January 2022: How to balance technical skills versus soft skills? Although technical skills are the core required skills for any profession, they need to be accompanied by proper level of soft skills for a person to succeed and progress in their career. Lack of essential soft skills can be a substantial obstacle in someone's path to growth despite high level of technical skills. The weight of importance of soft skills can be different from profession to another, depending on the needs of each job. Most work environments, however, would necessitate a practical level of soft skills, like communication and interpersonal skills, team work, time management, conflict management, etc. Amount of effort and training required to acquire such skills will depend on the current level of each person, while some people can be talented with charismatic level of personal skills, others would need extensive effort to adopt such skills in their character.
December 2021: What is a Project Charter? A Project Charter is the first formal document that recognizes the project presence in an organization. A charter is a declaration that a new project is initiated, and it summarizes the key characteristics of the project, including for example the project name, sponsor, project manager, client, key stakeholders, key team members, project budget, key milestones and deadlines, main risks and constraints, main deliverables, and other necessary identification boundaries. The charter document should be officially approved and signed by concerned parties, like the sponsor, the project manager, and executive management. A project charter is rarely expected to be altered throughout the project life, and subsequent changes should be reflected in the other relevant project documents, like the project plan and project organization structure with formal change requests.
November 2021: What is the 80/20 rule? The 80/20 rule, also known as Pareto rule, refers to the expectation that most of samples (almost 80%) in an observation are attributed to few causes or categories (almost 20%). This fact proves to be true in several cases, and it shows that the vital few causes are worth attention and investment. For example, in business you can find that majority of income is generating from small proportion of customers, to whom you should pay most attention. Pareto analysis is also one of the techniques in root cause analysis for problem solving. Bar charts are usually used to depict results of this analysis, with more frequent causes listed first in the graph with highest value in descending order as a visual guide to focus on more influential items.
October 2021: For what purpose is a project activity network diagram used? In project planning, the activity network diagram is a step in creating the project schedule, and is considered a form of project time schedule. The network diagram is used for depicting the project activity sequence and dependencies, showing the different paths in the project, starting from the kick-off point and up to the closing point. The purpose of the activity network diagram is to identify the critical path(es) in the project, which is the longest path that can threaten to delay the closing of the project. This diagram also shows the time tolerance of each activity and every path in the project, identified from the early and late start and end dates of each activity, and known as the float of the activity. The critical path activities are always of zero float and no delay tolerance. This allows for attention and proper risk planning related to project time and successful delivery.
September 2021: What is RACI Matrix? RACI matrix is a popular form of responsibility matrix, an acronym standing for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. These four terms indicate the corresponding responsibility level of each role within the context of a certain project or activity being managed. It is usually depicted in a tabular form, with rows representing roles or entities, and columns representing tasks, or vice versa. The intersection between rows and columns include one or more of the four letters of the acronym, showing the level of responsibility each role holds with regards to performing each task. One role can hold more than one responsibility level as necessary for each task, and it's not mandatory that all of the four levels be present for a given task. However, usually there would be one role accountable for a task, and one or more responsible roles.
August 2021: How can AI benefit your organization? Most popular Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques utilized in business include machine learning, data analytics, automation and robotics, etc. Businesses use these techniques for enabling processes and optimizing operations, which should in turn yield higher business growth and better business results. For example, historical business data can be analyzed to train machine learning models to be able to predict future results based on new collected data, for the purpose of decision support and insights. Another example, is use of smart objects and robotics that can adapt their behavior according to sensor information, as used in manufacturing and heavy industries. Even small scale businesses can benefit from AI techniques within their scope, for example by working with industry wide data analytics for predicting market trends.
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