for primavera
  • Upgrade and installation for products.

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.

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

Resources Allocation

iStock_000006849315XSmallTop ways that a project manager is likely to allocate resources for their projects, As discussed in earlier articles, the project managers need to be multi-tasking super heroes.

So what’s the best way of allocating your resources in best possible way?

It’s crucial and critical to stay on top of resource allocation. Ideally resource allocation should be inclined by these three principles,

  • Creating value for clients
  • Creating value for your agency
  • Creating value for employees

Now the most important question that arises, how does creating value relates to resources,

Motivated teams are a result of efficient resource practicing. Happy and motivated employees are vested in their work. That includes positivity towards their organization as well as clients.

First we should understand, what a resource is,

A resource can be identified as an economic factor or a productive factor, required to accomplish an activity.

Or as means to undertake an enterprise and achieve desired out comes.

Resources have several types.

They can be energy, entrepreneurship, information, expertise, management and time to name a few.

In project management, it includes executing project, managing people, technology, time, space, tools, equipment etc.

It also includes basic allocation decision, contingency mechanisms.

A very important and crucial technique used in resource allocation is resource leveling.

Which can be understood as a project management technique, use to examine unbalanced use of resources. Which mostly includes people and equipment.Another use is resolving over allocations and conflicts.

Resource training is also very major part, for many in the corporate world September is the start of the final push whether you are looking forward to finish the year or your project on a strong note or you ought to get new skills acquire for major roles, you need training resources.

Statistics show that you and your organization is spending significant time and money on training each year. This article will guide you in five different training resources, they might range from free to thousands of dollars.

The web today is filled with thousands of resources, a distinct problem is information overload, and you can start with these projects to stay informed on project management practices. It might help you in learning other skills.

Note:

If you are a self-employedproject management professional, copy blogger is a must read. It helps you build your internet presence.

Now we come to understanding resource allocation in a broader perspective;

Plans change all the time, one minute you are working on one project, next minute on another. The next thing you know your team has been switched to something else or the client might drastically adjusts the scope. In such an hour of panic or utter bewilderment. Rapid adjustments and re allocation of resources can be very time consuming and a big headache. Make your life easier and be at ease with your work by using latest tools e.g. “resource Guru” to streamline your re allocation process. Many companies still use legacy project management tools, that hasn’t kept up well with the time.

How things are catered using Primavera P6?

Primavera P6The thing which is of key importance are project planning and management skills using Primavera P6. While dealing with projects of lengthy time span and activities that are larger and are further divided in sub activities.

The key features to this are:

  • Planning
  • Monitoring
  • Budgeting
  • Accomplishing.

The foremost thing in carrying out of these features is scheduling. Whether it is used in planning long term plans or tasks at hand. Scheduling includes services that tell at what time, what task would be carried out. Scheduling has been discussed in a number of previous articles but would be differentiated with project management and planning in this article.

Differentiating project management, planning and scheduling:

It can be easily understood as:

Project management is a system’s approach to planning, scheduling and controlling.

Project management of primavera p6 is a recognized standard for high performance. The projects are high scaled, sophisticated and multifaceted. Projects with unlimited resources are recognized and organized. The number of target plans are large, which in return makes it a vital part in catering projects under primavera P6.

A project managers work include,

  • Balance resource capacity
  • Plan, schedule and control projects
  • Track progress
  • Allocate best resources
  • Monitor, visualize and assess project performance versus plan.
  • Risk analysis
  • Conduct what-if scenarios.
  • Plan alternatives in case of anything went wrong.

Executives will be facing increasingly complex challenges during the next decade these would be the result of escalating salaries, raw materials and competencies between different giant organizations. Which increased union demand, pressure from stake holders, and the possibility of long term high inflation accompanied by mild recession.

All the executives today agree on the point, that the solution to majority of the problems is better control and use of existing corporate resources.

Project management can mean different to different people. It is designed to use the existing resources in a better way.

Let us understand it with an example:

It’s around 5 in the evening and the project needs a design change as well as a front end implementation, within a couple of hours for a persistent client, handling this kind of tasks comes under planning your project where there should be a spot for sudden changes, you check to see who is available, this is done through already scheduled tasks and duties. Well, you have a UX designer but not a single developer who can implement the changes. You have teams in multiple time zones, a model, intended for flexibility and sudden turnarounds like this, so you should have someone available for the tasks.

Figuring out when a developer might be free for some additional work load or sudden task is just one of the many things that you ought to manage.

This takes a good project manager to handle this chaos, good project managers need to be multi-tasking super heroes. Figuring out what need to be planned when and what should be scheduled how, differs all three terms we were discussing in this article.

PSGINCS – REVIEWS, PROS AND CONS

PSGINC has always strived for the best forits customers, bringing them the best solutions for their professional related fields.  PSGINC has a reputation for giving excellence to the customer’s product and collaborating with them to get it to the heights of their professional needs.

The reviews and feedback we got in the previous year has been of great honor for us. This compels us to works more for the mutual greater good, which not only grow us as a company, but also make our customers the best choice for people when selecting from the organizations.

The reviews to be mentioned are

“Great company to work for, with paths of advancement for people who are smart and want to work hard. “

The person giving review has been an anonymous employ at PSGINC. He further adds to his talk.

PROS:

“I have always been treated fairly. In my time at prescient group solutions.I can’t say for anyone else. Compensation has been above average.  The company has been getting many clients in the past few years, which have generated a number of opportunities for junior level staff to move up and run their own specific account .The culture is friendly, the atmosphere is good. The staff is supportive as well as getting your back for things on hand.

Seminars are held by the company every week or few weeks to highlight the changing trends of technology. senior level engineers and technological staff has always been a great support and have our backs in times of hardships or if something is not getting the right way whether they are on the same account or not.

CONS:

By the nature of the business, staff is decentralized with most of them being assigned full time to specific client or client sites.  Thismay result in a negative approach, which is limiting the direct interaction with other senior or junior level staff members. Who are not assigned to the same project as you have been assigned to.

The one advice that need to be given as a loyal member of the enterprise is to focus on managerial stuff when it comes to IT team.

Another member added his experience:

He says:

The pros include, IT OUTSOURCING. The main focus is on growth and customer satisfaction and need identifying as long as I h=have been there. The company has stood through tough times with his employees and has made serious efforts to support all the crew with financial and economical allows. The sense of teamwork you get to witness as well as personally practice is not seen in other organizations. Where IT is simply considered as an overhead expense. The enterprise is a growing organization, which gives you opportunity to get a varied skill set and wider experience that can be had at a large organization.

Cons:

The cons include, like in every organization, sometimes the things don’t work out the way they should mostly when it comes to managerial stuff.

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