Questions They Ask To Decide

You have already read about the Questions to Ask Before You Decide ...now once you are ready prepare for the questions they will ask for them to decide...some samples are given for the prep..

• What are you most proud/ashamed of in your career?
• What would your team say about you as a leader/colleague?
• In what kind of working environment do you experience the most success?
• How would you handle an angry boss and flippant client?
• If you had the chance to go back and change something that you did in your current (or past) job, what would you do differently and why?
• What do you do to bring balance into your life?
• What is your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness, on the job?
• How much do you know of 'our' company and work we do? Do you have any questions/comments around our operations?

Plain updates

Just plain updates ...trying to do a lot of things to keep my mind from wandering...

Attended the awesome jazz and blues fest at Red Bank, NJ over the weekend..
Trying to get my arms around PMI courses..
Listening a whole lot to the likes of Carly Simon (you can find her top hit here)..
Had a get together of few people last week --self cooked (+ stuff by a good friend) food with good wine from down-under and NZ..
watched a couple of good films including 'Sex, Lies and Videotape', and 'Parzania'
life is good being single ...(well thats a consolation when the mind wanders)..

Take It Easy--everyone says that

Are you happy? or lets say are you doing good with your life? Whom do you confide your deepest fears? Who do you share your ecstatic wins? Whom do you like to be in next 5 years? Who do you love?Do you want know about unconditional love? Do you believe in compromises and adjustments? Do you believe in priorities?What do you want to have, if anything were possible? Do you have someone you would say everything to? Are you mad? What are your thoughts on this?
Simple questions....tough answers...

Life Management Institute

Wish there was a place called the "Life Management Institute" akin to the more popular PMI or Project Management Institute.
Wish LMI have had principles and standards that could be learned, imbibed and practiced to put together a great project called life; the output would have been a 'happy successful life'.
Wish LMI documented proven methodologies to 'execute' and 'monitor and control' different phases of the project life...so that all the risk elements in the form of sudden emotional crisis, loneliness, mental blockades, adhoc adrenaline rushes could be prevented, mitigated or at the least lessened. Wish LMI came with statistical tools, mathematical models and predictive comparison analysis to solve all the puzzles about making 'right selection' in terms of various inputs to the project life.

Verse

Her eyes
bright with hope
Her smile
ooze perennial confidence
Her hair
shadows the moonlight
Her gaze
across the horizon
Her lips
silent in thoughts

She broke my heart...

Get back to the basics

Sanjaya Malakar (he has bengali roots... I'm rooting for him still now)
Virginia Tech shootings
Citibank layoffs
Gov. Jon Corzine
India's early and disgraceful exit from World cup cricket (its called world cup because 16 countries play for the title, not like World Series played only in America)
Murder of Bob Woolmer by alleged betting racketeers
Not-so-smart confessions by Angelina Jolie, after all, she is a UN ambassador
Iran's (I is pronounced as in ink) uranium enrichment rhetoric
Warren Buffet's immoral support for Darfur genocide
Real estate melt down

We are surely living in very troubled times....so its a request to all my readers to get back to basics-----in your own little ways and do something good every day to make your life better...

300 Only!!!

Last weekend I had the chance of watching the latest blockbuster movie called 300. Its a story of how 300 smart and courageous Spartan fighters fought and died valiantly against the powerful, ruthless hordes of Persion army lead by Xerxes. They inspired 10000 more Spartans to fight.
The movie is outstanding for rivetting photography, art direction and music. And also for eyecatching 'spartan' physique (Gerard Butler looks awesome with his 6 packs and beard). The director took tremendous help of imagination and special effects in portraying and packaging a 5th century historical event to a saleable movie . I see a video game in the offing with the same name soon.
However to me the release of this movie at this time seems to be an irony..........USA is fighting a 5 year old war at Iraq and President Bush is asking more funds and solidiers to fight the 'evil'; this is so akin to the movie where the king goes to war with the best 300 soldiers and his wife is making a presentation at the state council for more forces and funds. She also kills the person who resist the proposal ( more like Bush vetoing any Congress sanctions!). What is however different between the movie and the present war is that the latter was almost unilaterally initiated and pursued by US while the movie depicts the war as an act of defense (and not offense), as an effort to preserve independance. Hope the people watching this movie doesn't get too motivated by the glorification of war/battle :-)

SDLC and PMLC

The recent spurt of Fortune employers scouting for IT Project Managers with PMP certification has taken me by surprise. I started wondering that why these employers would need PMPs to do Software Project Management when they can 'sustain' with SDLC experts or is it just another certification fad!!

