Project Management 101

My intent of writing this is not to get too involved in heavy project management language but to put togeather some helpful tips.

1. Excel is your best friend. You will always need a tracking sheet nothing heavy, no tool, no enterprise blah blah..just a small excel sheet. It works like a charm.
   
2. Use some form of an enterprise tool. There will be a time when you need more than Excel, something everyone can see. Something like Sharepoint. The sooner you embrace something like that the better. It helps to share information, it helps to keep things on track and it helps to keep order.
   
3. Metrics: Sooner of later someone is going to ask how are we doing ? Where are we ? Also metrics give some sense of achievement and accomplishment. Start collect basic data and start representing the data in graphs. Hard to believe but the senior the person looking at your metrics more colors and graphs he / she likes :)
   
4. Reporting: There are different audiences for different reports. Know the difference, might lead to frustration. You might think I am giving so much detailed info and putting so much hard work but your boss might think its too detailed I only need high level. (been there done that :) )
   
1. For Executive Reports: Approach should be a high level Project / Product , When it will launch, Status, High Level Dependencies
   
2. For Project Level: Project, Tasks, Dates, Status, Project Level Dependencies, Resources etc.
   
5. Habit of writing Meeting Minutes. Its surprising how many people overlook the importance of writing Meeting Minutes, but its an important tool of keeping yourself organized. It also helps in documenting the next steps many times discussions are done but no one concludes the next steps. Basic Template of Meeting Minutes (what I follow):
   
1. Attendees:
   
2. Agenda:
   
3. Conclusion /Discussion
4. Action Items (next steps)

Its Coming !! Investing Time

As predicted before in my posts its a good time to invest in stocks. Valuations everywhere. With new earnings reports, INFY IBM giving expected and better than expected results there is no reason why you should not invest now.

The 2 major issues of Credit Crunch and mortgage crisis have been talked about since past several months. And Fed Chairman has done a lot to fix these 2 (regular drop in interest rates, buying bear sterns stocks, rebate checks by govt.). It seems quite a lot has been done to fix these 2 issues. With growing confidence in economy its only a question of time when it will go uphill.

Now not to sound too optimistic, I should say I am cautiously optimistic of the outlook of US Economy and will continue to invest in good stocks to take benefit of dollar cost averaging etc. EMC is being reported as a must buy, looking at valuations, recommendations, I am putting more money in that stock.

Local LA Trip. Studio City -> Pacific Hwy -> Malibu

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Career: Motivation

Motivation sounds like a good to have thing these days. While its important to get the job done, its equally important to put your heart behind it. Where does the heart come from ?

• Well from the fact that you signed up for something you like
• You have a tremendous opportunity to do a good job and feel motivated
• Your manager recognizes your efforts and give you a pat on you back every now and then.
• The drive to make things better

It is surprising how lightly this subject is taken in working world. I was shocked to hear this from a Product Manager when a developer asked him "we need motivation, can we have a pizza party". Product Managers answer was "You paycheck should be your motivation, look at your check and look at mine".

Management feels that there is stress and deal with issues of people quitting, wanting transfers, wanting to move on but are not asking the right questions. That's the reason why some companies make it to Top 50 in ranking and others don't.

Career: The art of fighting frustation

Who is not frustrated in current world today? Developers are frustrated because they dont have many challenging assignment to do and they keep on getting pulled in to fix or cleanup. Or they need to move higher be an architect or manager. Manager wants to move on be a director. Director wants to move on and be a VP and the cycle of professional life continues.

The key learning is to do what you signed up for best. Give it your best shot and ask yourself "Did I give my best ? could I have don't better".

As for growth once the answer to the above question is Yes, its a matter to time, opportunity and visibility.

Till then continue to do what in your guys is your best shot.

Stocks & Investing

My Last post about stocks are optimistic. I still am. US market has already had a good hit, if we are in a recession we are probably half way through it.

I started investing in July, August last year. Everything was Green then.. Then the tumble started and everything started going Red. Some of the mistakes I did are as follows:

1: I invested in NAVR. Simply because it was below $10 and there were buy ratings by some analysts. I did not check fundamentals (at least not well enough.) Should have done more research.
2: Second mistake I did was to invest too quickly in it and the knife kept on falling. I wanted to average out so that when it rises my overall investments are fine.
3: Should be more uptoday on research. Jim Cramer's rule of investing "Invest 1 hour per week per stock".
4: Another stock I made a mistake with by following my rules of investing. Rule: "If you trust the stock, you know the company, you have some idea of future; if stock falls more than 5% in a day buy IT". I knew INFY as I worked there knew it was a solid company but will have challenges in the coming year so i was not planning on invest BUT it dropped 5% in a day and I thought hmm thats a buying opportunity. And I did. Result. It kept on falling. So threshold of 5% is not enough these days. Don't invest unless you are totally convinced about fundamentals, future growth, valuation, reports from S&P or Reuters or other reputed agency, looked at financial blogs for any negative news about the stock.

My Rules of investing now :

1. Fundamentals - Business, Industry, Outlook etc.
   
2. Future growth - From reports, etc.
   
3. Valuation - P/E ratio etc.
   
4. Reports from S&P or Reuters or other reputed agency , also check CNN Money, AOL Financial news, Yahoo Finance
   
5. Looked at financial blogs for any negative news about the stock.
   
6. Invest regularly (monthly is good).
   
7. Invest on a bad day (but for a good stock which fulfills criteria above). A bad day would be a day followed by 2-3 days of upside in the market. If you follow the trend some days are growth days and they are immediately followed by down days when people book profits or have a bad news (which results in panic but does not affect individual stocks in long run).
   
8. Buy in the later part of the day. I check out prices over 1 yr, 6 month, 3 months, 1 month and 5 days. And based on all inputs above check out a decent low price, give my Buy decision on a stock.
   
9. Diversify. Own large caps, small caps, medium caps, mutual funds, Index Funds, growth countries like BRIC.