#CriticalPath

[projectmanagertemplate]

Project management is a critical discipline that enables organizations to plan, execute, and complete projects efficiently. Whether it's software development, construction, marketing, or product launches, effective project management ensures that objectives are met on time and within budget.

In this blog, we will explore what is project management, its key methodologies, and fundamental concepts. We will also address common project management questions, including what is a project manager, what is agile project management, what is critical path in project management, and more.

[projectcubicle1]

How to Create Effective Gantt Charts Step by Step?

How to Create Effective Gantt Charts Step by Step?

If you are working as a scheduler or a project control engineer, most probably you use the Gantt charts every day while creating a work schedule. If you are working out of the field of project management, most probably you have never heard of a Gantt. Simply put, Gantt charts are the visual tools that demonstrate a view of project activities scheduled over time. Gantt charts are the effective tools used for scheduling projects of all sizes. They help you to see which activity is scheduled to be done on a specific day. In this article, we will discuss how to create effective Gantt charts step by step.

What is a Gantt Chart?

Gantt charts are commonly used by project management teams to understand the current status and plan the future activities of the project. Most of the departments such as engineering, procurement, production, construction, etc. are managing their tasks, departmental works, responsibilities, and plans by gathering inputs provided by Gantt charts. Gantt charts are specifically presented with dates at the top of the chart and a list of activities in the rows. Activities are presented as horizontal bars and the length of the bar shows the activity duration. The start point of the bar is the start date and the end point is the finish date. Gantt charts are usually created in Excel or even specialized project management software. By using a Gantt chart, you can easily see; - The project activities - Start and end date of activities - Duration of activities and project Gantt Chart software tools like Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project enable to create Gantt Charts, calculate the critical path, and assign resources and relationships to activities. You can easily create the WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) and group the activities under WBS levels. Online Gantt Chart software tools which support collaborative project management are also available on the market.

Who Uses Gantt Charts?

Almost everyone working in the field of project management and control use Gantt Charts to schedule project tasks. Individuals can also use Gantt charts to plan and visualize their tasks. If you use a software tool, it will do all the difficult work with the help of computer algorithms. Therefore you just insert tasks, durations, resources, and the software creates the schedule instantly for you. Gantt charts are the visual tools for these people; - Project Managers - General Managers - Project Team Members - Operations Managers - Scheduling Managers - Procurement Managers - Production Managers Using the Gantt Charts in an effective manner necessitates training in project management, estimation methods, critical path analysis, and resource-leveling.

How to Create Effective Gantt Charts Step by Step?

Below tips can be helpful to create effective Gantt charts. Make an Activity List at an Appropriate Level of Detail Task lists should be created at an appropriate level of detail in order to monitor their performance efficiently. If there is too much detail, it will be difficult to create and update the chart regularly. On the other hand, if the detail level is too less, the Gantt chart can not represent adequately the real conditions and phases of the project. Simply put, the detail level of activities must represent the real nature of work. Assign Right Dependencies Dependencies are the logic links between the activities. In general, there are four dependency types between the activities: - Finish to Start (FS) - Start to Start (SS) - Finish to Finish (FF) - Start to Finish (SF) The only possible way of determining the critical path of a project is to assign the right dependencies between the activities. These dependencies should be clearly represented on the Gantt chart so that the project management team can easily recognize the critical path and make sure those activities are completed on time. Create a Specific Calendar for the Project Weekends, public holidays, and non-work days should be specified while creating a Gantt Chart. Calendars are dependent on the client, and if the client has definite time constraints, make sure that the time constraints are clearly marked on the Gantt Chart. If your project is extending to years, you may define the timescale of your Gantt Chart in terms of months. The timescale of short-term projects can be defined in terms of weeks or days. Brainstorm with Your Team It is a good way to conduct a brainstorming session for the chart with your team to ensure you have not missed out on anything important. If you analyze the estimations for activities, activity dependencies, and the critical path of the project with your team, the schedule will be more realistic and effective. Also, share the Gantt chart with key stakeholders and receive their feedback before submitting it to the client.

