- Change Happens: They Keep Moving the Cheese
- Anticipate Change: Get Ready For the Cheese to Move
- Monitor Change: Smell the Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting
Old
- Adapt To Change Quickly: The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You
Can Enjoy New Cheese
- Change: Move
with the Cheese
- Enjoy Change! : Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese!
- Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again: They Keep Moving The Cheese.
Iron Triangle
This is my personal blog. I write on topics related to Technology, Management, Productivity, Personal Development, Travel, and General topics. Disclaimer: Any views or opinions represented in the blog are my own and do not represent those of the people, institutions, or organizations that I may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, including past, current, and future employers unless explicitly stated.
Tuesday, 30 June 2020
Book Summary Who Moved My Cheese
7 C’s of Communication for Project Managers
Book Summary What the CEO wants you to know
Ram
Charan is an advisor to Fortune 500 companies and has
lectured at Harvard and Northwestern’s Kellogg school of business. In his
book What the CEO wants you to know, he explores what he describes as the
“basic building blocks of business”. Using comparisons from his family’s
shoe shop in India he deciphers the day-to-day necessities of business in
order to describe the essential information you can use to determine whether a
business is successful. Here is a synopsis of some of the essential finances of
a business as described in” What the CEO wants you to know”:
- Cash generation – The
difference between all the cash that flows into or out of the business in
a given time period.
- Margin –
Margin is the percentage of profit made on the products the company sells or services the company provides. As a meaningful statistic, it usually refers to a company’s net profit margin after taxes.
- Velocity - Sometimes referred to as “inventory turns”, describes the concept of how frequently the company’s stock is moved off the shelves into the hands of its customers, and replenished by suppliers. It defined by how many times a particular product has to be restocked in a
year. Additionally, he measures “Asset velocity”, this is AV = Sales / total assets. This measurement is somewhat more interesting in terms of software companies that don’t have a
physical product.
- Return on Assets (ROA) – The amount of money you are able to make with a given amount of fixed assets.
Occasionally companies use slightly different measurements such as “Return
on investment (ROI)” or “Return on equity (ROE)”. These measurements answer the questions of
“How much money are you making with your investments, or with the money,
shareholders have invested in the company?” ROA can be simplistically defined as a
product of Margin and Velocity (R = M x V). Mr. Charan
describes the ROI of a
business as a critical marker to the health of a business. Comparing this
figure with competitors and the previous year can gauge whether a company
is succeeding or failing.
- Growth – A company’s
growth is the increase in a company’s size in terms of employees. The
author argues that with a lack of sustainable, profitable growth, a
company may not be able to attract the type of employees that the company
needs to succeed in the marketplace. If a company stagnates, the amount
of money it can afford to spend on research and development decreases, the
opportunities for promotion within the company begin to dry up, and the
ambitious employees move on for greener pastures. Even more dangerous is
unnecessary growth, where the company expands at a rate which is not
consistent with the return on the investment in the new employees/stores
etc.
- Customers – A company
must listen to its customers in order to succeed. In terms of e-business,
neglecting user feedback to your software or website is detrimental. The
prevalence of the internet means it is possible to promote your business
globally, and if you don’t cater to the tastes of your customers they have
little need to stay. The cost of attracting customers is relatively high,
but in most cases, the cost of switching for a customer is very low.
Using
these measurements, one can get a summary of the business:
- What were
the company’s sales?
- Is the
company growing, or is growth flat or declining? How does this growth
compare to competitors or the market segment?
- What is the
company’s profit margin? How does this margin compare to the competition?
- What is the
company’s inventory velocity? It’s asset velocity?
In
terms of wealth the book delves into the business from the eyes of an investor:
- Price-earnings multiple
(P-E Ratio) –
How much profit the company made for each share of stock. For example, a
P-E Ratio of 7 means that for every dollar of earnings per share the stock
is worth seven times that much. It represents the expectations of a
company’s current and future money-making abilities. When a company begins
to miss its earnings-per-share expectation investors often decide to take
their money elsewhere, resulting in sliding stock prices.
This
is followed up with some notes on personnel management, coaching, and how to
determine whether a person is suited to a job, though I’m not certain that this
chapter belongs in the overall context of the rest of the book. Finally, there
is a personal check-list you can use to evaluate your own company on the
metrics described previously. I found this a nice basic primer on business
finance, I’m certain that each of the topics could have entire books devoted to
them, but this is a good overview with enough detail to be interesting without
getting too dry.
