April 6, 2012
February 12, 2012
February 5, 2012
January 10, 2012
I would agree with this statement — even 80/20!
The Formula
I’d go even further and say 80/20!
(via get-thinspiration)
4 months ago • 1,988 notes
January 1, 2012
December 24, 2011
November 29, 2011
It’s Project Management, not project administration
Over my career as a someone who has been responsible for small to enterprise technical implementations for Fortune 500 clients, I have come across many different types of people: project managers, business analysts, technical architects, software engineers (front-end, middleware, backend), network engineers, and database administrators. I want to focus on the Project Manager function as it is often misunderstood its true role in terms of the project.
Owning the scope, budget, and timelines are the main responsibilities for the project manager — however most folks attempt to manage the project as “administrators” vs. “managers”. A key differentiator between administrators and managers is leadership within the actual project. Often I see people who have been placed in project management roles fail because they could not lead people within the project — they are often pushed into a situation where they are bullied or too accommodating to the internal team or client needs.
At times, project managers require the need to lead people towards the overall deliverable — while each team member has a responsibility in ensuring their parts are completed, the project manager has to ensure that the project moves in the appropriate direction — within scope, budget, and timelines. This is not an easy thing to do — and appropriate controls are required. However, it is not enough to have things documented or even having a PMP certification. Strong leadership is required to ensure the project is moving forward in the right direction.
6 months ago • 3 notes
August 6, 2009
Confronting the Icarus Paradox
The best preparation for managers to ‘a future war with the past’ is to develop a corporate culture where customers are considered in the decision-making process. It seems obvious but it happens quite often. Too much success for organizations can reduce the importance of the customer wants and needs while more attention is focused on the organization itself (company objectives and personal objectives) — whether it’s acquiring more companies (builder-> imperialist), to developing research projects (pioneer —> escapist), to perfecting process (craftsman —> tinkerer), from decentralized to added bureaucracy (salesmen —> decoupling). Jeff Bezos, in his message to Zappos employees (Amazon recently acquired Zappos for $900 million US) — was that if you focus on customers, mistakes are more forgiving. Too often, companies lose sight of this — and as a result, they lose their customers.
Apple, lost in the PC war with Microsoft, focused their efforts in consumer electronics. The lessons they learned from their experiences in the PC industry helped translate into their success in the iPod and iPhone products. They were not first to market for both products — and the industries were highly competitive — but what they were able to offer was a simple and elegant user experience to digital music players and smartphones, leveraging their marketing, R&D, technology, and supply-chain prowess. Microsoft, on the other hand, has unfortunately not figured this out yet (XBox is an exception) and because of their monopolistic practices in the PC industry, tried to apply a similar approach towards the media player (Zune) and smartphone product categories (Windows Mobile) but failed. Microsoft’s arrogance towards product development and its failure to capture customers and Apple’s successes has resulted them to emulate similar practices… the challenge for Microsoft is that they were once agile and nimble but have become large and bureaucratic. The product launch of Microsoft Windows Vista was a disaster — because they released a product which had too many bugs and it was slow and consumers looked for alternatives.
Keeping abreast of your competition, trends within the industry, understanding operations to reduce cost, getting to know your customer (feedback) are critical to challenge the status-quo, in order to create uneasiness and to combat complacency. By doing so, companies have a greater chance in growing over the long-haul.
2 years ago • 14 notes
August 4, 2009
Importance of CSR in Strategic Planning
Trust, commitment, and effort on the part of the stakeholders of a firm are essential to the success of that firm as are the competititive advantges and strategic positions of the planning process. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) cannot be separated from firm strategy and they are very much interconnected.
In 2007, Apple had responded to criticism by environmental groups such as Greenpeace who questioned their environmental commitment by taking a position on climate change, improving product energy efficiency, and recycling performance and to eliminate toxic chemicals from their products including: mercury and arsenic from displays and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from internal components. Apple introduced a policy on climate change, product energy efficiency, and overall recycling performance. A “Greener Apple” is an important part of their corporate business strategy. Also having Al Gore, former US Vice-President and active environmentalist — serves as a Director on the Apple board.
Although many companies are being socially responsible, they have found some challenges when taking their products/services to the global stage. Google’s internal corporate motto “Don’t Be Evil” was said to recognize that large corporations often maximize short-term profits with actions that destroy long-term brand image and competitive position. By instilling a culture of trust and image would outweigh short-term gain. When they were entering China in 2006, they caved into China’s hard-line censorship by allowing the government to self-censor their search engine. CEO Eric Schmidt explained that the term “don’t be evil” was then later replaced with an “evil scale” balancing evils for a greater good — rather than taking a stand on censorship, the Chinese market was too large to ignore and caved into China’s demands.
2 years ago • 13 notes
August 2, 2009
Competitive Advantages of Diversification
Because market conditions are dynamic and competitive, a firm needs to ensure that their corporate strategy is rooted in business strategies that produce sustainable competitive advantages. Companies that are especially in the early stages of growth of the firm should focus on a portfolio of businesses that can leverage, enhance, or create strategic assets which are important to long-term competitive advantages of diversification. It can be related if the firm has existing competencies that can be leveraged but there can be situations where a firm wants to enter a business that does not have all the assets to form the new business. Acquisition would be an example of unrelated diversification. Upon Steve Jobs return to Apple in 1997, Apple had primarily focused on the PC market. But he had realized that it could no longer win the “PC” business against Microsoft and conceded it to be lost — the focus of Apple was to focus its products to center around the consumer’s digital lifestyle — photos, video, music. In 2001, it had introduced the iPod — not the first MP3 player on the market but it was unique because it had an end-to-end ecosystem — where Apple controlled the entire user experience. The iPod business allowed Apple to leverage their marketing, user experience, technical, and industrial design competencies and using another corporation’s MP3 Player development experience (PortalPlayer) to develop new strategic assets support its new business strategy — and new life into Apple. Its success with the iPod has allowed them to diversify again into the smartphones business.
2 years ago • 1 note