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Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

July 15th, 2011 | Posted in Management

One of the toughest jobs of the project manager is making sure you actually receive the resources you have been given for your project.  People resources are the trickiest of all because each person assigned to you can choose to come to your meetings or not, answer their phone or not, respond to your e-mails or not, review materials you send them or not, do their work on time or not, and so on.

If your team members are also your employees, then you have tremendous influence over these decisions.  But in many project situations – virtually all large project situations – your team members are not your employees, instead they are ‘borrowed’ from other managers in the company.

This means their number-one priority is NOT you or your project; their top priority is pleasing and meeting the needs of their line manager.

If you get people resources on a ‘dedicated’ basis – meaning you get 100% of their time for the duration of your project – then their manager has pretty much handed them over to you.  You effectively become their line manager for that time period, usually up to and including giving input to their performance, salary and bonus reviews.

However, in any situation where an employee has to split his or her time between working for their line manager and working for your project – even if you negotiate prorated input to their performance reviews – you need to understand that the other manager has far greater influence over their time and decisions than you have.  You will have to deal with that fact for the duration of your project.

It is a good practice to be wary of time commitments for any resource assigned to you on a split-time basis, particularly if anyone is allocated to you less than 50%. Here is:

Why a less-than-50% allocation so often fails:

Human nature is such that both you and the person’s line manager will both attempt to task this person 100% anyway, creating a situation in which all three of you will lose.

Human nature also dictates that if it comes to making a choice between pleasing you or pleasing a line manager, then the person will choose the one who has the most impact on salary, bonuses, performance reviews, and job security. In a matrix situation, you lose.

People in this situation inevitably find their energy and attention is fragmented between the project and all other work. It takes more time and effort on your part to keep such team members up-do-date on what’s happening in the project. They, in turn, lose track and lose momentum switching back and forth.

People whose time is fragmented miss meetings. Your project is now subject to the whims and inefficiencies of whatever else is going on in their non-project time. When emergencies crop up in those areas, your project suffers.

The worse case I ever saw of this was when I was working as a consultant to one Fortune 500 company during a time period in which they started and concluded buy-out negotiations with another Fortune 500 company. People who had been assigned to my project on a split-time basis suddenly began skipping project meetings because they were getting pulled by their line managers into meetings related to the buy-out.  The impact to my project was that after 90 days the program had only received 60% of the resources we needed.

The smaller the time commitment, the lower our project sat within each individual’s priority list. Once the buy-out was announced, missed meetings and delayed meetings became rampant. Within this 90-day window, we had only one three-week period where we operated at full strength.

It is worth noting that even with this chronic 40% matrixed resource shortfall, our project suffered only a 20% delay in deliverables. The reason is we still had dedicated resources in the most critical positions, and they were able to create all sorts of workaround solutions that helped us make substantial progress in the face of otherwise overwhelming resource losses.

Since matrixed resources with split-time allocations are a fact of life in projects, how can you manage them successfully?

The solution is 3-fold:

1) Staff your team with the ‘right’ mix of dedicated and split-time resources.

For medium and large projects, in general, the shorter the timeline, the more dedicated resources you need. And, the more complex the project, the more dedicated resources you will need, so each key aspect of the project gets needed attention and creative leadership brainpower.  Even if your project is well underway as you read this, you can always step back and re-negotiate time commitments, if needed.

2) Track the time you actually receive from your resources each week and note any shortfalls, no matter how small.

This is largely a guesstimation exercise you and your leads conduct at the end of each week. If you wait till after the weekend, you will have already forgotten how the week went. If you wait for your time tracking reports – in the event your company not only has time tracking tools but actually uses them – not only will the data be too late, it will usually be incomplete.  In most companies, your pivotal business and management people aren’t required to use those tools.

3) Take immediate action to win back your allocated time from any shortfall resource(s).

Don’t take a ‘wait and see’ approach if someone misses a meeting or is late in a task or a response.  Instead, immediately follow-up and find out if this is a one-time event or a warning sign of more misses to come.  Find out what your team member needs in order to be able to attend all future meetings.  Work with them, and their line manager if necessary, to clear up any conflicts or issues. Then figure out to make up for the time that was lost, so you can make sure your project stays on track.

