Successful Project Management

Successful Project Management Here we conclude the research by deriving the best possible practice for a successful project management. For any project to be successful we need to understand what the project is supposed to achieve. Deciding what the real objectives are will help to determine how you go about planning and managing the project. The project manager also needs to define the scope of the project. Deciding which activities are within the scope or out of scope of the project has a big impact on the amount of work which needs to be performed during the project. An understanding of who are the stakeholders is also crucial if suppose we are going to enlist their support and understand what each person expects to be delivered from the project. Once scope and objectives defined , we will need to get the stakeholders to review them and agree to them. So, defining the scope and objectives is the first of any project management best practices. The second best practices is to define the deliverables.To achieve the desired outcome from the project, define what things (or products) are to be delivered by the end of the project. If the project is an advertising campaign for a new chocolate bar, then one of the deliverables might be the artwork for a newspaper advert. So, a need to decide what tangible things are to be delivered and document in enough detail what these things are. At the end of the day, someone will end up doing the work to produce the deliverable, so it needs to be clearly and unambiguously described. Once having defined the deliverables, we will need to have the key stakeholders review the work and get them to agree that this accurately and unambiguously reflects what they expect to be delivered from the project. Once they have agreed, we begin to plan the project. Not defining the deliverables in enough detail or clarity is often a reason why projects go wrong. The third of project management best practices is project planning. this is the time when we define how we will achieve the desired outcome of the project embodied within the objectives and definition of deliverables. Planning requires that the project manager decides which people, resources and budget are required to complete the project. we will need to decide if we will break up our project into manageable phases, decide which products will be delivered in each phase, and decide the composition of our team. Since we have already defined the deliverables, we must decide what activities are required to produce each deliverable.tools such as Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) can be used to achieve this. A need to estimate the time and effort required to complete each activity, dependencies between related activities and decide on a realistic schedule to complete the activities. Its always a good idea to involve the project team in estimating how long the activities will take since they will be the ones actually doing the work. Capture all of this into the project plan document. we also need to get the key stakeholders to review and agree that the plan is achievable and realistic. When developing the project plan, a project manager is often under pressure to produce a plan which meets the (unrealistic) expectations of some of the stakeholders. It is important here that the project manager comes up with a realistic schedule one which he/she thinks is realistic to achieve. We will be doing nobody a favour if you succumb to pressure and agree to deliver the project in a totally unrealistic schedule. Even the best made project plans are useless unless they have been communicated effectively to the team. Everyone on the team needs to know exactly what is expected of them, what their responsibilities are, and what they are accountable for. Project communications planning is the fourth of project management best practices. A project communications plan consists of a simple matrix which lists each stakeholder, their information requirements during the project, the names of the people who will produce that information, the frequency and method of communication. For example, we might identify that a key stakeholder requires a written weekly status report of project progress. This report will be produced by the project manager, and will be circulated via email to the appropriate stakeholders. Project communications planning is vital to ensure that everyone concerned gets the right information at the right time from the right person. The fifth project management best practice is tracking the scope, schedule and cost.Once our project is underway and we have an agreed plan, we will need to constantly monitor the actual progress against the planned progress. To do this, we will need to get reports of progress from the team members who are actually doing the work. we will need to record any variations between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. we will need to report any variations to our manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if the variations get too large. There are lots of ways in which we can adjust the plan in order to get back on track (rearrange the order of tasks, assign tasks in parallel if the variation is small, or add more staff or reduce the scope if the variation is very large). The project manager must constantly juggle three things: cost, scope and schedule. If he/she increases one of these, then one of the other elements will inevitably need to be changed as well. So, for a project which is running behind schedule to recover so it can be delivered to its original planned schedule, the budget might be increased by employing more staff (although this invariably never achieves the desired result of reducing the time left to complete the project), or the scope will need to be reduced. It is the juggling of these three elements known as the project triangle that typically causes a project manager to tear their hair out in frustration. All projects change in some way and managing changes is the next of project management best practices. Often, a key stakeholder in the middle of a project will change their mind about what the project needs to deliver. On projects of longer duration, the business environment has often changed since the start of the project, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may no longer be valid. This often results in the scope or deliverables of the project needing to be changed. If a project manager simply accepted all of these changes into the project, the project would inevitably be delivered late (and perhaps would never ever be completed) and would inevitably go over budget. By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of project success because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and can plan when and how the changes are made. Not managing changes effectively is often cited as a major reason why projects fail. The final best practice is about managing risks. Risks are any events which can adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. Some of the risks are staff lacking the technical skills to perform the work properly, hardware not being delivered on time, the control room being at risk of flooding in a major thunderstorm and many others. Risks will vary from project to project but it is important to identify the main risks to a project as soon as possible and to plan the actions necessary to avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to at least mitigate the risk in order to lessen its impact if it does occur. This is what is known as risk management. Not managing risks effectively is also often cited as a major reason why projects fail.

