Project managment Note & assignment

Please find the PM Note & Assignment HERE

Most People Give the Wrong Answer to “What’s Your Greatest Weakness?”

What’s your greatest weakness? It’s the stock question that every interviewer asks — for which every interviewee prepares a stock answer. Some common responses are I’m too passionate andI’m a perfectionist. Although college counselors and interview experts extol these canned, turn-a-negative-into-a-positive responses, the fact of the matter is that they’re hogwash. To answer a question in this manner — or to expect someone to spin their answer — is a recipe for insincerity. But if the interviewer encourages openness, the question should be an invitation for the interviewee to demonstrate self-awareness, critical thinking, and a willingness to tell the truth.

Reduce Your Stress in Two Minutes a Day

Bill Rielly had it all: a degree from West Point, an executive position at Microsoft, strong faith, a great family life, and plenty of money.  He even got along well with his in-laws!  So why did he have so much stress and anxiety that he could barely sleep at night? I have worked with Bill for several years now and we both believe his experience could be useful for other capable, driven individuals.

At one time, no level of success seemed enough for Bill. He learned at West Point that the way to solve problems was to persevere through any pain. But this approach didn’t seem to work with reducing his stress. When he finished his second marathon a few minutes slower than his goal, he felt he had failed. So to make things “right” he ran another marathon just five weeks later. His body rejected this idea, and he finished an hour slower than before. Finally, his wife convinced him to figure out what was really driving his stress. He spent the next several years searching for ways to find more joy in the journey. In the process he found five tools. Each was ordinary enough, but together they proved life-changing and enabled his later success as an Apple executive.

Breathing.  He started small by taking three deep breaths each time he sat down at his desk.  He found it helped him relax. After three breaths became a habit, he expanded to a few minutes a day. He found he was more patient, calmer, more in the moment. Now he does 30 minutes a day. It restores his perspective while enabling him to take a fresh look at a question or problem and come up with new solutions. Deep breathing exercises have been part of yoga practices for thousands of years, but recent research done at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital document the positive impact deep breathing has on your body’s ability to deal with stress.

Meditating.  When Bill first heard about meditation, he figured it was for hippies.  But he was surprised to find meditators he recognized:  Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Marc Benioff, and Russell Simmons among them. Encouraged, he started with a minute a day.  His meditation consisted of “body scanning” which involved focusing his mind and energy on each section of the body from head to toe. Recent research at Harvard has shown meditating for as little as 8 weeks can actually increase the grey matter in the parts of the brain responsible for emotional regulation and learning. In other words, the meditators had increased their emotional control and brain power!

Listening. Bill found if he concentrated on listening to other people the way he focused when he meditated his interaction immediately became richer. The other person could feel he was listening, almost physically. And when they knew he was listening they formed a bond with him faster.  Life almost immediately felt richer and more meaningful. As professor Graham Bodie has empirically noted, listening is the quintessential positive interpersonal communication behavior.

Questioning.  This tool isn’t about asking other people questions, it’s about questioning the thoughts your mind creates. Just because your mind creates a thought doesn’t make it true. Bill got in the habit of asking himself “Is that thought true?”  And if he wasn’t absolutely certain it was, he just let it go. He said: “Thank your mind for coming up with the thought and move on.  I found this liberating because it gave me an outlet for negative thoughts, a relief valve I didn’t have before.” The technique of questioning your thoughts has been popularized by Byron Katie who advocates what she calls “the great undoing.” Her experience and research show there is power in acknowledging rather than repressing negative thoughts. Instead of trying to ignore something we believe to be true, questioning allows us to see our thoughts “face to face” and to discredit them because they are untrue.

Purpose.  Bill committed to living with purpose. Not so much a Life’s Purpose — it was easier than that. He committed to purposefully doing whatever he was doing. To be doing it and only it. If he decided to watch TV he really watched it. If he was having a meal he took the time to enjoy the meal. There is research to support Bill’s experience. In “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email” Gloria Mark and Armand Cardello cite evidence to suggest knowledge workers check email as much as 36 times an hour. The result is increased stress. Giving each activity your undivided attention ensures you’re in the moment and fully living that experience.

An important key for Bill in all of this was starting small—very small. It’s important because you can’t take on stress in a stressful way. Often we try to bring about change through sheer effort and we put all of our energy into a new initiative. But you can’t beat stress using the same techniques that created the stress in the first place.