These three items are common sense solutions, but it is surprisingly uncommon to see a project manager do them all.  Be one of the uncommon few!  Since missing-in-action resources are such a challenging and chronic issue in many projects, there is a good chance at least one of these three options can help you today.

June 19th, 2011 | Posted in Career

Online Turtoring

Online tutoring is a planned teaching/learning process, live and fully interactive one-on-one methodology by which knowledge is imparted using a wide spectrum of technologies, mainly Internet to reach learners at a distance. It is a tutoring portal working for all your educational needs and where a student can learn via the Internet with the help of a professional, subject matter expert. It makes use of several web-based programs to achieve its goals. Online tutoring is now becoming the best way for students to get extra help in perusing their study smoothly and is being preferred by both students and their parents.

Online tutoring is a collaborative process, which facilitates the students to plan out their program according to their own preferences. Flexibility of timings is an added advantage. Online educational constructive approach, provides a pool of subject matter experts and imparts one to one real time learning, with peer interaction for every student at its self paced working methodology.

The main advantages of online learning are…

Working in a highly safe, efficient, result oriented environment and round the clock educational services are provided to your child for considerably improving his/her results with better understanding of the concerned subject. Online tutoring focuses on improving their existing capabilities in solving problems, doing their homework in less time and also emphasize on the weak areas of your child, working with utmost perfection to bring out the best in them. It also strives hard for the considerable improvement in results of your child and provide them an extra edge over the other students.This technology is tailored for offering quality online courses by tutors who are screened, qualified and ready to help your child get better grades, brush up their skills and provide them with flexibility of time to pursue other extracurricular activities at the same time for an all round development of your ward. Moreover, with online tutoring students can go at their own pace and from the comfort of their homes to learn anywhere and usually at any time.

Online learning process and its goals…

This real-time tutoring/teaching process offers learning scenarios, worksheets, interactive exercises, an assignment, a multiple choice questionnaire, a quiz, a discussion or a case study for students via the use of multimedia tools such as VOIP, an instant messaging, email, online two way interactive whiteboards etc. This customized teaching service is most effective when voice, video, graphics, and text can all be used at the same time to make learning fun, highly interesting and relevant.

If you are looking forward to taking up an e-learning course but wonder if you have chosen the right e-learning site, so think before you choose..

June 15th, 2011 | Posted in Other Information, Social Marketing

Competition Vs Collaboration and Creativity

There is this tidbit from my favourite blogger. She compares which is better between competition and collaboration. Collaboration obviously seems more beneficial in almost any kind of situation. She ended off with a funny thought as to what would happen if both the mother and the father of a family have a competition to serve the family members. Haha, that will be a disaster…

Speaking of which, we might have noticed that people who are very highly successful in their particular field has become so not due to competition but because they love what they are doing. If I give an example of a Kollywood superstar, Kamal Hassan, who is an epitome of acting (has won 171 awards, more than any actor in film history) is best at what he does because he loves it so much and not because he wants to compete with other actors. Think about food as an example. Home cooked food is better prepared than commercial food simply because the former is done out of love and commercial food is done out of competition.

What is the best way to achieve creativity? We know that the mind has to be open first of all. Much like how the saying goes “the mind works the same way as the parachute, it can only function if its open.” To achieve the full potential of creativity, one ought not to be creative with the intention of producing something creative. Nice paradox, isn’t it? The person should explore at their own leisure and discover things along the way. That is how most inventions are born. Some people call it “by accident”. Irregardless, inventions are usually done unintentionally. They could not have happened if the inventors were concerned about the end result.

“We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.” – Eric Hoffer

Sell more, spend less: Google Checkout is a new way to accept payments for your online store that helps you achieve both; free processing for AdWords advertisers, greater visibility in search results and an increased conversion rate.

June 14th, 2011 | Posted in Career

Software QA

The profession of software testing emerged in the early nineties when personal computers became more popular as they became more affordable. The fast-growing population of PC users created new opportunities for software companies as well as strong competition for the consumers business.

