Rathish Parameshwaran

Project management is a temporary effort focusing to create a unique service, product or a result with a defined start and end date. This focuses on following the principles and procedure for managing project from its beginning through its expected outcome. Program management focuses on managing a collection of projects with an aim to accomplish same or similar objectives of an organizations. They could be a combination of related or interdependent projects identified to achieve a common strategic goal. Portfolio management focuses to bridge the gap between the strategy and implementation. The main objective is to manage and balance the implementation of changes with potential ROI. This demands to predict outcomes and identify projects that offers the best results.

A customer journey mapping is an important strategic approach to understand our customer better and optimize customer experience. This mapping is a simple but effective way of creating a visual story of a customer interacting with our product or services. This helps us understand the customers motivation to purchase our product or services and the various touchpoints where we can influence the customer. This helps us understand business from the customer perspective and gather insights about the customers pain points and how to improve them. This is an important tool of Design Thinking that helps us unlock the unarticulated needs of the customer and their expectation along their buying lifecycle, which in turn help us develop innovative new products and services.

An unusual or abnormal distance of an observation from the other values taken from a random sample of a population is called an outlier. The degrees of this these outliers could be mild or extreme and it is up to the model or an analyst to define what is abnormal or an outlier. These outliers may contain valuable information or could be a meaningless deviation resulting from measuring or recording errors. The outliers can be detected using the Box Plot, Z-Score, or the Inter Quartile Range (IQR) techniques. Once the outliers are detected we can use the below method to handle them. Removing or trimming the outliers – Remove the abnormal data from the data set, its not a good practice though. Flooring and capping based on quantile – capping the value at a certain percentile (ex 90th percentile) or flooring at a factor below the 10th percentile Imputation of Mean/Median – take the Median value instead of the Mean which will be influenced by the outliers.

Multivoting is a technique used for making decision in a group that focus on reducing the long list of ideas to manageable numbers through a structured series of votes. This technique helps identify and prioritize ideas that are worthy and needs immediate attention. Though this technique is simple, easy to use and not time consuming. There is no assurance that a consensus would be reached which is the disadvantage.

Visual controls in our workplace are a significant aspect to spot and comprehend the information that is being communicated which increases efficiency and provides clarity. VC allows us to communicate without using words and transfer information without being interrupted. Below are the six categories that increase the control over standards, performance & quality. Share information – one of the ways to achieve this is through color-coding to share updates or status. This can help the users to easily identify and determine what actions to be taken. Ex. Visual board, floor markings, notice boards, or dashboards. Share Standards – Similar to sharing information, this category insists on doing a task or procedure in a standard way. Ex written instructions/process flows, or drawings. Building standards – this category ensures that deviation from the standards is minimized or eradicated. Ex standard templates used for presentations or reports. Scheduling tools like Heijunka box, which visually tell when by whom, and in what order a job should be completed. Warn abnormalities – this category alters the users before an error or defect is about to occur which in turn helps the user to react. Ex. Shadow boards, fuel light in the car, low battery alerts on the phone. Stop abnormalities – this category focuses on alerting the users and stops the process when an error or problem has occurred this ensures the error or abnormalities are not further pushed to the next steps. Ex. Unable to submit the form without filling the mandatory forms Preventing abnormalities – this category ensures the abnormalities are prevented from occurring considered as mistake-proofing. Ex. Window envelopes

In Agile the acronym INVEST is a set of criteria or checklist use to gauge the quality of a user story. A good user story must be Independent- Negotiable- Valuable- Estimable- Small and Testable. Independent- user stories should not overlap and be independent Negotiable- user story is a mode to encourage conversation and not a contract Valuable- product backlog item should be prioritized based on the business value and should be obvious Estimable- should be able to estimate the size of the product backlog item. Small- product backlog items should be planned for a few person days and max few person weeks. Testable- to be considered “done” a product backlog item should be testable. Strict adherence to the INVEST guideline reduces the risk by ensuring only the worth users' stories make it to the sprint. Independent is the most challenging of the six guidelines to follow, as we need to be cautious as much as possible not to make the stories interdepended which might impact the problem prioritization and planning.