Scrum Master Interview Questions.
6
months back, I was eagerly looking for a job change and attended interviews
with various IT companies in Delhi and NCR reason. I have collected below
Interview questions based on my experiences in job interviews. I was able to
get an offer letter from 3 reputed IT companies with just one month of
preparation. Below is the list of Interview questions.
1. What
are your roles and responsibilities in the agile team?
2. What
is your team Matrix?
3. What
is your role as a Scrum Master?
4. What
is the difference between the Scrum Master and Project Manager?
5. Tell
me about your day to day working
6. Who
is the product owner in your project and what’s his role?
7. How
do you calculate story points?
8. What
are the attributes of a good user story in agile?
9. How
do you plan a sprint? What is the duration of a sprint planning meeting?
10.
What is your team's Sprint duration any why?
11. How
do you draw a Burndown chart?
12.
What are the different roles in Scrum?
13.
What are the different Artifacts in Scrum?
14.
What is your team’s velocity?
15.
What is the difference between capacity and velocity?
16.
What is the Definition of Done?
17.
What is a Sprint Review meeting and who participates in it?
18. How
do you do the Sprint Retrospective Meeting? Do you use any tools to capture
Retrospective meeting output?
19.
What do you do with the Retrospective meeting output? Explain with an example.
20. How
do you plan your Sprint?
21. How
do you manage risk in Scrum?
22. How
do you consider that your deliverables are complete?
23.
What is a Burndown chart?
24. What
is a Burnup chart?
25.
What is the difference between burn-up and burn-down charts? How do we use them
independently?
26.
What is user Story and what are characteristics of a user story?
27.
What is Epic? Who is Epic owner?
28. How
do you split epic into a story, what are the criteria?
29.
What is a query in Jira?
30. Can
you show a role-specific dashboard to users in Jira?
31.
What are the four Values of The Agile Manifesto?
32.
What are the twelve Agile Principles?
33. How
do you run a Daily Scrum Meeting?
34.
What is the difficulty you faced in agile implementation?
35.
What are the different ceremonies in Scrum?
36.
What is the Scrum of Scrums?
37.
What is Feature Driven Development?
38.
What is CI/CD? What are the tools you use for it?
39.
What is Planning Poker? What is the use of the Fibonacci sequence in Story
point calculations?
40.
What is a Cross-Functional Team?
41.
Explain some common metrics for Agile
42.
What is the biggest challenge you faced in Project management?
43. Do
you perform automated testing? What are the tools you use for it?
44.
What is Test-Driven Development?
45.
What is a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?
46.
Share the current scenario of SAFe implementation in your project.
47.
What is the role of the Release Train Engineer?
48.
What is the difference between Epic, User Stories and Tasks?
49.
What is product backlog and who maintains it?
50.
What is the role of a Product Owner?
51.
What is time-boxing in Scrum?
52.
What do you understand by Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Scrum?
53. Who
shall be writing user stories?
54.
What are the challenges you faced as a Scrum Master?
55.
What is the release Burndown chart?
56.
What is the value stream?
57. How
do you foster a self-organizing team?
58.
What is a definition of done, why the written definition of done is important?
59. Why
you should minimize work in progress (WIP)?
60. How
you will run multi-location and multi-vendor Scrum teams?
61.
What is a product backlog refinement/grooming?
62.
What is the Minimum Viable Product and Minimum Marketable Features?
63.
Have you ever tried Pair Programming? Do you think it is useful?
64.
What is Increment?
65.
What is Technical Debt?
66.
What is time boxing?
67.
What is Moscow?
68. Can
we change sprint lengths in between?
69. How
do we develop a framework code and architecture in Scrum?
70. Can
Scrum Master and Product Owner be the same person?
71.
What is Emergent Architecture?
72.
What is Scrum of Scrum?
73.
What is sprint zero?
74.
What is the Build Breaker?
75.
What is Spike?
76.
What is Kanban?
77.
What is design thinking?
78.
What is XP?
79.
What is BDD? What tools do you use for BDD?
80.
Limitations / Drawback of Agile / for what types of projects Agile is not
suitable.
Always
be prepared with 5-10 questions that you want to ask/learn about from the
company or position for you to have applied.
Please
suggest questions in the comment section if I missed any.