The new generation of software users quite naturally expected their applications to work as advertised. At the same time, market forces encouraged the fast release of new software often at the sacrifice of thorough testing. Defective software does not sell.

The software industry soon recognized that, to achieve success, they would have to set quality standards prior to release and create thorough end-user testing procedures in-house.

In 1992, I got my very first job as a Software QA Engineer literally by accident: an old friend introduced me to a small startup company in Newark where he worked at the time. My job there was to identify functionality and performance problems in a client-server database application.

I searched for fellow testers for professional networking; but I found none. I approached over two dozen software developers asking if they knew of anyone who tests software for a living. They had never heard of software testers and could see no use for them since they tested their own software.

I found myself wondering what growth potential, if any, there may be in this career. In particular, I wanted to know how much I could earn as a software tester. I approached our VP of Engineering with this question. He suggested that, if I stay with the company for five years and do really well, I might hope to make up to 50,000 a year.

A small group of developers who had heard this exchange were clearly skeptical. I read the look on their faces, “That’ll be the day!”

In May of 1993 the startup I worked for collapsed. In the course of a week, there were five advertisements in the San Jose Mercury News for software QA positions. I sent a resume to each, which resulted in two job interviews the following week and one on-the-spot job offer.

My new employer was a multimedia startup. And guess what – that job paid 25 percent more than my previous one. Three months later I got a raise, which brought me to a 50,000 salary, exactly the projected five-year target thought to be unrealistic. My new employers were exceptionally successful. They sold the company profitably six months later. The new owners restructured the business and I was back in the job market again.

What I discovered in my new job search amazed me. Where I had found only five software quality assurance listings over the course of a week, I was now finding 10-12 listings a day. I had 3-4 interviews a week, sometimes two interviews a day, and received many offers within a month. The market had grown dramatically within a single year and the demand for software testers far exceeded the supply.

I chose the company that offered me strong exposure to automated testing, my passion at the time; but I could not help mulling over the amazing growth in demand for software testers and the equally amazing lack of supply.

In the mid-90s, software testing was still a new profession. Between 1994 and 1997, half of QA graduates of many small and big local QA schools became the first person in their companies specifically hired as software testers.

Today, most software companies have a dedicated quality assurance department with one or more managers and a staff ranging from junior testers to senior quality assurance engineers.

Before the recent recession, starting salary in QA was about 40,000 on average with 2-3 weeks spent on job search. Those who liked to change jobs every year or so as they acquired experience, saw their salaries grow to 75,000-95,000 within two-three years. When the recession hit Silicon Valley job market in 2001, there appeared to be no jobs at all for the inexperienced software tester.

But in the year 2007, the recession is over. On average, an entry level QA job seeker in Silicon Valley would get 2 job interviews a week. It seems to take only 3 or 4 interviews to land an offer. Finding a QA job today seems to be no more difficult than it was in the 90s.

Software QA is a unique job niche in many ways: Maturity is an asset in software testing unlike other IT fields. Maturity is easily marketed as patience, attention to detail, and tolerance for routine tasks, all of which are highly valued in software QA.

Whatever your prior education or work experience, it is likely to be an asset because there is likely to be software that specializes in your field of expertise. If you have experience in education, accounting, banking, publishing, workflow or contact management, sales, client relations, drafting, stock or bond trading, image processing, to name but a few industries, you will find software companies that target your field.

Testing software is basically about finding the discrepancy between the expected behavior of the application and its actual behavior. If you have an accounting background, for example, you are better positioned to understand what the expected behavior of a software application should be and how an accounting department would use it.

Testing is not a difficult concept to learn. We all have some experience testing something. We test new recipes, test-drive cars, double-check our change at the convenience store. In each case we are testing to see that the actual result meets our expected result.

Entry-level jobs in software QA do not require a computer science degree. The field covers a broad spectrum of technical proficiency. The niche is large enough to accommodate you.

We see individuals of all ages transitioning from H1B visas to green cards, for example, becoming two-income families and homeowners, and establishing themselves in their new country.

Software testing is definitely a consideration for college educated people of all the ages and professional background looking for a career change.