Instead, the key is to do less than you feel you want to. If you feel like breathing for two minutes, do it for just one minute. If you are up for a day of really listening to people deeply, do it for the next meeting only. Leave yourself eager to try it again. What you want is to develop a sustainable habit: a stress-free approach to reducing your stress.

by Greg McKeown

Five Ways to Sharpen Your Communication Skills

We need people who can communicate!

Raise your hand if you have heard this line at least a thousand times. In fact, you’ve likely heard it so much that it’s become meaningless. Communication, as I teach and coach, is the glue that holds an organization together. It is the means by which we exchange ideas, learn from each others, and perhaps most importantly, connect to each other.

“Communication and interpersonal skills remain at the top of the list of what matters most to recruiters.” That’s according to the most recent Harris Interactive/Wall Street Journal business school survey published in September 2007.

So why do we ignore the relevance of communication until it becomes an issue? One reason may be because we don’t take the time to quantify what we mean by it.

That’s why I found Adam Bryant’s New York Times interview with Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Airlines, refreshing. In the interview Anderson proceeded to define his expectations for effective communication.

1. Know the fundamentals. “People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word,” said Anderson. Express yourself well verbally, as well as on paper or through email. Failure to communicate coherently leaves people unsure of what is expected of them.

2. Think clearly about what you will say. Anderson is not a fan of PowerPoint. Bullet points without a “subject, a verb and an object” do not convey “complete thoughts.” With respect to Mr. Anderson, PowerPoint itself is not the problem; executives who use it as a short-hand for thinking are. Too many managers use it to sketch out thoughts rather than flesh them out.

3. Prepare for meetings. Documents for meetings should be distributed in advance and made clear and concise. Anderson also wants meetings to “start on time.” That’s all part of the preparation process. So often meetings go off track before they begin because managers and employees do not take the time to think about what they will say before they say it.

4. Engage in discussion. “I want the debate,” says Anderson. “I want to hear everybody’s perspective, so you want to try to ask more questions than make statements.” All too often, either due to the press of time or perhaps a feeling of over-importance, executives do not make it clear that they want to hear alternate points of view. Such an approach leads to “groupthink” because no one speaks up.

5. Listen to others. Discussions are meaningless if no one is listening. Anderson does not like to see his managers checking their BlackBerrys in meetings. Doing so shows lack of “focus” and is akin to reading a newspaper during the meeting, says Anderson. As little as we may tend to oral and written skills, we spend even less time on listening. For that reason, too many managers end up ill informed and, in turn, ill prepared to deal with issues that subsequently morph into problems. Time spent listening might have headed off such disasters.

“Measure what you treasure” is a saying used by compensation professionals in reference to aligning rewards to corporate goals. The same philosophy can be applied to communication. If you value communication skills you will recruit, train and hire for it. Oral and verbal skills are a baseline; organizations also need to look at the broader context of how such skills are used to inform, persuade, coach and inspire. That requires years of practice and example. It is up to leaders to show the way by communicating clearly — but also teaching others to do the same.

Modern Strategy and Hinduism: Finding Parallels

Strategy used to be about protecting your existing competitive advantage. Today, it’s about finding the next advantage. Strategy starts to decay the moment it’s created. That’s why corporations must develop strategies that address tomorrow’s business realities. Strategic actions that companies take belong in one of three boxes:

Box 1 = managing the present
Box 2 = selectively abandoning the past
Box 3 = creating the future

The first box is about improving your current businesses. Boxes 2 and 3 are about innovation, breakout performance, and growth. Most organizations restrict their strategic thinking to Box 1. Leaders are focused on cost reduction and margin improvement, especially during a serious downturn. But strategy must include Boxes 2 and 3 as well. Leaders must address what their companies need to do to sustain leadership in the long term. In fact, innovation is more — not less — important right now. Wal-Mart’s transformation of the discount retailing industry, Apple’stransformation of the music and phone industries, and Southwest Airlines’ revolution in the airline industry provide good examples of successful Box 2 and Box 3 initiatives.

Industries transform and change as a result of customer discontinuities and nonlinear shifts in technology. For example, nanotechnology and genetic engineering are revolutionizing the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries. Globalization is opening doors to emerging economies, most notably India and China, and billions of customers with vast, unmet needs. Once-distinct industries, such as mass-media entertainment, telephony, and computing, are converging. Rapidly escalating concerns about security and the environment are creating unforeseen markets. Other, more subtle changes are important as well, such as the trend toward more empowered customers, the rising middle class in the developing world, and the aging population in the developed world.