Summary

Gantt charts build bridges between management teams, project managers, clients, and stakeholders. They are applicable to different types of projects such as construction, engineering, military, manufacturing, infrastructure, and IT. They help you to view the start and end dates of all project activities in one simple view. Resources in charge of each activity can be clearly represented, dependencies for each activity can be marked and time constraints can be visually presented with the help of Gantt Charts. From this point of view creating effective Gantt charts establishes effective communication channels between the parties. In this article, we discuss Gantt Charts and the tips to create effective ones. If you have anything to share or add, you can do it through the comments box. See Also Advantages and Disadvantages of Gantt Charts Gantt Chart Example External References Are you being misled by your progress Gantt chart?   Read the full article

[marcubus-dev-blog]

Decoupling

For the tech leaders here it's worth reading this in relation to feature work. It delves into the importance of task splitting and some mathematics to highlight that adding more people when you haven't split properly doesn't make your team much (if at all) faster.

If you recall a while ago I had a word of the day thing on the Critical Path - well this feeds into that by looking to optimise a teams throughput by making as much of the work as possible parallelizable. This is why we should be putting time into task breakdown and decoupling our tasks as much as possible. Doing this essentially means you can have more people working on a feature at once without tripping over each other. Therefore you get feature work done faster.

Decoupling is a key architectural and engineering principal.

As a footnote:  If you read the mythical man month the premise is that there is a prevailing belief in the software development industry that adding more people will get things faster in a linear fashion. We all (hopefully) know by now, there is diminishing returns with any additional people you add to a problem and there becomes a time when it actually slows you down. Task splitting and decoupling effectively mitigates some of this - but only to a point.

[any-mackinday-07]

Ciencias Forenses México, Tiro Deportivo GUNNER y Criticalpath Forensics te invitamos al curso denominado "Tiro Táctico y Explosivos"

Dirigido a:

-Cuerpos policiales

-Seguridad corporativa

-Criminalistas

-Expertos forenses

-Público en general

pre-registro https://forms.gle/eLMKu7XaH9FLq4si7

El curso Incluye:

-Práctica de tiro

*90 tiros para fusil

*10 tiros para .380

*10 tiros para escopeta

-Practica de explosivos

-Utilización de K-9 en investigaciones forenses

Se entregara DC-3 de la STPS y Diploma

Reserva tú lugar ya que es cupo limitado.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtJqZc9JHqM

#SomosForenses

#FamiliaForense

#Gunner

#Rag

#Jaguares

[lovezacblr]

My money says “Dont trust, Verify” 😉 #NakamotoConsensus #BuckminsterFuller #CriticalPath #!981 #PerfectMoney #SystemsTheorist #Futurist #CypherPunk

[l3o0]

#CohnWolfeSingapore #Singaporean #SingaporePR #CohnWolfe #singapore #AdrianLee #Arrested #Rape #Cheating #Prison #Jail #Prisoner1107 #LeeHwaiSan #ChangiPrison #NewZealander #Kiwi #AllBlacks #Bankrupt #Bankruptcy #AJLee #GerrieDing #GeraldineDing #BVL #CriticalPath #WowAutomobiles #BonVivant #BonVivantHoldings #BonVivantLifeStyle #Invessence #APCO #XPR #thePRelement #ItConvergence

[teslaoutsourcingservices]

An introduction of 4D BIM techniques

Construction Scheduling or Sequencing in a project records benchmark for project, generates output, determines the start and end date of building a project. BIM 4D Services is also known as Construction Sequencing provides project drafting and project extraction arrangement for project management.