Certifications for Software Project Manager: Required or Hoax?
There are so many
certifications available in the IT Industry. These are mostly related to
Software Development, Software Testing, Enterprise Architect, Project
Management, Business Analysis, and Service Delivery Management, etc. All the
certifying agencies claim that their certificate is more promising and helps to
improve accessibility to the Job market. There are so many factors related to
the selection of the right certification. It requires a lot of time, money and
hard work to get the certification. So it’s very important to invest
hard-earned money and precious time in the right certification for optimum
benefits. This is a kind of investment we usually make to improve our credibility.
Is certification
really necessary?
This is the first
question professionals usually ask. Certification has very little contribution
to the actual job scenario and your experience plays a vital role in
challenging the environment rather than certification. Job recruiters are
mostly from the non-IT background and search profiles from the job portal on
predefined criteria. If you have certification then there might be more chances
for you to come up on the search results but if you don’t have it then even
after experience and knowledge, you have fewer chances to reach on the
interview desk. We cannot deny the knowledge gained through certification and
its implementation in a real scenario. These certifications add some value to
your profile. For example, the Employer knows that if somebody is PMP certified
then he/she will demonstrate a level of knowledge and commitment in the project
management field. Sometimes certification is contractual and needs legal
obligations. Peer pressure is also one of the necessities for an individual to
attain certifications.
Some of the factors to
choose the right certification
- Value in Job Market – One should choose certification
which has great value in the job market. For example, PMP, CSM, and
PRINCE2 have great value in the IT Job market compared to other Project
Management certifications
- Choose the right certification – Choosing the right set
of certification also plays an important role. Certification should be
relevant to your profile. For example, PMP certification is not relevant
for the Enterprise Architect role
- Credentials of Certifying agency – Certifying agency
should have a prestigious name in the industry. It should have some
accreditation and should have spent some time in the field. For example,
PMI which provides PMP certification is more than 40 years old
organization and has a great credential in the industry
- Cost – Cost of the certification is also very
important. One should check their pocket before investment
- The proximity of testing center – This is also one of
the important factors
There are various
certifications available in the market for Project Managers. Few important
certifications are
1. Project Management
Professional – PMP certification is one of the prestigious certifications in the
field of Project Management. Project Management Institute is the only
certifying body of this certificate. As of August 2019, there are 932,720
active PMP certified individuals in 218 countries. Gaining PMP credentials is
not easy, you require a lot of dedication and hard work. The Project Management
Body of Knowledge has a set of standard terminology and guidelines for project
management. Knowledge of PMBOK in the practical scenario is required to pass
the PMP exam.
2. PRINCE2 Registered
Practitioner - This certification has two-parts: Foundation and Practitioner.
PRINCE2 emphasizes dividing projects into manageable and controllable stages.
It is adopted in many countries worldwide, including the UK, Western European
countries, and Australia. If you are managing a project for the company of
these countries, gaining PRINCE2 would be beneficial. AXELOS is the only
certifying body.
3. Certified SCRUM
Master – CSM is one of the premier certifications in the field of Agile project
management. Two days of training is mandatory to gain this certification. In
this certification, you will learn the Scrum framework and gain an
understanding of team roles, events and artifacts. SCRUM Alliance is the
certifying body
4. PMI-Agile Certified
Practitioner - The PMI-ACP spans many approaches to agile such as Scrum,
Kanban, Lean, Extreme programming (XP) and Test-driven development (TDD.) This
certification is provided by the prestigious Project Management Institute. If
you are already a CSM then you don’t require to do PMI-ACP as it meets the same
purpose.
5. ITIL Foundation
Certification – This is one of the prestigious certifications in IT Service
Management. ITIL is an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure
Library, has a set of detailed practices for IT service management that focuses
on aligning IT services with the needs of the business. There are five stages
in the ITIL V3 Service Lifecycle: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service
Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement. AXELOS is the
certifying body.
I would like to
conclude that I am personally in favor of gaining appropriate certifications
based on an individual’s area of expertise and interest. However, it is not a
golden rule to be followed by everyone. If u have a zeal to grow and move
towards the top ranks in your industry, certifications can serve as an
elevator.