As a result of these forces, companies find their strategies require almost constant reinvention. Old assumptions are no longer valid, the previous strategy has been imitated and commoditized by competitors, or changes in the industry environment offer unanticipated opportunities. The only way to stay ahead is to innovate. It’s the responsibility of executives to make money with the current strategy. That’s the challenge in Box 1. It’s also their responsibility to make up for the decay and commoditization of strategy. That’s the challenge in Boxes 2 and 3, but too many companies ignore these boxes until it is too late.

In some ways, to understand these three boxes is to understand Hinduism . Though the Hindu religion recognizes 330 million gods, there are only three main Hindu deities: Vishnu, the god of preservation; Shiva, the god of destruction; and Brahma, the god of creation. The correspondence between the three boxes and the three Hindu gods is clear.

Box 1 = preserving or managing the present: Vishnu
Box 2 = destroying or selectively abandoning the past: Shiva
Box 3 = creating the future: Brahma

According to Hindu philosophy, preservation-destruction-creation is a continuous cycle without a beginning or an end. The three gods play an equally important role in all three phases of that process. Further, Hinduism states that, while changes in the universe can be quite dramatic, the processes leading to changes are often evolutionary and involve smaller steps.

This is just the challenge for large companies: to create their future while managing their present. To take small steps that lead to big change. How good is your organization in managing the preservation-destruction-creation cycle?

PLACEMENT NOTICE

PLACEMENT NOT

Company Name	Mu Sigma (www.mu-sigma.com)
Target Degrees & Branches	B. Tech (All Branches), MCA and M.Tech (Throughout 60% in academics)
CTC	Rs.3.3 LPA plus Rs.1.2 Lacs retention bonus after completing one year
Designation	Trainee Decision Scientist
Joining Location	Banglore
Joining Date/Month	June-July 2015
Selection Process (No. of Interview Rounds)	Online Test Video synthesis Problem solving (Algo round) Group case study Personal interviews
Any Bond	No
Campus Date & Time	12th and 14th September, 2014 Reporting Time on 12th September, 2014 – 12:00 Noon at Auditorium-301, PGDM Building

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Mu Sigma, today, is a leader in the Decision Sciences space. We have achieved this because of our belief that talent in our industry needs to be created and not found and that everybody has the ability to become a Decision Scientist.

Every candidate who joins us as a Trainee Decision Scientist will attend Mu Sigma University.

As part of MSU, you will learn the concepts of decision sciences from scratch and have access to technologies used exhaustively and exclusively in the field.

Being part of this juggernaut however has several requirements and expectations.

Do not come on board if:

1.    You are not hungry to learn (be it new subjects, businesses or technologies)

2.    You don’t want to work in an extremely fast paced environment

3.    You’re not open to change and prefer to stay within your comfort zone in terms of work, practices, people and everything else

4.    You don’t want to get your hands dirty with programming

5.    All you want to do is programming

6.    You don’t want to take on additional responsibilities within the team

7.    You don’t like documenting your learning and work

8.    You want a bulging wallet that weighs down your trousers, albeit we like to blame that on the city you will be working in

What we expect from you:

1.    Communicate effectively with client/onsite personnel to ensure transparency and clarity

2.    Understand evolving business needs and actively gather domain related information to share and teach, and create ideas within the organization

3.    Deliver well organized and error-free reports, dashboards, data analysis and statistical models on time

4.    Manage time well, have a life and help make the world a better place by actively participating in organizational initiatives

What we offer you in return:

1.    Learning as a way of life, in a challenging and diverse work environment

2.    The opportunity to push the envelope of your capabilities with a top-notch peer group

3.    A collaborative culture that encourages counter points and believes in being open minded

4.    The guarantee that you will be a part of a select group that will globally redefine the process of decision making

If you still believe you have what it takes, then we can be the Nick Fury to your potential Avenger!

Tech Mahindra

Tech Mahindra is visiting our campus on 15^thand 16^th 2014 
We are  also enclosing the “Model Mock Papers: Test Paper”. Please try to solve them.

All the best !!

PM NOTE-1

Please click on link below...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz1kTL36q1WtR2lyZmt4WDdPdzNaRFkzN1ZXSWFSekpiTW44/edit?usp=sharing

PM Assignment-1

Please find attached assignment-1 under project management subject.  you need to submit it by 04.00 pm on 17.09.14. 

Please ensure this being shared by all people in class and announce this in the classroom as well. 

click on link below

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz1kTL36q1WtTkkxTmpuVWVLd0NicmRQbTN3NmlvY2w5RTdv/edit?usp=sharing

PM:
Please note that a quiz based on Unit-1 shall be conducted on Thursday, 11.09.2014 in your class. This quiz shall be part of continuous assessment with 10 Marks. Everyone should attend the quiz.