Archive for the ‘project management’ Category

Brazil will spend in excess of $1 trillion on infrastructure projects in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games.

With $280 billion already invested since 2007 and a further pledge of $878 billion announced by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration, Brazil’s preparations for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016 are well underway.

Many thousands of sportsmen and spectators from all corners of the world will be descending on Brazil between 2014 and 2016 and this developing world power is more than prepared to take its place as one of the largest economies in the world. The announcement of this massive infrastructure spend in July 2010 was at the Brazilian foreign affairs ministry.

All of the works are forecast to be completed by April 2014, in advance of the World Cup. The host cities are , Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Cuiab, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Manaos, Porto Alegre, Salvador, Recife and Natal.

This announcement dispels any lingering doubts regarding Brazil’s preparations for the World Cup and ties in with the official launch of the bidding process for the country’s world-leading bullet train scheme.

The bullet train’s area is home to some 40,000,000 people, 20% of the Brazilian population, with firms and industries that together generate a 3rd of Brazils GDP. An extension to Campinas, seventy kilometres from Sao Paulo has been planned with the purpose of providing access to the heart of Brazil’s wealthiest and productive manufacturing and farming area.

At the launch President Lula da Silva said that provision of a strong railway network has been overlooked for the last 15 years. He went on to promise that the government would “furnish Brazil with good roads, waterways and train line systems, and this process has begun”.

The Brazilian government will in most cases retain a majority shareholding but is looking to form joint ventures with domestic and international companies. Interest has been expressed by companies in Europe, South Korea, China and Japan.

All of the major infrastructure works are planned to contribute socially and environmentally for the Brazilian people for many years after the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games

This article was written by Ginny Naish, Director of Brazil Property Administration, a Brazilian property consultancy based in Joao Pessoa, Paraiba. Brazil Property Administration can provide consultancy services with regard to residual land value analysis, site investigations, project management and Preparation of Design Briefs. Please visit our site for further information.

The term business analysis refers to the discipline of identifying needs within a business, and determining the appropriate solution.

These solutions may include changes in the organization itself, strategic development or development of new policies. The person who takes on the responsibility of business analysis is called a business analyst.

When the time inevitably comes for some sort of change, the business analyst has several techniques at his disposal. Precisely which techniques are used will depend on the nature of the problem, and the scope of the solution. Here are five that are used successfully by business analysts to help solve an array of different problems.

MOST

The MOST technique is an internal analysis. It contains four attributes that are defined by the business analyst to ensure the project you are working on is aligned and on track. These attributes are as follows:

Mission (where the business intends to go) Objectives (the key goals that will help achieve mission) Strategies (the different options for moving forward) Tactics (how the different strategies are put into action)

PESTLE

The PESTLE technique is an external analysis designed to examine the many different external elements affecting a business and its operations. It includes six attributes:

Political (Current and future political influences) Economic (The local, national and world economy impact) Sociological (Different ways society can affect an organization) Technological (The effect of new and emerging technology) Legal (The effect of national and world legislation) Environmental (Local, national and world environmental issues)

CATWOE CATWOE is a technique used to encourage critical thinking about what the business is trying to achieve. There are six different elements included in this technique: Customers (who benefits from the highest level business process and how does the issue affect them?) Actors (who is involved in the situation? Who is implementing solutions? What will impact their success?) Transformation Process (what processes or systems are affected by the issue?) World View (what is the big picture and what are the wider impacts of the issue?) Owner (who owns the process or situation being investigated and what is their role in the solution?) Environmental Constraints (what are the limitations that will impact the solution and its success?)

SWOT

A SWOT analysis is used to give a more complete overview of both internal and external factors affecting a business. There are four attributes to SWOT:

Strengths (examine advantages and what is done well within the company) Weaknesses (examine the disadvantages and areas that need improvement) Opportunities (examine opportunities for improvement in all areas, including market share) Threats (examine the obstacles the business faces in accomplishing their goals)

FIVE WHY’S

The Five Why’s technique is used to help get to the root of any given problem within the business intelligence. It is a question asking method to examine the cause and effect of a particular situation.

You will start with a problem, such as “my car won’t start,” then ask a succession of why questions until the root of the problem is uncovered and a solution is evident.

Business Analysis can be a complex and intricate process. Within this broad spectrum lie several sub-disciplines, roles and even more techniques.

All businesses encounter situations and problems that need attention to help keep them moving forward. With a skilled business analyst employing the right techniques, a solution won’t be far behind.

Market leader in providing a new generation of predictive, business analytics software and services that create true business intelligence. Offering masterful tools in financial management, information analysis, and collaborating business statistics.

A web-based project is a project which totally relies on the features of the commonly known World Wide Web.

This seems to be indeed a dream come true, but the question is: How can we define a web based project? Which brings us to the core issue of this concept: How applicable is it?

The web-based project makes use of tools for planning, organizing and managing resources to achieve project goals and objectives. It has an out-of-the-box functionality.
There are many important benefits of a web based project which can be “exploited” if the users know how to use the right tools. Tasks can be assigned, files can be shared, ideas discussed, clients involved. This type of projects is fully customizable.
It helps you share information and work jointly on projects and efficiently use all available resources.

Project management entails processes such as scheduling, calculating a critical path, building time lines, creating task lists, managing resources, controlling documents and providing trails. Each of these processes can be controlled, but we must learn how in order to make it useful.

The web based projects are designed to get things done the simple way.
Technologies must be established to create and interpret web-based content. They are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of the project.

