BUS 528 Chap 3 Project Stakeholders

Stakeholders are the persons that that contribute to or benefit from the final outcome. Five key stakeholders in any of the projects: sponsor, customer, management, project team members and project manager. They provide input, define and plan the project. A successful project should meet all stockholders expectation.

At define stage, different functions to be performed from the whole project should breakdown till different skill requirements emerge and then identify person with skill to perform the function. Clarify the goal, documentation and track the progress. A project manger then tries to negotiate and leverage his/her authority to get support from cross functional team members.

No one wants to see a meeting ends up inconclusive or non-productive. It’s better to have a preliminary communication to the decision makers and those with veto power. Collecting their comments and inputs. This will give you an idea about how much materials need to prepare in advance and access number of persons standing on your site before host a meeting.

BUS 528 Chap 4 Making the Rules

Project rules outline the project in three categories: Agreement from stakeholders for the preset goal, tracking schedule and budget under the defined project scope and management support.

The authority of project manager will be established as the agreement being created from stakeholders, plus statement of work being published and a project charter put in written. This legitimate authority will help to remove roadblock and also get assistance from other functional groups. Project manager also better possesses the expert authority in parallel. Expert authority refers to the insightful knowledge, ability and experience to influence team members to achieve the desired goal.

Effective communication make the information pass over to the right decision maker to make project become productive. Determine the frequency and response time frame requirement for different level of stakeholders is critical for success of the project.

Key items of foundation for Project Management needs to be in written. They can be broken down to items as follow:

Project Proposal
Charter from sponsor to create authority
Statement of work
Responsibility Matrix
Communication Plan Matrix
Checklist

BUS 520 Leaders I Admire & the Value I Believe

To me a great leader is the one establishing something from nothing. A leader makes a company grow and prosper not just simply grabbing competitors’ market shares but the vision of creating a brand new industry and the world become better place to live. Influence other associated things around us and we also benefit from the change he or she made in the long term. A great leader is also aware of the company itself has social responsibilities, such as provide job opportunities not just for high talents but also for seniors and have a good conscience on protecting environment.

A leader not just put challenge to the subordinates; he or she also challenges him or herself first. Realizing an authority may move a man, but the soul always belongs to the man. Persuade the opportunity and keep the promise while others having doubt. Showing respect to all the others inputs, and also is a great listener and an executer. Maintain the company always at the cutting edge and keep focus on innovation.

Two leaders possess certain unique leadership characters that I listed as above. One is Meg Whitman - the previous eBay CEO – and the other one is Robert Noyce, cofounder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor.

Meg Whitman is one of the few females CEO receive well recognition on the field was dominated by males. Her motto - refuse to fail - is the essential spirit keep her constantly deliver the result. She made eBay grows from 4 million dollar company to a revenue of 8 billion annually with 16,000 employees in 10 years. eBay’s online auction concept creates a brand new industry. The business model rely more on the mutual trust and cohesion from the customers - buyers & sellers - interface with the auction platform rather than how well the organizational structure or management skill of the company itself. eBay helps small business owners run the business online and currently 1.3 million eBay customers running business at eBay for living. Meg Witman’s determination to meet the challenge, refuse to accept failure as the option, and insightful vision on firmly believing eBay business model will thrive and encourage the staffs to reach such goal are the key factors that makes eBay extremely successful.

Robert Noyce is the other type of leader with distinctive characters that I respect. He is the person who creates and starts the legend of Silicon Valley. Robert is the inventor of integrated circuit (IC). His impassioned vision on manufacturing IC on silicon base as a simple and cost effective approach is the key that ICs so popular and become one of the most essential elements for our modern world. He further delivered the birth of Fairchild semiconductor in 1957 with a group of 8 young talent men and grew Fairchild to 11,000 employees’ company in 10 years. Robert later he joined Intel as a cofounder and successful re-coursed the Intel from DRAM oriented business to microprocessor giant while facing fierce competition from Japan in 1980s. His creativity, lead by example, risk taking and determination brought the great success of Fairchild semiconductor and Intel. Robert Noyce makes Fairchild and Intel both companies shine way ahead of the glories of Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, Yahoo or Google shown from the historical technology roadmap. Furthermore, these prestigious companies were built upon the foundation of ICs that invented by Robert Noyce 50 years ago without exception.

However, Robert Noyce is not a superhero. For many years his personal life was difficult, and he was not entirely without faults in this area. To me, every single leader, no matter how great he or she is - still is a human being. We fully accept both the glowing and dimming parts just simply because no one is perfect. The key is: whether a leader always thinks about is not just making a great achievement for himself only but all the people around will benefit.

