IT project management

Management lessons learned from the US presidential campaign

What is the first thing comes to mind when the current US presidential camping is mentioned? I think most readers will agree with me that the first thing come to mind is the personal attacks that each candidate is waging and the time each candidate is spending on finding the faults of his opponent. What benefits the voters will gain from this?

If I were to vote, I don’t know yet which candidate to vote for, I cant tell which candidate is better for the country. Both candidates spend considerable amount of time on attacking each rather then spending time on telling the voters about their plans to lead the country for the next four years.

If your company were in the process to change the management team, what would you want to hear from the new (potential) managers? Would you want to waste your time listening to each candidate for the job talk about how bad the other applicants are or would you want all the applicants talk about how they will provide better management plans than the previous management team?

In the last few months, I have been working with one of our major contractors, our contract with them was up and it come to a renew, the renewal process included a bid that we had to submit (with other bidders) to win another year with them.

Throughout the bidding process, all bidders were submitting their proposals that showed their ability to do the job, no bidder wasted their time telling the customer how bad the other bidders were, they all focused on showing the customer that they were fit for the job.

Don’t waste my time telling me how bad the other guy is, tell me how good you are.

Will you give up 10 percent of your pay to telecommute?

As gas prices and energy cost keep going up and as technology makes is possible to work from remote locations, will you be ready to give up portion of your pay if you can work from home?

Back in 1999, I had a job as web application tester, I had to commute about 45 min to work on each direction, besides the weekly meeting with software developers, my job was to sit in front of a computer all day long trying to crash the web applications our company was developing, there was no need for me to be in my office, I could take my work home and work from there, and only come to the office when there is a meeting. I asked my boss if it was ok for me to work from home and save me the daily trip I make to work, the idea seemed foreign to him and he said “no.”

Since than, I left my full time job and I started to work on contracts, my company office was my home office, I would conduct my business from home and from my cell phone, and only go to the client site only when needed. Working this way lowered my total take home pay each month, but it:

1- Made me feel more relaxed, I forgot when was the last time I had to drive through morning rush hour
2- Gave me a lot of time to do more social activities that many IT professionals only dream of
3- Made me love my job as IT consultant, when I had corporate job, I would count the minutes till is time to go home
4- Made me make better use of the current technology which makes working remotely possible

So what would you say, take a lower pay for more relaxed life-style?

What is an ERP?

ERP stand for Enterprise Resource Planing, ERP is software-based solution for your business management needs. Most businesses have separate software for accounting, for Human resource, and for various services that they offer. An ERP system is software that consists of various modules designed for particular business setup, various business software can be combined in a single ERP system.

ERP solutions vary from vendor to vendor; however, most solutions provide several common features and functionality that can be tightly integrated. Financial reporting and analysis are often the core to most ERP systems since financial reporting is almost required by every business, from there you can add modules as you need them, so for example, if your business needs grow in the future, you can add more modules to your existing ERP system instead of buying new software (solution).

Once an ERP system is implemented in your company, adding new functionality to the system will not require a new training for your employees, you ERP system can grow with your company.

The advantage of ERP system is that you can have a single software that streamline all your business reporting needs in a single software interface.

As a manager, you can get reporting from various departments in one single screen.

HP offer a really nice online introductory course in understanding ERP system, you can check the course at this link: http://h30187.www3.hp.com/sessions/overview/p/courseSessionId/62136?courseId=18829

You will have to create a free online account to access the course.

==== Some of the text used in this article were excerpt from HP ERP course listed in the above link=======

Do you turn off your computer at night?

As in IT consultant, I am sure you were asked this question many times “Should I turn my computer off at night or when I am not suing it or should I leave it on?”

I think the world is divided on this issue, some tech would tell you to turn if off and other would say, including myself, if you are a heavy computer user, never turn it off.

Turning the computer on and off each time would wear out its components, just like a car, if you turn it off each time you stop at the red light, you would harm the engine and other components.

But now, there is the issue of reducing energy use and green IT, is it better to turn off the computer when is not in use, or is it better to put it on standby mood or sleep mood? What would consume less energy? And if we have hundreds of computers, how much energy we would save verses how much tear and wear these computers would suffer for each start up procedure?

I don’t know the right answer, but I leave my laptop on most of the time, I still believe that power on procedure or start up takes a lot of energy to complete.

Male or female employees

This maybe not be politically correct subject, but I want to share my experience working with both male and female employees, keep sexism out, this is purely practical approach.

I haven’t worked in a diverse office environment such the one I am working in now. I have noticed few significant differences when it comes to male and female employees.

I will not say who is better, but I will list areas where I noticed these differences:

1-Attention to details
2-Good listeners
3-Willing to take responsibility
4-Loyalty
5-Fast learner
6-Making suggestion
7-Out spoken

These are the areas where I noticed some significant differences between the genders.

Smart management not cheap management

As business managers, we all care about reducing costs and maximizing profit, we look for ways to acquire assets at the lowest possible cost. One of my clients who I do consulting work for have the habit of buying used supplies including computers. He gives me a lot of work trying to fix his network that runs on old used computers. I asked him many times why he keeps buying old computers while by spending few hundreds extra dollars he can get himself new computers? He said “I run an insurance company and most of the time my staff uses the computers only to fill forms online, I don’t need new computers with extra features that I will never use.”

I understand his reasoning, but I also understand that old machines will keep breaking and his maintenance bill will keep going up.

This client has many offices that I do network and computer maintenance work for, so one day I told him “lets start buying new computers for one of your offices and see how this will reduce your maintenance cost”, he agreed and we got new computers for that particular office, and the results amazed him, his maintenance and network support calls for that office went to almost zero, and he was able to recover the cost of the new computers from the saving he made by not losing work hours due to network down time and not having to pay for network troubleshooting.

At my current consulting job, we have the same problem, some off brand computers that breaks every few days and not reliable web hosting company for our e-mail services. Now again, I am starting to clean up this company and show the management how they can save by investing in good equipment and reliable services, even if the cost is bit high, but it will pay-off later.