When one business or company acquires or is merged with another, the result is a brand new organization. Managing that change is a complex and time-consuming process, with significant implications of tough time in terms of people management. Scenario: You are working as a Project manager in a multi-national company and were performing fairly well. Due to merger and acquisition your top management gets changed. Your new boss starts bothering the entire department with new policies and procedures. Projects priorities change, project managers were changed without any justification or criteria. Suddenly it became very difficult for you and your team […]

In project management the concepts of efficiency and effectiveness are used for evaluating different processes. Today project-based organizations are struggling to balance between the triple constraint time, cost and scope (plus quality), and thus are focusing in doing it both efficiently and effectively. However, there are a wide variety of views on efficiency and effectiveness among project managers and senior project members, which makes it difficult to apply these concepts in project-based settings. As per the thought leader Drucker “if efficiency is “Doing things correctly or right,” then effectiveness is “Doing the correct or right Things”. Basis this distinction it

It is human nature to compare, we often compare our lifestyle with our friends, colleagues, relatives and neighbors. Both freshers and experienced professionals sets an expectation from their job. Even those candidates who fail to get a job through campus, also set some expectation level basis their qualification and specialization. But after 5 to 6 years of job, one must check if his salary is competent with the market. Today it is very easy to find your friends and classmates through internet. It is possible that while surfing internet,  you found few old college friends, you did your bachelor’s or

Project management is an art or science, entirely depends on the type of organization you are working in. Some PMOs helps in pushing the framework, some micromanage people and some give you the opportunity to interpret the actual deliverables. In case your PMO is doing the governance part only the project management is used as more of art than Science in the ratio around 60:40. Since project management does not bear absolute truth, it cannot be a science completely. It is a technique based on years of experiences that showed us the best practices and the most promising approach. When

To address performance issues is still possible but to cater challenging performance issues is not an easy task. In fact it is very difficult for the manager if the company do not support firing of employees. It becomes all the more important for the manager to address it effectively. You can begin initially by thoroughly defining the key responsibility areas and expectations from the employee. Further you can list down the employee’s performance in terms on time, quality and accuracy along with your expectation from him on the same parameters. Check for the difference between current and the expected values,

In some organizations, stakeholders are informed only about the major milestones and are involved only at the time of major or emergency changes. Some stakeholders want in-depth involvement in the project and want to know every in and out of the project to eliminate the possibility of last minute surprises. Each development methodology suffers from one or the other limitation. On one hand, there are methodologies like the conventional Spiral model which are customer friendly but rather unforgiving for development and quality audit teams. Tips to improve transparency in the projects Share resource plan with the key stakeholders. Notification to

There are different types of project managers, some believe to use emails only to share data or confidential information. For other tasks like status updates they prefer the team to use time-sheets and other project management software and tools provided by the employer. They hate emails with subject “status update” followed by some number and one liner description as “done”. The other reason why some project managers hate e-mail is that they feel that any information related to the project should be part of a formal process. For example, an e-mail may contain question and answer exchange, which might be