Matt Barrett: Barclay’s CEO Position

Barclays: Matt Barrett’s Journey- Winning Hearts and Minds Barclays was founded in 1690 in London. After 30 years later, Barclays started to expansion its area to the world, and became the first foreign bank to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington D.C. in 1981. Barclays’s global market capitalization rank was fourth in 1980. However, it fallen to 22 in 2000. In October 1999, Matt Barrett accepted the invitation of Barclays’s CEO position, and started to work on his challenge. At that time, the situation of the Barclays is that institutional investors were unhappy, employees were demoralized, and the front-line and senior executives had lost confidence. Barrett soon discovered an excessive cost problem of Barclays and realized that the bank needed a shift in culture and mind-set, a new strategic direction, a structural overhaul, and an improved communications policy. Barrett had worked on changing the mind-set and culture of Barclays, and he believed that a more fact-based, value- growth orientation to running Barclays was essential. At first six month, Barrett started to build the foundation. Barrett met approximately 10,000 employees during the initial three month. At the same time, Barrett developed his own vision for the bank- earn, invest, and grow. He planned to reduce cost by  £1 billion for saving money from cost. Six months after Barrett became CEO, Barrett committed the goals were to apply equally to him to management, and everyone in the organization. Barrett started to change the top management. For example, Barrett appointed people to take position, which was a significant change on the ExCo and using young talent to the ExCo. Barrett started to think about group strategy. In addition, Barrett and the ExCo decided to work with Marakon to set about looking at all businesses and activities from a value perspective, identifying where value was being created and where it was being destroyed. Under Barnett’s leadership, and with the help of Marakon’s systematic, fact-based approach, the ExCo developed a long-term strategic.

Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Duel

Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr meet at Weehawken on July 11, 1804 to end the long rivalry between both of them. The collision between Hamilton and Burr in 1804 was clear that they came from family backgrounds that have contributed to their rivalry. Burr was born into a prestigious social status and Hamilton being an illegitimate son of West Indian parents and had no connection. Therefore, he married Elizabeth Schuyler.Where his father-in-law was a Senate and in 1791 G. Philip Schuyler lost his Senate seat to Burr. Due to Hamilton popularity in Federalist, he blocked the Federalists to nominate Burr for governor. Then in 1792, Burr declared himself a Democratic-Republican. John Adams called Burr â€Å"unprincipled both as a public and private man† Hamilton was a Federalist and Burr was a Republican. Both men have repeatedly opposed each other.Hamilton owned the Bank of New York. Burr broke the stranglehold of the Federalists financers. Hamilton had lost the power of the purs e and his political prominence all because of Aaron Burr. In that year, a tie between the Democratic-Republican candidates Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton in effort for denying Burr for becoming the winner for candidate, he favor Jefferson and crushed Burr campaign that let to Jefferson winning the election.On June 27, Burr formally challenged Hamilton to a duel, and Hamilton accepted because Hamilton political led him to refuse to deny the challenge. The duel wasn’t the result of the 1804 election but more of a culmination of their rivalry and disagreement between both of them for decades. Hamilton death was truly a tragedy for America because his efforts during American Revolution and Secretary of the Treasury.

Karl Marx - 973 Words

Karl Marx Karl Marx was a German scholar who lived in the nineteenth century. He spent most of his life studying, thinking and writing about history and economics. A many years of study, much of it spent in England, he believed that he understood more deeply than anyone who had ever lived before him why there is injustice i world. He said that all injustice and inequality is a result of one underlying conflict in society. He called it a class struggle, that is, a conflict bet the class of people who can afford to own money- producing businesses, whom he called capitalists or the bourgeosie, and the class of people who do not surplus money to buy businesses and who are therefore forced to work for wage whom he called workers.†¦show more content†¦It included a number of Trotskys ideas which Stalin had previously opposed. As Russia developed under Stalin, members of the Communist Party took for themselves many privileges. All the original communist ideals of Marx received service, but it became clearer and clearer that members of the Communist Party becoming a ruling class that was not equal to non-members. Most important of all to Stalin was ensuring that he remained in power. H often used the most brutal tactics. Chief among his creations were two highly effective political weapons - an efficient propaganda machine which more and m promoted the idea of Stalin as a great, nearly god-like leader, and a secret p force which kept the country quiet through the use of terror. At one point during his rule, he organized Show Trials in which many of the people he did not lie strangely confessed to very serious crimes and were executed or sent to harsh prison camps. Eventually Stalin began trading with non-communist countries of western Europe, although he continued to be hostile to Germany. Then, in a shocking ab face in 1939, he suddenly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. 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