Read more about 4D BIM and its techniques in our infographic here: https://www.teslaoutsourcingservices.com/blog/infographic/an-introduction-of-4d-bim-techniques/

#4dbim #4dbimservices #constructionscheduling #sequencing #constructionsequencing #bim4d #criticalpath #scheduling #constructionproject #aecindustry #4dbimtechniques #barcharts #linkedbarcharts #lineofbalancesequencing #qscheduling #teslaoutsourcingservices

[christopherisonphotoblog]

@westdeancollege well worth a visit right now... Visual Arts #SummerShow #CriticalPaths on until Friday 7th July. #creativearts #visualarts #painting #contemporaryart #photography #marketingphotography #marketingphotographer #mycanon #canonuk (at West Dean College)

[projectmanagertemplate]

Project schedule delays are challenging, but they’re not insurmountable. By identifying the root cause, adjusting the project plan, and implementing targeted strategies like fast-tracking, crashing, and resource reallocation, you can recover lost time and deliver a successful project. Remember, effective communication and proactive risk management are key to staying on track and avoiding future setbacks.

[felord]

CMPT381 Assignment3-MVC, Multiple Views, and Interactive 2D Graphics Solved

CMPT381 Assignment3-MVC, Multiple Views, and Interactive 2D Graphics Solved

In this assignment you will build a JavaFX system that demonstrates your skills with Model-View-Controller and multiple views, 2D graphics, and interaction with graphical objects. The application, called CriticalPath, allows users to create a dependency graph for a project and see the critical path from project start to project completion. A dependency graph is a directed acyclic graph (DAG)…

[pathtopurchase]

Reading notes for digital marketing folks

Here are some books and blogs that I believe will be useful to digital marketing folks. 

General marketing

1. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This! by Luke Sullivan: True to its tagline “The classic guide to creating great ads”, it gives pointers on how to make great ads on TV, print, radio, direct TV etc. Sullivan’s philosophy is that effective advertising doesn’t mean boring or cliched advertising: this leaps out from every page.

2. Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy: Despite his creative chops, Ogilvy was clear that the purpose of advertising was to sell things: that he was a door-to-door salesman early in his career probably shaped his views in this matter. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Ogilvy was a believer in research and came up with a set of rules on what was effective and what wasn’t. As an example, he points out that when you’re advertising food ingredients, it’s best to show the final preparation rather than just the ingredient. We’ve actually tried this in our work and it turns out Ogilvy was right.

3. Truth, Lies and Advertising by Jon Steel: I can’t recommend this highly enough. It explains the craft of Account Planning but it’s a lot more than that: in my view, it is a definitive book explaining the process of how great advertising happens. Steel’s central thesis is that when you develop advertising, you need to involve customers at all stages. I also learnt from this book the importance of qualitative research and, perhaps more crucially, the dangers of bland, uninspired research. 

For a quick summary of his ideas watch Steel’s talk “Bringing Back Those Big Ideas” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqk6C7zGY3M

4. How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp: This describes a scientific approach to marketing. Some may find Prof. Sharp’s certitude a little off-putting, but that’s no reason to give it a miss. The key point in this book is that a lot of marketing metrics (e.g. purchase frequency, retention) move in-line with market share. In other words, it’s hard to increase, for instance, purchase frequency without increasing market share.

5. Advertising Media Planning by Sissors and Baron is a solid book on media planning. Given that media planning is quite country-specific I found its US-centricity a bit of a hindrance, but the conceptual framework is excellent and the book itself has stood the test of time.

5. http://sellsellblog.blogspot.in/ is an interesting blog on advertising. Also, https://martinweigel.org/

6. CNBC Storyboard (on YouTube) has a bunch of great interviews with marketers and people from ad agencies. It’s a great place to keep oneself updated on trends in the Indian marketing world.

7. It’s worth following @adweek on Twitter.

8. Shuchi Bansal’s weekly columns on media in Mint are excellent. See http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Author/Shuchi%20Bansal

9. For Pricing, read “Confessions of a Pricing Man” by Hermann Simon.

10. The following podcasts are very good. In my experience, I’ve found it best to pick 2-3 good podcast shows and listen to all of their episodes (as opposed to trying to pick new podcast shows every week or so). 

a. http://www.marketingtodaypodcast.com/

b. https://thedrewblog.com/podcasts/

c. https://nadinedietz.com/cmomoves/

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. Google’s starter guide covers the basics of SEO and is a good place to start for beginners.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

2.The Moz blog, https://moz.com/blog: Moz has been writing useful stuff on search for a long time now. It’s also worth watching as many video lectures on YouTube by their founder Rand Fishkin as possible (look up Whiteboard Fridays by Rand Fishkin, on YouTube) . Also, follow @randfish on Twitter. 