An example of a successful web based management project is the famous internet portal, Wikipedia. It is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project which has been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. There are enormous advantages, but also disadvantages of this site, but this is another story worth to be investigated to have a better insight on project management systems.

One disadvantage to using Web-based project is that it might work slower depending on the client application. Web-based applications are limited by the speed of one’s Internet connection. In addition, most information in Web-based applications is not accessible when a user is offline. Therefore, we have to turn to specialists to improve the features of a web based project systems.

See how web based project management systems focus on tools and services that make it easier for you to manage projects.

This is a quick guide to some of the pioneers of project management in the modern era. (When we talk about the modern era, we’re talking about the middle of the 20th century onwards. There are, obviously, many fantastic project managers from before this time – including such people as those who built the Pyramids, and many famous war and political strategists throughout human history, but we’re looking at those who contributed to project management as we know it today).

1) Frederick Winslow Taylor

The “principles of scientific management” were written by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. These are based on five basic elements for managing successful projects:

i) You should study the nature of the project first to determine the best way of completing it.

ii) Find the best person / people for the job.

iii) You need to ensure this person is adequately trained in how to complete the tasks involved.

iv) Offer incentives to ensure they follow best practices.

v) Managers should manage the project, while workers complete it.

2) Henry Gantt

The man behind the famous Gantt Chart, which is widely in use in today’s projects. The chart is a graphical tool that looks a bit like a sideways bar chart, that gives a visual overview of a project’s schedule.

3) Frank Gilbreth

Time and motion studies were the focus of Frank Gilbreth’s work, who was committed to ensuring each individual attained a certain level of efficiency.

4) Donaldson Brown

Working at the DuPont Company in the early twentieth century, Donaldson Brown was an accountant who brought various concepts to widespread attention, including the principle of return on investment, and the methodology of financial forecasting.

5) William Edwards Deming

W.E. Deming had a huge impact on the Japanese whilst working there from the 1950s onwards. he created the famous 14 principles for management, which were outlined and expanded upon in his 1986 book “Out of Crisis”.

6) Joseph Juran

Also working in Japan, Joseph Juran was a key figure in the promotion and widespread adoption of Quality Management principles throughout Japan from the 1950s. The key to Quality Management was focusing on training from the top down – ie managers first – which had proven unpopular in the US, but enabled Japan to become world leaders in production of quality goods from the 1970s onwards.

Jason Jackson is an agile project management consultant with many years experience in the field, working on a range of types of projects for multinationals and large organisations.

Providing a comprehensive set of standard management reports based on real time data is an indispensable part of any time & expense management solution. These reports should concentrate on certain key metrics to manage your business, including:

* Billable Time reports which compare chargeable vs. non chargeable effort by resource and project

* Timesheet Exception Reports detailing missing and incomplete timesheets

* Revenue Reports broken down by activity, client, resource, role, project, charge, department, rate, or any user defined variables.

* Revenue Reports broken down by client, project, resource, activity, department, charge rate, role or any user defined variable

* Budget Reports detailing budget vs. actuals broken down by time, cost, charge and expenditure

* Budget Reports detailing budget vs. actuals broken down by time, expenditure, cost and charge.

* Project Cost Reports broken down by resource, activity, cost rate, role, department, task or any user defined variable

* Project Cost Reports broken down by resource, activity, cost rate, role, department, task or any user defined variable

As well as providing reports access via the menu system, the more superior time and expense management solutions such as Atlantic Global OnDemand give you access to reports from specific dashboards and screens.

Context Sensitive Reporting

Making any system as easy to use and as relevant to the end user as possible is crucial to the performance of a solution. By offering context sensitive reports tools like Atlantic Global OnDemand are able to achieve this. Context sensitive reports allow users to run a report with a single click from any screen in the application without the need for specific criteria. For instance, a user could easily run a utilisation or timesheet detail report straight from their timesheet entry screen. This functionality allows us to provide every user with access to their most used reports straight from the views they use the most.

Dashboard Reports

Atlantic’s solution is able to provide access to reports directly from dashboards which is another example of improving the ease of use and access to data. For instance, a project manager can rapidly get into all project management based reports directly from the project status dashboard. Working in this way means a user can be provided with a single point of entry to the system via a dashboard, where they can access all of the status information, views and reports they required for their role in the organisation. By hiding anything that isn’t relevant it then becomes a lot simpler and easier to train people on the use of the system and to provide them with clear focus on the data they should be maintaining and updating.

Another key aspect of Atlantic Global OnDemand is that it allows each user to print selected dashboard elements, meaning status reports can easily be produced with a single click.

Custom Report Writer

To support all of your reporting needs it is essential that your time and expense management solution provides you with the ability to generate your own ad hoc reports to cover any additional reporting requirements which are not met by the standard reports provided with the application. For ease of use, the report writer should provide the user with a graphical user interface that does not require the use of any coding languages. The report writer should also provide the ability to generate text, column, cross-tab and graphical reports. Solutions like Atlantic Global OnDemand also offer the ability to clone and manipulate the standard reports in order to add additional fields or filtering options to meet your individual reporting needs. With SaaS solutions, a strong user community and product road map also means that these type of systems offer the ability to load or import additional report definitions enabling you to constantly extend your system reporting capabilities.

Export reports

Another aspect of reporting that a solution should offer, is the ability to export data into other systems where it can be manipulated and used. To do this a solution should be able to export data in common data formats (MS Excel, XML, PDF and HTML) directly from reports.

If you have any opinions on the importance of Real Time Management Reporting then let us know by leaving a comment.

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