If you have been working in IT industry for a few years you might have been part of at least one project that was closed midway.
I’ve been part of a couple of them myself.
And it’s not a good feeling when that happens, is it?
[easy-tweet tweet=”Check if your project has any of these 16 symptoms of project closure (download infographic)” user=”pmexamsmartnote” hashtags=”#projectfailure, #projectshutdown”]
Projects are closed for various reasons – sponsor abandoning the project, lack of funds, an idea whose time hasn’t come, bad execution, and many more.
As a project manager, there IS something you can do proactively to avoid a situation, or at least lessen the impact on your team when the project does get closed for reasons beyond your control.
The first thing is to look out for signs.
The ominous ones.
Star Wars Fan?
At the end of this post you’ll get a downloadable inforgaphic. I’d suggest print and stick this to your work desk, as this acts as a guidepost for some of your day-to-day decisions as well.
You’re going to love it if you are a Star Wars fan!
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The original title of this post was “The Story Behind PMESN, and How You Can Benefit From It”. In many of my posts I take my own examples to put a point across. And I have tried to do the same here with the example of PMESN.
There is a simple question that has made or broken companies.
And the question is –
“Why does your company exist?”
Way too many companies start great and then drift without direction into territories that aren’t inline with founders’ vision. They then end up folding, being acquired by companies for pennies, or leading a dilapidated indifferent existence.
This is a great question to ask even if you are an individual (whether working for yourself or others).
Why?
Because, the answer to this question is the mission statement. [continue reading…]
Some of what you are going to read might surprise you.
What do you think most of people think about when they hear the word ‘performance bonus‘?
If you said ‘Money’, you are in the majority.
We all know that performance bonus is a reward for the hard (smart) work employees have put in, and is a sort of motivation to work better – if not as much as they did earlier.
But the question is, is money = motivation?
We certainly seem to be treating it to be so. At least, majority of the organizations are.
Let us look at some of the research findings.
Prof. Dan Ariely is a well-known researcher in Behavioral Economics – a study of human behavior where money is involved, in simpler terms (a long and complex definition here).
He shares that there are 7 combining factors that lead to motivation for an employee. [continue reading…]
Our world is becoming busier by the day, and we most often feel a mad rush to get more things done. Take up more projects, more responsibilities, and more of everything.
This attitude can be argued to be both good as well as bad. But without getting into that argument, let us look at few ways we can use our time better and achieve more than what we are currently doing.
These are 8 ways we may be wasting time at work and not realizing it –
1. Not prioritizing our work
More often than not we tend to ‘go with the flow’ at work. This is the default state if we do not plan specific tasks to work upon. Prioritization of tasks gives us focus and helps us get most ‘value’ out of our time and effort.
Time management skill can be an art and is extremely important for a project manager. We already realize that time is a currency that is always in short supply.
The Eisenhower Method of time management matrix (used in Stephen Covey’s book published in 1994 titled “First Things First
“), is a great tool to get our myriad of tasks segregated. This matrix helps us identify the truly prioritized tasks. [continue reading…]
Last week a good friend of mine wrote to me –
“Shiv, I see an article in today’s ET about management roles being made redundant – pl refer the link – can a PMP in any way tackle this? http://bit.ly/1o7l2XL”
It had an interesting headline:
Entire generation of IT managers set to lose jobs as frugal companies embrace automation
My first reaction was that of surprise. That was a pretty strong title I thought, but represented entire decade of Indian IT scenario in one single sentence.
(Hence the exact same title for this article.)
That news article talked about the latest trend in Indian IT companies. These companies are automating most of manual jobs that IT managers are doing and then letting the managers go.
This immediately raises three questions if you are a manager in IT company –
- What kind of manual jobs are these managers doing
- What is the main reason behind this move
- Whether this affects me, if so what is the way out?
Here’s an attempt to find out the answers. [continue reading…]
First of all,
Thank You!
You have been awesome last month and supported PMESN community with your participation. We’ve had,
- 321 additional page Likes on Facebook page (40% +)
- 21K post reach week on week
- 8213 new readers on the blog
- 3640 new views on Slideshare
But the crown jewel – mails from you telling that you are finding the content helpful for your PMP preparation.
The blog testimonial page has few of such messages. Again, thank you for that!
Before we declare winners of last month’s Fb contest, few announcements –
1. PMESN Inner Circle
Like I said earlier, I have been getting mails and notes from readers who are succeeding at their PMP exam by using PMESN notes as one of their reference resources. I feel immensely satisfied to see the goal of PMESN being fulfilled, that is to ‘Make cracking PMP easy and fast for busy professionals’.
Hi Shiv, I used your notes as one of my reference study. I am happy to inform you that I successfully completed my PMP certification on my first attempt, your notes is a good reason for that. Thank you so much.
– Nagesh G
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