Once you’ve got your stakeholder list — the one from the stakeholder list document, filled in with names, titles, and notes — the next step is to stop looking at it as a flat list and start grouping them. A flat list of twenty names is hard to work with. You can’t send the same email to everyone. You can’t run the same meeting with everyone. You can’t make the same promises to everyone. So you split them up. ...
Every project has people who care about it, whether they’ve signed up for it or not. The trick is figuring out who they are before they start caring loudly. I keep a simple stakeholder list document open from day one. It’s not fancy — six columns, thirty-six rows, nothing more. But it stops you from being surprised when someone you never considered shows up at a steering group demanding answers. ...
I’ve been reading up on emotional intelligence lately and collecting the bits that felt useful. Not the textbook definitions — the ones that actually change how you show up in a room. The five things that matter There’s a framework that keeps coming up, and it boils down to five skills: rapport building, curiosity, communication, ambition, and conflict resolution. They’re not glamorous. They’re not the sort of things you put on a CV under “technical expertise”. But they’re the difference between being someone people want to work with and someone they tolerate. ...
Most people treat office politics as something to avoid. They’d rather focus on their work and hope it speaks for itself. But the truth is, everyone is already playing the game — whether they admit it or not. The difference is between people who understand how it works and people who get surprised by it. Here’s what I’ve learned about developing political awareness at work. Know where you’re going You can’t navigate an office if you don’t know what you’re looking for. What do you actually want? A promotion? A transfer to a different team? More influence over decisions? Be honest with yourself about it. ...
It’s the last day of 2013 and I’ve been sitting with the question of what I actually want to do differently in 2014. Not what I should do, not what sounds good on a vision board, but what I genuinely want to change about how I spend my time. I’ve made lists before. Five resolutions, ten resolutions, the whole lot. Write more, exercise more, read more, save more, learn a language, cut out social media, meditate every morning. By February I’d abandoned at least eight of them, and the ones I kept were half-hearted at best. The problem was never discipline. It was that I was trying to change everything at once, which is just a fancy way of saying I wasn’t going to change anything at all. ...
Vendor Assessment Type: Vendor Assessment Project Information Field Description Value Name Enter the name TPA: Project Name Whirlpool project name requesting third party or service provider connection TPA: Project Owner Whirlpool project owner requesting third party or service provider connection TPA: Business Area Whirlpool business area or process supported by the third party or service provider TPA: Service Provider Name Service provider company name TPA: Service Provider Contact Service provider or third party contact TPA: Target Implementation Date Target implementation date TPA: CISO Vendor Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) or equivalent TPA: User Directory Choose the user directory used to manage security and provisioning of access on your internal network TPA: OS and database List the operating system and database used to manage Whirlpool data TPA: Datacenter location List the location of the datacenter that hosts Whirlpool data OS/Database options: Mainframe, Unix, AS400, Windows, Oracle, DB2/UDB, MS SQL, Other ...
I picked this up a while back and it’s been sitting in my notes ever since. It’s a risk assessment checklist for software projects — the kind of thing you’d run through before committing to a contract or kicking off a big engagement. The original is a ten-page Word document with checkboxes. I’ve reorganised it here so it’s easier to scan. The categories are roughly in order of how you’d work through them: start with requirements, move through design and implementation, then look at process, people, and external pressures. ...
I prebooked an Aakash Ubislate tablet on its first day of availability. Two months later, I’m still waiting, and the email chain with Datawind’s support team tells the whole story. The booking confirmation Dear Shafiq, Your Booking ID is : xxxxxxxxx Someone from our sales team would get in touch with you and provide you with the payment and delivery options. The commercial version of the UbiSlate would be launched in early weeks of December. ...
I spent a fair amount of time working on SAP implementations back in the day, and one of the modules that came up again and again was Order to Cash. People throw the term around in meetings like it means something obvious, but if you ask five people what OTC actually covers, you will get five different answers. So here is my take on it — not a textbook definition, but what it looks like from the inside. ...
I needed a simple way to track a scrum project without investing in a tool, so I built a spreadsheet template. It’s not meant to replace anything serious – just something to get the structure down on paper before things get messy. You can grab it here: scrum-tmpl-100212 It’s got three sheets. The first is basic project info – organisation, project name, scrum master, product owner, start date. The second is the product backlog, laid out by sprint with room to track effort against each release. The third is an impediments log, so when something blocks the team you write it down with a category, date, and who raised it instead of letting it get lost in a standup conversation. ...