Creating Weekly Support Dashboard for Client: How I Structure It
One of the major
duties of a Project Manager is to share the weekly report about the health and
progress of the ongoing Project or Operation. We usually collect details of
service requests from any of the tools like Service Now, Azure DevOps Board, and
Jira etc. End Users usually log their incidents on online issue tracker tools
and the support team updates the status after the issue is resolved.
Many tools comprise of
inbuilt reports already but often the inbuilt status report is unable to give
the tailor-made picture to the client. In such cases client needs their weekly
report customized. That is when the role of the Project Manager starts. PMs Collect
raw data from these tools, develop and customize it according to the needs of
the client.
Today let me shed
light on the process I am personally using with my current project of
developing a weekly support dashboard for my client.
Filter Data and Graph
Plotting
- Extract the data that is
resolved (current week) and the unresolved data (pending)
- Segregate and mark the
incidents logged in the previous and the current week
- Further, the data is bifurcated
into two parts: Issues and Service Request
- Moving ahead, I divide the
resolved incidents level wise and issue-type wise
- We come to know a number of
carried forward incidents after subtracting the number of resolved
incidents from open incidents for the given week
- For all the open incidents I
will divide it into three categories: Active, Awaiting information from
the third party and Awaiting user information
- I then create Pivot tables for
all the Active incidents, Issues, and Service Types according to priority.
I plot all the data for visual representation on excel graph with proper
data labels and Legend
Country-wise
Segregation of Data
- In this kind of segregation, we
filter out data according to the countries and brands.
- The tickets logged in the
current week are taken into account and display the data with a small
summary
- We may also add data related to
application performance
At the end of the
dashboard, I present key updates from the reported week. I also exhibit:
- Development activities
- Support activities
- Risks, Dependencies and Action
items
- Issues of the project
It also includes:
- Discussing with the client
about the pending points
- Highlighting the initiatives
taken in the project
Here is a peep into my existing dashboard.
However it is primarily an individual’s discretion on how and what he/she wants
to use for their dashboard presentation. Depending on the needs and asks of the
client the same can be altered or elaborated.
10 Common Mistakes as a Project Manager: How to Avoid Them
We all are human beings and often do
mistakes. Learning from these mistakes and moving on to our path is the essence
of life. ‘Discipline’ can play an important role in avoiding those mistakes. In
professional life discipline is an important factor in achieving professional
growth. We should practise self-discipline to avoid such mistakes. As a leader,
team members look up to us when they need our help. Maintaining a high level of
commitment and integrity is essentials to set an example for team members. Some
of the common mistakes that I have experienced myself are:
Not Involved in Day to Day Operational Work
–
Project managers are involved in many
things like preparation of weekly and monthly dashboards for the client, project
health audits, meetings with the customer, senior management review, risk register
update and many other things. Sometimes they also need to manage multiple
projects. Many times they do not get the opportunity to be involve in day to
day operations and some employees take advantage of such situations; they
provide false or misleading information to project managers or manipulate the
things according to their needs. By the time, some employees become functional experts.
They acquire domain knowledge or technical expertise of the particular process
and create dependency. After some time it is difficult to remove such
dependency and hence they start taking undue advantage of this situation. A
project manager needs to arrange some time daily from their busy schedule and
understand the ground level of the situation, domain, and the nitty-gritty of
business needs. For example, if you are a Service Manager, you should know what
the types of Incidents getting logged are and how the team is resolving the
issues. But you cannot build this capability overnight, it takes time. You can
start by understanding RFP points, Participate in the demo and understand Open
Bugs or Incidents.
Not Technically Involved –
Project managers usually come from a
development background and have good knowledge of technical things. But due to
overburden in management activity they start losing interest in technical
things. That is when the Solution architect or Senior team members take
advantage of such a situation. Project managers should always involve in the
technicality of the project and be aware of the latest technology trend of the
market so that he can also contribute technically to the project. In future,
these things will matter a lot and make a difference.
Not Having Control Over Project data –
As a Project Manager, you should have full
control of project data. Higher management, Customer or Auditor can ask you to
provide the data at any time. If you have control of data, you can analyse it
and extract important information out of it. You can also play with this data,
keeping business objectives in mind. PM needs to track all kinds of project
data related to Project status, risk, productivity, individual performance,
etc. You can start by keeping some data always handy, keep yourself up-to-date
with audit prospective and organize your project dashboard.