Developing of Leadership is through a process of self awareness, digest the knowledge learned from the experience, it’s a continuous process. All of great leaders learn how to follow before lead. We can't really understand what is going on now unless we look back what came and happened before.

A great leader should have the following values embedded into the leadership:

Vision – Understand the trend, well plan and execute what is to come. Convenience and inspire others have passion and courage to follow and sacrifice. Then empower the staffs when they have good sense of responsibility and accountability.

Integrity -- speak the truth, be brave and safeguard the conscience always, even if it leads to face the challenge obstacles.

Creativity – understand the innovation is the key for team to prosper and survive. Think untraditional solution is the key to solve problem as we face obstacles.

Persistence – Once a goal being set, needs to think how to get there. If hits the wall will find the path.

Teamwork – well communicate so all the team members can work together to achieve the desired objective. Share knowledge and experience among others.

I admire and respect different role models from time to time. All the leaders have one thing in common –be the best of themselves. For me the life journey is to be the best of myself and searching the meaning of life so my mind and heart can rest upon it.

BUS528 Definition of Project

Proj mgmt definition of project

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BUS528 Reading Summary of Chapter 1 & 2

All the successful companies long last, receiving respect and recognition have one unique trait: focusing on innovation and creativity. Innovation and creativity also means we will take the challenge, will change ourselves and think the solution out of box. Reengineering and continuously improving the function of each department as needed to stay competitive. The whole cycle is a self-evolution and it will create organic growth of the company.

The benefit of innovation is to allow a company can keep developing high performance products that the customers are willing to pay the premium. This will help on generating the high profit margin revenue pool. As the result, the company will have a healthier financial strength, provide better employee compensation, allocate appropriated funding to the next generation products and also pays higher dividends to the stockholders. In contrast, the companies compete based on cutting cost, production efficiency and manufacturing excellence but trade off innovation and quality will be difficult to keep itself competitive.

As the effect of globalization, most of the companies no longer keep manufacturing function at bay area anymore. The US based headquarter more or less just serves as a nerve center. Even the best talent staffs now can simply recruit from other cities without relocation (thanks the power and convenience of internet). In addition, the majority of manufacturing jobs are reallocated to the more cost effective cities or just outsourced to oversea OEM manufactures. This trend makes product development and project management more complicated than ever to deal with as the cross functional team members now can spread all over the world. Especially for a multi-function system level product development that involves numerous interactions of project management from inception of design down to operate stages. Work overtime and communicating with oversea staffs for driving the project forward, frequency of business travel and instability of job security due to the need of technology / product transfer are some of the negative impacts that the high tech project leader / coordinator needs to face off from time to time.

To me the most important factor to accomplish project is not how much budget can be spent but a good cohesion of teamwork to execute the project. As a project leader, he / she needs to ensure all the individual tasks will be executed in parallel, access the risk of system level integration failure, perform the corrective action for the improvement, and NOT afraid of requesting the extra support as needed so the final project will deliver on schedule. A well defined plan from the project leader will be a good foundation to complete the mission. Well plan ahead and clearly define the responsibly of each supporting group function definitely will further reduce the finger-pointing complains and unnecessary mistakes circulating around. The project leader should always give credit, appreciation and recognition to members make key contributions. This will make the members have a good sense of ownership, achievement and willing to work together as a team during the course of project.

Project Management - CALMAT BUS528

I worked for quite a few leading analog and digital ICs companies in the past 15 years, from a start up with size of 50 staffs up to a well-established corporate with thousands of employees. My expertise is on IC reliability and failure analysis in semiconductor industry.

Currently I work for Linear Technology Corp and lead a reliability engineering team. The major job responsibility includes generating qualification test plan, providing the test solution to meet customer or specific industry requirements and delivering all reliability test result so the product can be released to the production stage in time. The most complicated part of the job is not taking care of over 50 well-defined qualification routines & reporting the weekly status but to develop unique reliability test system solutions that meets the specific requirements from time to time. This kind of developing task is more complicated due to no example to follow and at the inception stage only having one or two pages of document spec to reference. How to leverage the possessed resources, authority and get support from other cross-functional groups also is not an easy task either. The higher management involvement is always needed. Furthermore, the perception of management believes that a project leader gets the assignment should be the most capable and knowledgeable one to accomplish the project without much issues, therefore no need to add any staffs but just spending very little budget & using his/her "creative thinking" to deliver the result (what an honor). This in general just make the project even more complicated to accomplish.

Dealing with the project assignment is always challenging and stressful. Hopefully I can learn the arts on dealing with the project more effectively and efficiently from the class.