3. https://searchengineland.com/ is worth checking regularly.

4. For technical SEO (i.e. SEO activities that involve tweaks by engineering rather than content) there are some interesting talks on YouTube e.g. https://youtu.be/Cw3zo1XB0YI

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

1. https://adwords.googleblog.com/ is Google’s official AdWords blog and is worth following. I find it a lot easier to get key updates from Google’s account representatives, but in case you don’t have access to one, the AdWords blog should be helpful.

2. It’s worth reading the transcripts of Google’s investor earnings calls every quarter (you can get these on Seekingalpha) to learn about key trends.

3. Google periodically conducts events such as Marketing Next and Performance Summit, and these are on YouTube. Again, these are worth reading in order to understand where Google is headed in search (and display) marketing.

Social media

1. I’d focus on Facebook here. Facebook’s updates page https://www.facebook.com/business/news is worth checking weekly.

2. Facebook has something called Blueprint to help marketers learn about advertising on the platform. https://www.facebook.com/blueprint/?ref=footer#

3. Facebook’s quarterly earnings call transcripts (available as pdf’s on their Investor Relations page) are worth reading.

Mobile marketing

1. AppsFlyer, Localytics, Urban Airship and Moengage have blogs/newsletters that are worth following.

Email marketing

1. SendGrid and MailChimp’s blogs are worth following.

Analytics

1. Avinash Kaushik’s blog https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ is quite good. I actually find it a bit overwhelming to be honest, but it does contain a wealth of information for those interested.

2. Making Sense of NoSQL by McCreary and Kelly is a good introduction to Big Data for non-technical folks.

3. Data Smart by John Foreman is a hands-on guide (in Excel) to Big Data models. I haven’t completed this, but I’ve read enough of it to recommend it.

Technology industry

1. I find it quite useful to keep myself updated on trends in the technology industry. A subscription to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery (US$ 10/month) is well worth the investment. There are other publications like The Information (US$ 39/month when I checked last) which also seem to be quite good.

2. www.asymco,com, run by Horace Dediu, is a brilliant analytical look at the mobile industry, especially Apple. His podcast http://5by5.tv/criticalpath is well worth a listen.

3. Among books, The Innovator’s Dilemma by Prof. Clayton Christensen is excellent. 

Design

1. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug are quite good.

2. Luke Wroblewski’s talks on YouTube are worth a watch. Also, there’s this Netflix series called Abstract that I found to be quite good.

[hobobuzz]

New #hoboken tweet. Balancing #qualitycontrol and #criticalpath while minding #budget #schedule and the #humanelement ... #projectmanagement in #hoboken

[davidcarlton]

Huh, I didn’t know about this GDPR thing; sounds worth keeping an eye on, and even worth being cautiously optimistic about?

[teslaoutsourcingservices]

An introduction of 4D BIM Techniques

Construction Scheduling or Sequencing in a project records benchmark for project, generates output, determines the start and end date of building a project. BIM 4D Services is also known as Construction Sequencing provides project drafting and project extraction arrangement for project management.

Read more about 4D BIM and its techniques in our infographic here: https://www.teslaoutsourcingservices.com/blog/infographic/an-introduction-of-4d-bim-techniques/

Learn more about Tesla Outsourcing services, visit here https://www.teslaoutsourcingservices.com/

#4dbim #4dbimservices #constructionscheduling #sequencing #constructionsequencing #bim4d #criticalpath #scheduling #constructionproject #aecindustry #4dbimtechniques #barcharts #linkedbarcharts #lineofbalancesequencing #qscheduling #teslaoutsourcingservices

[christopherisonphotoblog]

Creatively immersive day a #WestDean #visualarts #summershow preview today. #criticalpaths #MA #photography #photographer (at West Dean College)