Business & Personal Growth

  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 ...

  Dealing with pressure-like situations is one of the skills people need to master in this fast-moving world. Moving away from that steady & sedate lifecycle, we live in the times when every aspect of our life is volatile, wherein we need to deal with multiple variables at the same time, putting us under tremendous pressure in figuring out the ways to emerge out of it. Everyone deals with pressure throughout his life, personal or professional, and the real character of an individual comes out only while attempting to deal with it effectively. Your attempt to coping up with pressure shows a lot about your experience and maturity in evolving yourself as an individual. The manifestation of the pressure in your professional life could be in the form of anticipation of getting a pink slip from your organization, performing your job as per your boss’ yardstick, getting enough exposure to build your career organically, delivering within stringent deadlines, etc. As we understand that ...

  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...

Creativity is something people accentuate a lot these days. Creativity has created its own space & importance in this uncertain world. It is all about coming up with fresh ideas and trying out new things to provide a panacea to the potential problems that may arise. Since the culture in which we live & the society around us don’t always encourage us to be creative, it does not come naturally to us & so haven’t thought this as one of the crucial attributes in progressing in our careers. Corporates do emphasize innovation, but it can only take shape once employees extract their creative juices in everything they do. It is about challenging the set ways of working & doing things differently. Creativity should be embedded in our daily lifestyle to keep ourselves excited & enthusiastic from carrying out our mundane tasks. Here are a few ways to kick-start our journey on creativity: Break from a daily routine: People achieving monumental success in their life have one thi...

  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...

  Keeping yourself motivated has become an elusive task in recent times, given the kind of negativity we’re surrounded with. Staying motivated is one of the most important factors in aligning yourself & staying on track towards attaining your goals. Motivation and Productivity go hand-in-hand. Only when you’re motivated, you tend to achieve more in a lesser amount of time, thus, achieve your goals faster than many others. For some, people are the real motivation & so staying in groups acts as the biggest source of motivation. However, this can be counteractive when there is pessimism floating around and your group members are not able to maintain high motivation levels. So it is prudent to find your ways to keep yourself motivated to influence external factors rather than it influencing & controlling you. Read the below tips to keep you motivated at all times. Set a goal & keep monitoring: Without goals, you are like a ship setting its sail with no destination. The...