April 2025: What is the Value-Added of External Consultants? External consultants are contracted by companies for various purposes. Aside from the specific task being assigned to them, external consultants are expected to provide additional insight, as opposed to internal consultants or experts. They bring with them the diverse experience they collected through working with several clients in different industries. In addition, they view the inside operations and processes from an independent and unbiased point of view, which allows them to be objective in their findings and recommendations, without being influenced by what they are used to do inside the organization or tending to compliment one side over the other under the influence of organizational politics. In light of that, external consultants are expected to be truthful, sincere, frank, ethical, and driven by the client interest. External consultants can be individuals or firms, and they accomplish their job by working with teams of internal and external staff, depending on needs of the project.
March 2025: What is Analysis Paralysis? This term refers to the case of over analyzing information or data related to a situation to the extent that disables analysts to reach conclusions and make decisions. The reasons leading to this paralysis can be the pressure of time or the criticality of the situation and the implications of the decisions to be made, or the amount and complexity of the data being analyzed. Desire to reach perfection of analysis will lead to escalating commitment and allocating time and effort for more analysis with deminishing return and low gain with regards to the quality and value of the final decisions. This case can be avoided by proper planning of the analysis process, including selection of data sources, data collection and cleansing, setting goals of the analysis and desired decisions to be made, and identifying the target stakeholders impacted by the decisions, as well as using professional analysis tools. By Experience, analysts will master control over the analysis process and are not to get trapped in this paralysis case.
February 2025: What is AI Economics? Artificial Intelligence (AI) Economics refers to the economic implications of adopting AI technologies in various industries. This is analyzed at both the macroeconomic (meaning the implications on national GDP and growth) and microeconomic (meaning the jobs and market affecting individual livings) levels. The term emerged because of the wide spread of AI integration and its potential associated opportunities and threats. While analysis of economic impact at national level highly varies from country to another, depending on the the current GDP and technical development level and what added value AI technologies can introduce, the impacts at the individual levels could be less variant, taking in consideration the similarities of job functions of a specific position and the benefits or threats AI technology can involve, and what new jobs are added or old jobs are replaced. Understanding the economic impact and preparing for it upfront will help in capitalizing on these technologies and not missing opportunities.
January 2025: How to decide on project activity sequencing relationships? Most popular activity sequencing relationships in a project schedule are Start-to-Start (SS), Start-to-Finish (SF), Finish-to-Start (FS), and Finish-to-Finish (FF). Choosing the relationship between two activities in the schedule is not arbitrary. The type of relationships connecting activities, and any lag or lead durations between them, will directly impact the performance and overall duration of project completion, and could consequently impact on overall costs of the project. For example, an SS relationship with a lag time can be used when two activities can be executed in parallel, but the second one depends on partial delivery of the first at its beginning, so instead of waiting for the full activity duration of the first one to complete, the second activity can start after a certain lag time as soon as the first activity is started and began to deliver, which leads to much saving of time of the overall project schedule. Similar reasoning can be applied to deciding on when the other types of relationships can be used.
December 2024: What is Generative AI (GenAI)? Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a modern trend in technology, a sort of Artificial Intelligence that utilizes machine learning and neural networks techniques, applied on large data sets, to identify patterns and structure of content, and possess the ability to create, that's to generate, new content, in forms of text, image, video, audio, etc. Newly generated content will be satisfying characteristics desired by the user of the application that's based on GenAI technology, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, among others. Many applications are starting to emerge by building on the power of GenAI, enabling users to create unlimited sorts of content based on their own criteria, and this is embedded now even in legacy applications, to add new features. In addition to the many positive sides of GenAI, still there are malicious uses, like deep fake videos, where audio and video content is generated and attributed intentionally to some persons for the purpose of defame or insult.
November 2024: How to select an Assessment Sample? Random sampling is a technique used in studying a certain population. It's used for purposes like market research and trend analysis. In the context of maturity assessments of processes in business operations, like project management maturity assessment, a sample of staff are selected for interviews, and a sample of projects is selected for document reviews for evidence of compliance. While the size of the sample is usually a proportional ratio to the size of the overall population in the scope of the assessment, and usually the ratio is recommended according to the assessment model adopted, the individual items in a sample should be selected so that the overall sample is as representative as possible for the population under study. The larger the sample, the more representative it would be, and more realistic the resulting findings will be. For project and process maturity assessment purposes, a representative sample should cover all departments and all business lines within scope with weights proportional to staff size of each.
Page:
1 2 3 > Last ›
[Archive: 2012 - 2015 | 2016 - 2019 | 2020 - 2023]