Project management as a discipline can be used to handle situations in almost any domain - from building houses, to planning your holidays, and obviously developing software. So Project Management is valuable to focus as an established mechanism (a science??) for getting work done. It has processes (Rita Mulcahy) and should be used for continuous improvement of PM processes and for capturing knowledge to improve the performance of the Project Team. Concern of project management include project planning, risk assessment and management, issue management, schedule management, status assessment and reporting, calculating costs etc.
SDLC is another specific discipline used only for the development of software. Concerns of SDLC involves requirements gathering, business modeling, systems architecture and design, development, integration, release, maintenance, etc.
The processes involved in SDLC definitely needs to be managed and data from these processes need to be collected for future improvement and client satisfaction.

The similarities are many in both of these methodologies; PM methodology recommends breaking down tasks into chunks of activities to be completed in definite or overlapping phases. SDLC prescribes the phases as Analysis, Design, Code and Test, Deploy . However its important to understand the differences;each of them has independant sets of metrics, and SDLC is much more specific than PMM. RUP, Agile and other software development methodologies has Project Management as a separate thread to address this unique overlap. RUP even also has no prescription for contract/vendor management.

At the end of day, it makes more sense to mix the PM and SDLC methodologies based on cumulative experiences, company culture and and come up with blended ( or chai latte) approaches (continuous improvement) that handles "who", "how", "when", "why" of "what" needs to be done in the context of IT Project Management. Also with most of the companies now agressively being involved in ourtsourcing and offshoring and multi-vendor contract development, software Project Management demands a new level of acuity and ingenuity than earlier. Again, SDLC supports only development of software systems, a project usually involves lot more than just developing software; customer interaction, business process reengineering, marketing a new product/service etc. Knowledge of generic PMLC helps to coordinate all these other activities.
So having a Project Management certification along with RUP or Six Sigma is not bad at all for your next career move!!

One more trip to India

I successfully returned to US last week from one more annual trip to India.
As usual, I amassed tons of invaluable experiences during this visit.....not only because I took a 'american gori' with me to 'amar kolkata' but also due the airlines I chose to travel with.

To start with, Air India delayed us by 30 hours and made us poorer by 500 dollars even before we could see the sunrays glimmering on wasteland-grass blades around the Kolkata airport. Air India and Indian Airlines made sure that the dollars saved by buying relatively cheap Air India tickets (during prime holiday season) ultimately got spend in purchasing alternate tickets..some kind of poetic justice...ehh.
On our way back Air India and United Airlines goofed up a checked in luggage at the Chicago airport and still there is no trace of it (heard from the mouth of a coughing call center agent based in New Delhi that the black luggage made it to other distant airports in the US during this time).
No more Air India I think in the days to come.

The american gori coupled me garnered more stares from passersby in Kolkata, Delhi and Agra than the number of girls I have stared at during my entire college life. Just think of it. When will our colonial hangover ultimately disappear??? And to top it all, most tourist sites in India make unprecedented discrimination based on skin colors....white people pay $15 and get to wear their shoes with a shoe-cover inside the Taj while brown skinned masses like I have to walk barefoot!! Who says color doesn't matter?

Bite the Apple

I'm now in Big Apple.
The move from Houston, TX to NY happened very fast over the last few weeks. Obviously the reasons of the move can be summed up in one single quintessential word: professional-->I joined a new company hence a new assignment and hence a new location (the fact of the matter is presently I have 2 offices, the office of my employer and the office of my client)----the true portrait of a H1b holding consultant.
Life here at NY/NJ is much more hectic, chaotic, demanding than what I have experienced in my last few years in USA; the initial weeks went by just to absorb the turnaround and fit into the mould of this randomness.
Hope I will be able to keep this blog more updated now that I'm a bit more settled.