Business & Personal Growth

 The importance of PMO is increasingly recognized now more than ever. Companies had PMOs set up only for compliance purposes without them being utilized to their optimum level. There is misconception pervading across organizations about PMOs – their purpose, structure, benefits, roles involved, etc. Hence let me first outline why do PMOs exist & how can be made effective for organizations. In the abbreviation PMO, “P” might take different forms like Project, Program, and Portfolio depending on the level a PMO operates. PMO can operate at a department level to manage all projects within it or at an enterprise level to oversee functions at all business areas. PMOs are primarily defined as a business function that ensures effective delivery of the project. The major functions of PMO include coordinating and managing shared resources, developing the project methodology & processes along with the best practices & standards, Training & Development of PMs, coordinating com...

  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...

  Project Managers encounter a host of problems while managing the project, which they are expected to resolve. The wide spectrum of the levels of complexity requires them to have a wide variety of weapons in their arsenal in the form of problem-solving techniques. No matter how many risks they capture & how well they proactively plan for the unknown unknowns, there would be a number of issues they would be handling on a daily basis. With so many moving variables defining the fate of the project, the nature of problems varies with the project's size, their business objective, stakeholders involved, etc. These problems can be viewed as the pieces of the larger Jigsaw puzzle, i.e. the larger project environment, and only when these pieces are put at their right place can we solve the larger puzzle at hand. In order to resolve these potential issues rising throughout the project lifecycle, the people skills of project managers take the driver’s seat. All the analytical techniques ...

  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 ...

  Business agility has become the order of the day. In this fast-paced world, organizations are heavily tested on their agility and so their performance is gauged on the parameters like faster time-to-market, adapting swiftly to changes in requirements & continuous reinvention along the way. In order to score high on these parameters, a complete revamp needs to be made in the way businesses operate and deliver on their commitments. While adopting new processes, tools & technologies might seem in vogue and appear trendy, forming the right culture, governance & policy framework and leadership styles create a major impact in driving transformational change in bringing business agility. These act as a catalyst in inculcating an agile culture across all the levels & teams of the organization. At an operational level, we have various teams that form the core in ensuring organizations stay agile by efficiently delivering their offerings that are relevant in the face of the...

  The projects which are typically termed as the largest of the lot, involves multiple vendors, partners & client teams. Organizations tend to outsource the non-core elements to third-party vendors in the quest to cutting costs or getting access to specialization. Thus it brings in multiple teams & stakeholders to achieve a certain project outcome. Naturally, managing such projects becomes challenging for the Project Manager as there are several communication lines to manage. Moreover, the greater challenge lies in aligning each team’s interest with the larger interest of the project. While the team’s synchronization can be maintained by having an effective communication plan at its place, the underlying self-interests of the team can become a major blocker in taking key decisions. There could be disagreements in a few project-related aspects like delivery timelines, requirements, communication which impacts projects adversely & one can easily find teams passing the buc...

  In this changing IT landscape, Citizen Development plays a vital role in bringing efficiency & productivity to the existing SDLC. It enables us to take the next step of bypassing or keeping lesser dependency on the coding phase in its run-up to building enterprise-level business applications. With having a complete understanding of Citizen Development, teams can create apps using simple interfaces. With not much technical background required they will be able to build systems using any low code or no-code platforms. It facilitates the low-code application development environment and given the shortage of software developers, Citizen Development significantly reduces the burden on the IT departments. According to one of the Forrester Research estimates, there would be a shortfall of 5 lakhs software developers in the US by 2024. Apart from reducing the coding dependency, it can also be a lower-cost option & improve time-to-market, enhancing the overall efficiency of the en...

With the advent of modern technologies like AI & ML, their applications are largely being discussed & predicted in various domains & business functions. AI is a technology that helps in forecasting the future by recognizing the pattern of the humongous amount of available datasets. According to one of the surveys by PMI, it is estimated that 81% of organizations are impacted by AI technologies in one way or the other. Today I would like to outline how AI’s ability to interpret events, unfold future predictions & take automated decisions can largely affect the Project management field, their practices, their laid-down framework, and their tools & softwares. These days, project managers face a lot of challenges while managing complex projects, where there are multi-disciplinary teams to handle along with a number of variables to take care of. Often we’ve experienced projects falling short of either of their boundary parameters: - Schedule, Budget & Quality, thereb...

 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...