Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Webspam Projects?


Reading an interesting article, I was amazed by the accuracy of Matt Cutts, the guru of online marketing and SEO, one year back.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webspam-projects-in-2010/

Short,  but Matt suggests the direction, what Google should look into.

--
Regards
Vijayashankar

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Project Manager Vs Program Manager

First of all who is a Proect Manager? S/he is one who execute a given project ( software or collection of activities ) in a systematic manner. Tracks and assigns resources. Take care of reporting the progress and ensures the deadlines.

So, project managers are the delivery managers who deliver specific deliverable's. They tend to be a member of the department which is responsible for that specific deliverable and have the necessary technical expertise. Delivery level managers, however, do not report to the PMO but to the respective line managers.

Program managers are assigned from PMO to ensure proper alignment between all project managers, and are responsible for:
(1) single view of the program; being the single point of contact and managing the central depository of information & status on the project
(2) hold the program plan integrating all project level plans, all inter-dependencies, all inter-project commitments and track them to resolution
(3) guide the program through the initiation phase; explain the strategic aim & business case to all stakeholders & project managers; organise kick off meeting
(4) determine the structure to run the project (incl which coordination meetings to be held), which could change during the course of the program; the governance structure; and the communciations plan. Eg, when we launched four major products for the World Cup recently, they can't all have their own separate marketing plan, leading us to have one marketing & communications workstream for all products within that program. And of course, one software project manager may be delveiring for more than one product and each product may require more than one software project manager's delivery.
(5) evaluate all information & development arising externally or from the projects and escalating to all appropriate persons for attention and/or action
(6) identify program level risks and issues (as distinct from project lelve risks); these largely arises from coordination & alignment, or strategy & benefits management
(7) render a single reporting to any stakeholder and senior management, aligning project level documentation & methodology where appropriate
(8) monitoring progress and removing roadblocks to implementation, especially with regards to process (getting procurement to send out a particualrly problematic PO) and project communications
(9) ensure benefits tracking is set up and, most importantly, organise the closeout party

I think that is about it. Based on this, the program manager will require the following skills:
(a) analytical skills to make sense of all information and reducing them into a single coherent picture
(b) strategic awareness as he/she will be the only person ensuring alignment of all efforts towards the strategic aims, while everyone is focussed on delivery
(c) interpersonal skills as you are getting information and delivery through other people
(d) communication skills as the single reporting goes out to so many disparate people (from CEO to technical delivery), there are so many different angles from which people can misunderstand.



--
Regards
Vijayashankar

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Cloud Computing in Detail

Cloud computing is heralded as the next big thing in enterprise IT. While corporate data centers and on-premise software are not going away anytime soon, "the clouds" will likely have a growing impact on enterprise IT and business activities in many large organizations. CIOs and other business leaders must look beyond the hype to see what opportunities and challenges lie in the cloud—and how this approach can be used to further the organization's strategy to achieve high performance.
Cloud computing is a classic disruptive technology. As such, it has its origin in the fringe of the IT market, i.e., the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and consumers, whose need for simpler and lower-cost or even free solutions is underserved by traditional packaged software. As cloud-based services matured, they started to win broader acceptance from mainstream enterprise customers. Now, they compete directly with on-premise and packaged software. The significance of the cloud, however, lies far beyond cheap computing. The Web-enabled, variable cost model represents a huge departure from existing practice, and carries far-reaching implications for IT providers and users alike. A new wave of venture-funded startups are likely to appear, offering an array of innovative solutions ranging from niche applications to cloud middleware and infrastructure services. The emergence of cloud platforms will significantly ease the entry barrier for such small players to develop, deploy, scale and integrate their services. The battle between pure Internet players like Google, Amazon and Salesforce and traditional enterprise vendors has just begun. Incumbents such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft have been investing aggressively to extend their on-premise capabilities into the cloud. For example, Microsoft has launched online services to offer its software in the cloud. It is also investing billions in datacenters to help confirm quality and availability. Microsoft has developed a Software + Services hybrid model to offer its customers a choice between on-premise, partner-managed or Microsoft hosted solutions.

One of the key challenges of cloud computing, which is defining successful business models and architectures for value creation in the enterprise. At this nascent stage both SMEs and large enterprises are just beginning to adopt cloud technologies, as CIOs and IT managers learn about how they can deploy the cloud in their organizations it will create business opportunities for startups and entrenched players to develop business models that are successful in serving their customers as well leading to the success of their own companies. .


So contact us for paid consultation.

--
Regards
Vijayashankar