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Project Management Series (Session 1): Introduction to Project Management

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Introduction - Project Management Series (Session 1) - Introduction to Project Management

Welcome everyone to Techgig’s project management webinar series, today’s webinar is the first session of the three part series, this session is an introduction to project management and will be conducted by Ravindra Prasad, program delivery manager at Tesco HSC, Mr. Prasad has been in the IT industry for the past 13 years with program and project management forming large chunk of his career.

He also leads Project Management Competency Center at Tesco HSC which has more than 500 members. Today’s webinar session has a new twist of its lead, Techgig is mightily glad for the continuous support of its ardent webinar audiences and wanted to show its appreciation for such great (( )) so we bring to you the best answer competition which will be help during this session itself.

Mr. Prasad will be asking certain questions over through the session and whomsoever answers it best according to our speaker will be awarded with one of the best books on project management call project management 24 lessons to help you master any project the MHPE series

You can answer these questions on this webinars page on Techgig mentioned under the recent questions to speaker meanwhile your questions for the speaker can be posted through the chat available in the webinar software so without any further delay I introduce to you our guest speaker Mr. Ravindra Prasad.

Thank you this is Ravindra, it’s my pleasure to be with you today afternoon and I would like to appreciative your time and then interest in project management today afternoon welcome to all of you, today what I am going to do is surely I am going to introduce what is project management all about and as my presenter explain.

This is the first session of the three project management seminars that you are going to have, so what I am going today is I will start with very brief introduction to what is project management and importance of project management in the current world and I will touch upon 5 phases that are there in the project management again because the time constraints I will go very high level on these areas and surely I do wanted to introduce to the 9 knowledge areas that are pretty much important for a project manager to either to start the career or to become successful in the project management career .

I am not going to read out all the nine areas but you can see them in the slide, finally towards the end of this session I will touch upon how somebody can start a career in project management and few certifications that are available in project management how they can help someone either to start the career or become expert or if not the certification they can still do the project management so all these things I am going to cover again I would like to welcome all of you.

Before I go ahead with presentation I would like [Not Audible] our core values, there are two values no one can start the customer, [Not Audible] treat our people as we like to be treated these are the two core values that is the part of my organization, I would also like to thank TESCO to encouraging me to give this presentation

What is Project Management?

Before I talk about the as a project management as a sentence I would like to split that as project and then a management, if you look at project I mean suppose If I ask this definition straight away what is project many people it’s very difficult for them to define straight away but what I will do is quickly take up one example and then I explain, suppose somebody is making a movie that’s called project because there should be director, there should be producer and casting, music director there is a person who is going to write a script, story all those things.

Here surely the director is project manager and usually we would not be doing same movie twice so it’s a kind of a temporary endeavor we will not be doing same movie whatever we did once we will not be doing that again may be one exception would be Ram Gopal Varma did Sholey twice but the second time he had to burn his hands that’s different story but if you look at the definition it’s a temporary endeavor which is undertaken to create a unique product or service or result what is this mean? Any project we would not be simply doing there should be outcome from the project and it is I would like to emphasize the point that it is a responsibility of the project manager to ensure that either the success or the failure of the project surely lies with the project manager nobody else can be blame for the success or failure.

The origin of the word called project came from Latin word which says that to through something forward, which also means that to develop something it is from the scratch or change something which is existing, when it comes to management there are many definition that are available in management but again suddenly if I ask someone what is management it’s very difficult to give a definition but I will go with [Audio not clear] favorite author Peter Ducker, he says that management is all about doing the things right and leadership is all about the doing the right things.

[Audio not clear] Manager as the life goes on project manager also need to take up the things that are right, both are important but again management has a Latin origin which is called Manus which is indirectly called as hand, but it also says that ability to handle the things so that’s where the meaning is going to come into picture.

Now what I will do is I combined these two words and then see, what is project management all about? It is the application of knowledge and then tools and techniques that probably we will touch upon few things today surely and then how do we meet those requirements in to the day to day project.

What makes project managers life very difficult as you can see in the picture here project manager typically juggles with the many things, so there is a scope which come from the stakeholders and the stakeholders also will have an expectation saying that my quality needs to be met, [Audio not clear] at the same time stakeholders also we have the budget because nobody would say that I have internet budget so let’s spend what are the money you want and at the same time they will also have expectation on schedule which means that project manager has to deliver the project within defined timeframe.

