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A bit old but very interesting read on Project Management.

Many project managers feel as if their role is more of a game than a job. Some project managers play to win, some simply wait for the next roll of the dice, and others haven’t got a clue how to play. Many project managers are accomplished at playing the PM game and are able to deliver spectacular results. Others simply don’t know what they’re doing and cannot deliver because they clearly don’t understand the rules of the game.

Once you start playing the “Game of Project Management,” you soon realize that there is never enough money, people, and time, so you have to call on your interpersonal skills to get what you need to get the project delivered.

There are two fundamental aspects regarding the human side of project management that are important to remember:
People influence a project’s success or failure.
A project problem can only be resolved by people.
So, if it’s people that form the core to any project, let’s look at the way many project managers play the people game. A successful end result means everything to project managers. They cannot afford to fail because executives are always looking at two key things:
Who’s putting money into the coffers—i.e., delivering on time, staying within budget, keeping clients happy, etc.
Who’s taking money out of the coffers—i.e. missing milestones, allowing conflict on teams, going over budget, experiencing unhappy clients, etc.
Organizations therefore try and employ project managers that have the ability to deliver. The downside to the political game involves what I call “shark-like” behavior: careerism, scheming, underhanded negotiating for resources, political campaigning, and unscrupulous behavior.

Let me knock down a few myths right from the get-go. Only naïve PMs believe that hard work, mastery of Microsoft Project, and knockout project documents will make you a better project manager. This myopic approach may work for you on small projects, but definitely not on medium to super-size projects, where executives demand instant 360-degree views of budgets, resources, time, and more. So how then do you play this game? You need to be able to:
Understand politics extremely well.
Provide timely communications.
Build relationships.
Provide leadership to your team.
Improve your negotiation skills among others if you are to win.

Read more on TechRepublic

I started taking Project Management course and I feel stuck at the formulas for the lack of business background, and instead of running away from it (IT IS REALLY SCARY!). I will face it by reading online materials and share it here (with proper citation) and hopefully will get feedback on whether I’m on the right track or not.

AccountingCoach costing is an important subtopic of cost accounting. Standard costs are usually associated with a manufacturing company’s costs of direct material, direct labor, and manufacturing overhead.

Rather than assigning the actual costs of direct material, direct labor, and manufacturing overhead to a product, many manufacturers assign the expected or standard cost. This means that a manufacturer’s inventories and cost of goods sold will begin with amounts reflecting the standard costs, not the actual costs, of a product. Manufacturers, of course, still have to pay the actual costs. As a result there are almost always differences between the actual costs and the standard costs, and those differences are known as variances.

Standard costing and the related variances is a valuable management tool. If a variance arises, management becomes aware that manufacturing costs have differed from the standard (planned, expected) costs.

If actual costs are greater than standard costs the variance is unfavorable.
An unfavorable variance tells management that if everything else stays constant the company’s actual profit will be less than planned.
If actual costs are less than standard costs the variance is favorable.
A favorable variance tells management that if everything else stays constant the actual profit will likely exceed the planned profit.

The sooner that the accounting system reports a variance, the sooner that management can direct its attention to the difference from the planned amounts.

I think the quality of this introductory paragraphs to Cost Variance is the reason why AccountingCoach is making it the first result when you Google accounting related keywords.

The concept of Cost Variance is explained as

Cost Variance (CV)
Concept: Provides cost performance of the project. Helps determine if the project is proceeding as planned
Formula: CV = EV – AC
Result Interpretation:
Negative = over budget = bad
Positive = under budget = good

This did not sound simple when I read it first, as someone who did not come from business background, I could not understand the formula without a scenario like the one provided by AccountingCoach.

I will try to make it a habit to post on issues that I see as problematic during my PMP training and share whatever I find.

Mac OSX is beautiful, not only in its design, but also in its memory management. However, sometimes the inactive memory takes long time before released.

According to Apple support Inactive memory is

information in memory is not actively being used, but was recently used.

For example, if you’ve been using Mail and then quit it, the RAM that Mail was using is marked as Inactive memory. This Inactive memory is available for use by another application, just like Free memory.

However, if you open Mail before its Inactive memory is used by a different application, Mail will open quicker because its Inactive memory is converted to Active memory, instead of loading Mail from the slower hard disk.

In many cases you will need to jump from a heavy application into another, and then you will need either to accept the system performance, which is not deadly bad, or use a simple command line to free your memory.

First, how to monitor your memory?
Mac OS X comes with Activity Monitor Application that gives you a glimpse about your system resources, one major resource is your memory.
Read Apple help on Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

Now, how to free the inactive memory without having to reboot?

Open your terminal app and run
purge

Checking the ManPage of Purge, purge task defined as force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied) with a description Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis. It does not affect anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc.

No need to download an app to free your memory and moreover, you do not need to buy an app for that purpose, it comes for free.

Speed Freak, at a user-specified interval, reprioritizes applications so that the frontmost (or active) application gets more processor time than background applications. By default in Mac OS X, all processes have equal priority. By using Speed Freak, you override this default by increasing the priority of whatever application you are currently using, resulting in faster application performance. Speed Freak accomplishes this through the Unix “renice” command.

Speed Freak does not affect graphics card performance and will show little to no increase in 3D games. Although Speed Freak does not affect network performance, the increased CPU priority it offers should increase performance in internet applications. For example, web pages with complicated HTML should render faster but download speed will not change.

The eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system brings our best thinking from iPhone and iPad to the Mac.

Mac App Store

Mac OS X Lion includes the Mac App Store — the best place for users to discover, purchase, and download your apps. Millions of customers in over 90 countries can quickly and easily select from some of the best Mac apps conveniently on their Mac. Learn more about the Mac App Store and how you can introduce your apps to millions of users around the world. Learn more

 

Full Screen Apps

Provide an immersive, focused user experience with a full screen app. NSApplication, NSWindow, and the NSWindowDelegate Protocol in Mac OS X Lion make it easy for you to create and manage full-screen user interfaces while providing you the power to design rich user interactions.

 

Popovers

AppKit framework now includes popovers, a new unit of content that can be positioned relative to other content on the screen. Popovers automatically move whenever the positioning view moves. You can also design popovers that can be detached, allowing them to become a separate window.

 

 

 

Overlay Scrollbars

Mac OS X Lion introduces overlay scrollbars similar to those in iOS. These scrollbars appear as an overlay on top of the window’s content while the user is scrolling and remain visible briefly to allow scrollbar dragging.

 

 

Auto Save and Versions

If you have a document-based application, Lion offers an efficient, built-in auto save feature that stores changes to the working document instead of creating additional copies on a disk. Versions automatically records a history of changes made to your documents and lets your app display a Time Machine like interface so users can browse through previous versions.

 

Sandboxing and Privilege Separation

Create apps that are more secure with app sandboxing and privilege separation. Sandboxing protects the system by limiting the kinds of things an application can do, such as accessing files on disk or resources over the network. Limiting the capabilities of an app to just those operations that it needs to perform helps keep the rest of the system more secure in the event that an app is compromised. Privilege separation is another common technique for improving security where an app is factored into smaller pieces, each with their own distinct roles and privileges.

 

File Coordination

Coordinating access to files between multiple threads and multiple processes can be difficult and error prone. File Coordination helps eliminate inconsistencies due to overlapping reads and writes by allowing your application to access files and directories in a way that is serialized with respect to other processes’ accesses of the same files and directories.