Business & Personal Growth

  Change Management is one of the most important aspects to manage when it comes to managing large-scale projects. Changes are inevitable in a project, coming from any part of the project lifecycle & can have a significant impact on the overall project’s success criteria. To insulate from its adverse effect, there is a change management framework in place at a project level. Similar to this, we do need a change management strategy at an organizational level to absorb all the potential effects that various dynamics surrounding the business pose at them. Changing the business landscape paves way for new market opportunities, with customers shifting the way they choose & interact with their brands, forcing organizations to manage change. Technology is the key enabler these days to digitize their business offerings in the way customers expect. Faster time to market, hyper-customization & personalization & enhanced service quality puts changemakers at the helm to formula...

  While we have a structured PM framework which we typically use for all our traditional IT projects, managing AI/ML projects entails a lot of exploratory phases which becomes challenging for PMs to manage. Unlike our typical IT projects, there is no specific solution that the team can implement and goes through the discovery phase to ensure if this is the right implementation for the business case in hand. From the Business standpoint, organizations are aware of the potential benefits these evolving technologies bring to them in terms of increased revenue & business growth in this digital world. With this pandemic around, several organizations have adopted digital transformation to streamline their business processes & embrace new systems making AI-based projects a new norm in the foreseeable future. However, the businesses are yet to chalk out the concrete use cases they would be benefitting from. Right from the uncertainty of the business outcome to designing and impleme...

  Stepping into the shoes of the Project Manager handling multiple projects could be quite overwhelming. It feels like managing innumerable project activities with altogether different teams to manage. It is not a cakewalk and can be a juggling act for Project Managers as they need to be mindful of their involvement & equal attention given to all the projects, without leaving any of them behind suffering in achieving their project objectives. Switching between various project meetings in a day could be quite stressful at times, which could lead to oversights & inadvertent behavior. Keeping a tab on all the moving pieces of various projects, their impediments, resource constraints, task dependencies, conflicting timelines, stakeholder’s management, etc. can be too intimidating & complicated for PMs to manage. PM’s skills would be gauged on how dynamically they manage their bandwidth to make their presence feel to all the project stakeholders, thereby doing due diligence ...

 We have always been reading & knowing about the activities/tasks, Project Managers or Program Managers are incessantly involved in. I myself have been writing on them and the skills they need to excel in. One of the things that are being put under the spotlight about this role is becoming an effective leader. While there is a lot to talk about in having superior leadership skills, there are a few key emotional aspects a leader should exhibit in his quest of becoming a distinguished & transformative leader. And these are more relevant now than ever before. They are closely linked with the behaviors that they display amidst their daily project routines. It is about the core principles they follow while dealing with their team in getting their project work executed. A few of them are outlined as below: Stewardship: This is an ethic most commonly found in great leaders across the world. Being an awesome leader doesn’t come with the title or position you hold, it comes by insp...

  Corporates across have experienced various transformations in the past year and will continue further, owing to the pandemic, in terms of the employees’ way of working. Remote-working has borne its strong prominence in recent times and leaders in organizations have adopted various practices to ensure the team’s outcome is not affected in any way. Few organizations would even consider this major shift as a permanent working model than a makeshift one. Hence it is imperative to take into account all sorts of challenges that it may potentially pose for the leaders or managers, right from team alignment and communication lapses to the team’s accountability for the work activities assigned. And once again the role of a Project Manager comes at the center in ensuring that the team is working towards the common goal.   “Co-located teams vs Distributed teams” has always been one of the crucial considerations Project Managers need to make to adopt the right governance style and str...