Not Applying Best Practices –
PM should need to aware of all kinds of
best Project Management practices and their practical implementation in the
Project. There are a lot of them available in the industry like Six Sigma,
PMBOK, Prince2, Agile, Scrum, ITIL, SAFe and many more. You don’t require certification
on these but gaining inherent knowledge will suffice your need. If you know
these best practices, you can utilize them to manage your project and meet the
business objectives.
Not Familiar with Project Management Tools
–
There are many tools and software available
in the market which help Project managers to perform their tasks efficiently.
These tools are mostly related to Schedule management, Risk management, Cost
estimation, tracking of work completion status and Communication. Examples of
such tools are MS Project, Azure DevOps Board, Jira, Calendar, MS Teams, Skype,
Planner and Sticky Notes, etc. Arrange some time and learn these tools and
utilize these in your project.
Interacting with Selected Team Members –
We usually spend our time with the selected
person who likes us or we consider him/her important in the project execution
perspective. It’s human behaviour. But as a Project Manager we should not
restrict ourselves to a selected person but mingle with the entire team so that
the entire team can feel comfortable to share their thoughts, views, and
issues. Some people glued to you for their personal motive and want to take
advantage of your power and position. Always identify such people and beware of
them. Make yourself available to every team member. I started interacting with
everyone and spending some time in general discussion while having coffee, tea,
etc. with all the team members. Even established formal relationships with least
likeable people.
Unable to Efficiently Manage Office Politics
–
The efficient management of office politics
is also one of the important skills for any employee. Project Managers need to
keep their eyes and ears open for them always. Don’t unnecessarily jump in the
matter of others. We should also keep away from all kinds of gossips and
backbiting. If you need to say something to anyone say directly to that person.
Many times conveyer conveys the message according to their perception and need.
In the workplace, nobody is your friend or enemy. We all have assembled here
for work only.
No Interaction with the Hierarchy Above –
Often we interact only with our immediate
bosses only and not above him/her in the hierarchy. You never know what he/she
has conveyed to his boss about your performance and attitude. If you have
interaction with the above hierarchy then you can convey your message and make
your points when required. Although it is advisable not to jump hierarchy but
in some scenarios you may require it. So always establish rapport with the Boss
of the Boss and do regular interactions with them. A few days back, I read the
book “Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship with Those above You”
by Rosanne Badowski. It provides detailed insight on this topic.
Not Respecting his Own Power:
Project Management is a responsible but
powerful position. Organizations provide you the power to give Appraisal,
provide Performance Grade, Salary jump, Job Confirmation, give Promotion or Demotion,
Hire or Fire somebody etc. You have to use all these powers with the utmost
care. Don’t misuse it by being arrogant, rude and angry; changes are very vital
in corporate. Never abuse or lie to anyone, you don’t know how long you have to
work with them. Always be polite, grateful and humble with your position. Keep
yourself distant with all kinds of Judgements and Grudges. Trust on people’s
ability and intentions. Be secular and don’t force your political, religious orientation
to anyone. Keep yourself disciplined by embracing good habits, following truth,
timeliness, doing clear communication, transparency in the act, following
rules, following secularism in the workplace, maintaining professional
hierarchy, showing a positive attitude, exhibiting the right way of doing
things, trust and give people respect.
Developing Emotional Attachment with the
Project
According to PMBOK, the definition of
Project is – ‘Project is a temporary endeavour’. Every project which starts
will end one day. You are hired by your employer to just manage the project,
you cannot control everything. Don’t develop emotional attachments with the
Project, Team members and Customer. It can hamper your growth path. It will
stop you to take new challenges in professional life. Don’t get in the comfort
zone but focus on your Learning and Earning. A project can be run for a longer
duration like decades but you cannot stay there for the rest of your life to
execute it.
Team members and Customers trust only that person who leads a disciplined professional life and a person who treats others with respect and takes his commitments seriously. By avoiding such mistakes we can keep ourselves going and earn a reputation in professional life.
Book Summary Who Moved My Cheese
Recently I read a novel - Who Moved My Cheese? It is a business novel. It describes an amazing way to deal with change in work and life. T...
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One of the major duties of a Project Manager is to share the weekly report about the health and progress of the ongoing Project or Operation...
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Mobile applications are an integral part of our life. Nowadays, we all spend lots of time on mobile phones as the use of various mobile apps...
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Recently I read a novel - Who Moved My Cheese? It is a business novel. It describes an amazing way to deal with change in work and life. T...