End of Year Recap - Career Connect Singapore

Weekly meeting each Tuesday at TCC The Central at Clarke Quay MRT from 11 am to 1 pm

Our group is recapping lessons learned from our networking experiences during 2009!

Please bring along your story of success find new jobs and new client in the Recovery Economy to share with members who are poised to succeed in 2010!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Lessons Learned 2009

Sorry not to post in awhile. I have been busy this year managing consulting projects as well as getting Career Connect up and running in Singapore and Bangkok! I have helped about 25 people find jobs in Singapore now.

Each year, and each project gives me more and more experience to learn from. This year I found myself working in Mainland China for the first time. I did a software quality assessment for a US insurance company. My learnings come from the work itself, and just living in China.

Here is some of what I found out for myself. If it resonates with you in anyway, I would enjoy hearing from you at rick@eprojectsource.com

1. When I complained about problems with taxi drivers in Shanghai, my expats friends already had an expression TIC (This is China). So I found myself humbler in a culture that is emerging from a long period of isolation and now driving 100 miles an hour towards a model of socialist/capitalist business. Keeping TIC in mind I found many instances of it on the project I was working as below:

2. Project Management means different things to different people and organizations. (not really knew)....but when placed in certain firms in certain countries...it can be cumbersome and built alongside the development organization and seen as an administrative function (witnessed in Shanghai, Manila, Singapore and Vietnam). If you are just going through the motions of project management, then the results you get will mirror the direct efforts you make from the "real" power center of the project. Then when the projects fail, the PMO can be blamed, and the power center walks away washing its hands of the project, bound for managing another project without implementing a project management methodology or PMO.

3. CPM tools are not spreadsheets. I found a project director using spreadsheets to brief his management and client management. A smart guy, but there is no way to use a spreadsheet to do the CPM analytics needed to update a completion schedule let alone do any EVM. To his dismay he was not able to delivery on time.

4. Document the project lifecycle, and use the people, processes and tools to deliver on time and on budget. Again, the project was poorly documented and would not even rate Level 0 of the SEI CMMi. Innovation cannot happen from chaos. The test phases were a mess, and set delivery of quality, zero defect software applications back months, if not more than a year. This added to the cost of the project, as well as diminished the reputations of managers and team members on both the vendor team and the customer team. It was and is a huge frustration when tech

These are just a few of the lessons learned I encountered working in Asia on projects in 2009. I am teaching them in 2 day seminars titled "Project Killers and their Solutions."

Please contact me at rick@eprojectsource.com if this is a seminar your management and staff would benefit from. I am happy to send you the outline of my talking points.

Regards,

Rick Price