Having with all these constraints and at the same time project manager also will have to have the right people to deliver the project, when I say resources not just the people but also equipment, infrastructure and any other things that would help the project manager to do the project successfully this is also can be when the person is working with every big projects and then the person has to involve the government organizations all those things would come under resources. And while the project manager juggles with all these things there could be something which is come and then hit like a risk or issue.

Risk are something like if I give an example sometime back we had Tsunami in Japan you also might have seen in newspaper saying the Toyota they were not able to deliver the cars on time because there was a hit on their plants in Japan. So that is a risk.

There are multiple things a project manager looking into, again a successful project manager can become successful if the person is able to manage all those things very effectively that’s where I would like to reiterate the definition managing the things right that is very important for project manager to be successful so in this webinar anyway I am going to cover very high level view of what are the all the things can be done by the project manager let’s go through the next slide.

What is the importance of Project Management?

I quickly touch upon the importance of project management, very recently I think 10 days back there was an article publish in Rediff by ministry of statistics and program they looked at 560 infrastructure projects these are very specific to India, but I will touch upon what is happening in the world as well.

Each project is worked on 150 crores and right now close to 97% of the projects they are running late and there also if you look at the over budget it is very big amount which comes to close to 1246 billion rupees which is very big number and coming to the sectors railway’s they had a cost overrun for 84% of the projects and the steel sector they had a cost overrun 63% of the projects.

I had put the link down, any of you are interested you can quickly see that, when it comes to all over the world this is according to PMI, 1/5th of the worlds GDP is being spent on projects which is close to 12 trillion dollars this is the world statistics and out of in US alone close to 40% of the workforce they are going to leave the work or retire by 2015 which means there are lot of job openings that would come and it comes project management and all these projects 40% of workforce which I said ideally they would manage projects worth of 4.5 trillion US dollars which is all these money at risk surely all of us can learn some of the best practices that are available in project management and then make sure that we do contribute to the investee and also to the world.

How do you start a career in project management?

I do want to touch upon how to start how somebody can start a career in project management as you see here

No one is born as project manager, no one is born as a leader so all these skill can be learn, I try to put across nine points which not necessarily in a sequence but initially the person should understand how to capture the requirements, how to do the estimation and then how to schedule the work by looking at the dependencies and then it is always good to start with small modules instead of going with the bigger projects where the project management responsibility still [Audio not clear] with the project manager and then as an individual you will be able to manage a small modules.

Then it is a essential to work with the people effectively I mean especially in a IT industry or as we are in the knowledge academy without the people none of the work is going to move, so it’s absolutely mandatory that a person should be in a position to communicate and then work effectively with the people, one dilemma comes to the most of the manager’s is I mean suppose they are very good at doing the coding then the design and then development so if I lose a control probably some of my expertise going to work but however delegation is the right tool, delegating with right confidence and delegation itself is an art if person has to know what to delegate and wjat not to delegate while delegation happens again the accountability still goes with the project manager.

Fifth point is it is pretty much mandatory that project manager should have very good networking skills within the organization and outside the organization. This is important because suppose if we have a project requirement where we need to have a server which I really comes with infrastructure team suppose if you go with the SLA’s and then the official channel probably it might take 2 months to procure it but suppose if you have the right contacts and then probably the work can be done within a week or within a day also.

It is also important to work with difficult stakeholders because stakeholders are also human being and their expectations are ever changing and we need to understand why they look like difficult and then person should not hesitate to work with the difficult stakeholders.

Having the right team is a very important so it is also responsibility of the project manager to recruit the right people and as I mentioned earlier 80% of project mangers time goes into communication, so written and then oral communication skills are most important, finally right information always is going to build a trust to the stakeholders to the team.

Why I am saying this is sometimes probably the team knows that the project is in trouble but let say in front of your team project manager says to stakeholder if everything is (( )) the person is going to lose the confidence from the team and eventually the truth is going to come down as once work (( )) said there are 3 things that can’t be done for long one is sun, moon and then truth.

Certifications in project management and their relevance to start and career growth

I will quickly touch upon certifications that are available surely one thing that comes across our mind is PRINCE2 which is simpler form of projects and controlled environment, there are two things here one is PRINCE2 foundation and then 2nd one is PRINCE2 practitioner.