Human centered design is a problem solving approach mostly used to design and develop solutions by involving human perspective throughout the problem solving process. The main objective of HCD is to develop solutions that are focused on the user needs and requirements which in turn improves the efficiency and the effectiveness of the solution. HCD is designed based on three important basics Empathy- be genuine and design keeping the user who would use your product. Creativity- be creative to solve user problems Business need- be cautious about the commercial success of your product or solution HCD is achieved following a 4-phase process. Inspiration- learn about people, their wants, needs, and find a problem that we need to solve to make their life better. Ideation- brainstorm ideas to solve and conceptualize the problem. Implementation- Develop a prototype to turn the idea into a tangible solution. Validation- Test the prototype with users, which will help in understanding what users say they need versus what they need. This approach will help us know the users at a deeper level which in turn will result in creating a solution or product that makes users' life exponentially better. This also helps us understand the difference between the problem and the symptom. This approach also helps to discover the problem before they emerge in real life resulting in fail fast and fixing early, making the solution cheaper to change. Examples of designs and solutions where HCD has been used successfully are, Push/Pull doors, inverted ketchup bottles to get the last drop from the bottle. Ring pull cap instead of concealed bottle caps.

Earned value is a technique used in project management to measure the project performance and its progress in an objective manner. EV tells us the value of the work that has been completed against the planned budget. It helps us in providing an accurate forecast of project performance and its problems. This in turn helps the management to take proactive actions and make decisions effectively. EV focuses on three factors of project (before, during & after) to evaluate its feasibility, progress & Success. This is calculated by multiplying the project completion % with the total allocated budget for the project. Ex. If the total project budget is $ 10000 and the project completion is 45% then the EV is $4500. However, to get more insights on the project performance we need few addition calculations along with EV which are scheduled variance and cost variance. Schedule variance is calculated as Earned Value (EV) – Planned Value (PV), [SV=EV-PV]. This will help us assess if the project is ahead (if positive) or behind (if negative) the schedule. Cost Variance is calculated as Earned Value (EV) – Actual Cost (AC), [CV=EV-AC]. This will help us assess if the project is over (if negative) or under (if positive) the budget. This technique of assessing the project performance holds good for projects that follow waterfall methodology which focuses on delivering (OTOBOS – Ontime, On budget, On Scope) and stresses the need for establishing a baseline before the project starts. Hence this technique will fail if applied for projects that follows Agile methodology where the projects are agreed and delivered in portions during the fixed sprints. Agile methodology which gives room to accommodate frequent changes during the various stages of the sprints EV might not be a best technique to adopt.

Cost, Efforts & Time are the most critical parts of project management. These estimates play an integral part, as it impacts the success of the entire project planning. The cost and time estimate for any projects can be know using one of the two estimation techniques which are 3 Point estimate or PERT. 3 Point Estimate: This is a technic which is simple yet suitable approach to estimate time or cost. It utilizes an optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely estimate to determine the ideal estimate for project task. The key benefit of this technic is that take the project risk into its account. The commonly used calculation is to take the mean of the 3 estimates i.e., E=[O+P+M]/3 where E is Expected, O is Optimistic estimate, P is Pessimistic estimate & M is most likely estimate PERT: understanding the effort to accomplish a project is vital as it helps the project manager take decision on factors such as task delegation and budgets. The estimates can be pessimistic or optimistic but by using PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) we can determine realistic estimates. This is an alternate technic to 3 point estimate where the most likely estimate is multiplied by 4 where as the overall divisor is increased to six i.e., E = (O+4*M+P)/6 The difference between 3 point estimate and PERT is that the 3 point considers only three estimated points and PERT allows to convert the 3 points estimate to nearly normally distributed bell shaped curve which can be used for probabilities calculation of ranges of expected duration.

Card sorting is a technique that is used to assess and finalize a design/process that focuses to organize, giving a structure, and labeling the contents in an effective and sustainable way. Before conducting sessions, it is always better to understand the end-user or end output. Knowing them will help to accurately shape, decide, label, and navigate during the session. These sessions can be steered using actual cards, posits, or other card sorting software tools. Though this technique is widely used to design websites, the learnings and techniques can be useful in various stages of the continuous improvement journey. This technique has nominal setup cost, can be executed quickly, helps gather insights from many members, and provides a good base. To conduct an effective Card sorting session, First, we need to identify topics that can be either phrase, words, or specific instructions. Second, we need to choose the mode of conducting these sessions (in person or online). Third, set up the session by explaining the scope and lead the session. Finally, once done collect the data and analyze using a cluster analysis software or manually using Ms excel. These sessions can be conducted as one on one, in a group, or in remote sessions, using card sorting software. Based on the expected output we can either do open or closed card sorting. Open card sorting is where the members are free to sort cards into categories and label them, they seem fit. Closed card sorting is where the members are expected to sort the cards into the categories that you as a session lead would have provided. This technique sounds very similar to the affinity diagram, the major objective of these two techniques is different though. Affinity diagram or mapping’s focus is to generate discussion and then sorting. Where are Card sorting the focus is to sort and not discuss and done with the actual users. Further, inputs received from Cart sorting can be further used to brainstorm and gather using affinity diagram/mapping.