PRINCE2 foundation certificate goes with 3 days training and then there is a test and then practitioner total 5 days including foundation a person can only become a practitioner only when the person completes foundation, so this copyright of PRINCE2 to belongs to UK office of Government and Commerce because this is the organization who started this PRINCE2 concept altogether initially they wanted to implement this PRINCE2 concepts into all the UK government project but later on I think close to 25 companies came together and they form a (( )) and they came up with these standards.

Total cost of the certification would be anywhere around 55000 to 60000 if somebody is doing in India, but I think somebody is doing in UK it’s going to little costly, you can get more information from this site which is www.prince2.com

Let’s go to PMP which is a project management professional this comes from PMI project management institute based out of USA according to PMI the recent survey of 6th edition salary survey it came to know that people who are certified in PMP they get 10% more than people who are not certified and according to 2007 survey by price water house coppers they said that 80% of the high performance projects use the credentialed project managers.

If you look at the eligibility answer I did not mention the eligibility of PRINE2 as such there is no hard eligibility but expectation is at the person is person knows something about the project management before they attend the course, but PMP got a very strict eligibility person should complete 4 years degree and then 3 years of project management experience and then 4500 hours of the leading that projects.

What it means is the person designation is not necessarily should be project manager the person can be project lead or (( )) but some things like estimation, breaking down the work and then being scheduling all those activities must have been done by the person along with this the person should have 35 hours of the project management formal education which means that some of the training institutes they would offer the second scenario is second year diploma in our scenario it could be plus 2 or a diploma.

The person should have five years of experience and then 7,500 hours of leading in the project and 35 hours of training, so when it comes to PMP the total cost comes to 35,000 to 45,000 again this is including the training, training usually they charge around 10,000 to 20,000 depending on the training institute and then the fee to take this exam comes around 26,000 depending on the dollar conversion date.

Again it’s not my personal view but I did was I gave a search in three different jobsites I didn’t mention the jobs sites name but you can look at some of the popular jobsites in India, so PMP in the same site PMP jobs there are 414, PRINCE2 there are only 17 overall you can look at the ratio overall there are around 695 jobs were for PMP and PRINCE2 we have only 37.

However this ratio is quite opposite when I look at UK jobsites but however generally if you look at US most of the companies in US recognize PMP not PRINCE2

But again this is not my personal opinion is just I put across the statistics that are available in the jobsites.

Let’s look it , the last one I want to conclude saying that “Knowledge without common sense is nonsense” so this all goes with I mean usually this is something which I often here from the project management trainings or the seminars, the story goes something like this there are two people one person digs a hole and other person fills that hole with the same mud and then they continuously start doing this for 100 holes and then 1 person watches this and he was not able to understand what’s happening with these two people, they are just digging and then one person is again putting across the mud.

He goes and then asks sir actually we wanted to plan the samplings but the person who is suppose to plan the samplings is absent today but we do want to complete our work today itself, so that doesn’t make any sense any theory or the certificate or knowledge people should have the common sense I think related to see that there is a one session tomorrow how to use the common sense probably if you are interested you can join that webinar as well.

These are my contact details you can reach me at ravindraparasad@yahoo.com or LinkedIn you can get me at ravindraprasad and then twitter ravindraparasad again and you can also look at my blog you may write on so I name it as small and beautiful word I wanted to write on painting and sports and whatever good things happening in the world to make the people happy so with that I am done with my time and also with my presentation I think I pretty much on time.

Video length - 01:20:07

1400 attendees

Conducted on - 02 Aug,2011

12222 views

About Speaker
Ravindra PrasadProgram Delivery Manager
Ravindra Prasad is currently working as Program Delivery Manager at Tesco HSC, Bangalore, leads Non-food program delivery. He has been working with Tesco HSC for last 6.5 years. He has 13+ years of experience in IT ...
Project management is becoming increasingly important, given the current business challenges we are surrounded with. Project management enables the project manager and team to do a structured, predictable delivery of projects which helps the stakeholders satisfy their needs. Project management is the application of knowledge, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements such as schedule, quality, budget. This webinar discusses below topics Key Learnings:

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Project Management

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