Getting Ahead Of The Competition

Both an individual and a business work in the same way and are motivated by the same things.  You may see businesses as illusive, inanimate entities but we all know that businesses are made up of individuals and if those individuals are not performing at their best the business most certainly will be affected negatively.  So I see businesses as a living breathing group of unique individuals rather than a machine that is beyond our grasp. As businesses are an accumulation of individuals, we can consider the desires of businesses the same as when we just speak of individuals alone. Do you want your business’s performance to be one of excellence and great abundance, do you want fast sustainable improvement or do you want mediocre, slow improvement?  Do you want your own life experience to be one of excellence and great abundance, do you want fast sustainable improvement or do you want mediocre, slow improvement? I know, dumb question, but most people and businesses are choosing the latter.  They are choosing strategies that will only bring them slow and unimpressive improvement at best.  Business success levels prove this without much investigation.  There are more so-so businesses than there are highly successful businesses.   Why, because we have been following the wrong path to advanced, acute, top of the pile success for too long. 

Everyone is looking for that little extra that will propel them ahead of their competition.  Individuals and businesses alike want to be the best.  They want to out shine everyone in their field. Why? Well it’s all for the same reason really it’s just that we don’t recognize it. It’s not because you get more money, it not that the shareholders will be happy, its not to be able to move into the big corner office, its not to be able to buy the big car, house or trip overseas.  No I can say with absolute strong belief and conviction that none of these reasons is why any of us want to enjoy business success or personal success. The key is…… you want to feel good.

It’s the feeling the promotion gives you, it’s the feeling being number one gives you, it’s the feeling that you get stepping into your new favorite car for the first time gives you, it’s the feeling of sitting in first class on your way to your dream holiday gives you. Businesses are no different because it is the feeling experienced by the individuals that make up the entity called “the business” that determine its direction and evolution.  Individual human beings drive the business so we need to look at what drives the drivers. It is not the actual achievement itself it is the feeling it gives you that drives you to want to be the best in what you do.

I want you to stop reading now and consider what I have said.  Imagine you have achieved your greatest desire.  Imagine sitting behind the wheel of that car for the first time, imagine the day you walk into the office and some tells you just got the biggest contract of your career. Imagine the feeling that comes over you when you have what you really want right in the palm of your hand.  Name it, feel it.  Is it joy, excitement, relief, contentment, elation, do you want to tell the world, or the one you love, or are you happy to sit with it and savor it all through your body? Being able to feel what it is like when you achieve your goal will fast track that goal toward you.

So what do you think the most successful people in the world do?  They chase that feeling.  Sure they can look at being better time managers, better public speakers, better at balancing the books, but what they do best is keep focusing on that feeling of being successful and what it means to them.  Focusing on the right things will allow you to be open to finding ways to achieve that thing.  The feeling of achievement, the feeling of mastery, the feeling of satisfaction, all these positive feelings can be achieved in endless ways.  It’s the feelings that we all chase not the “things”.  Yes we have preferences of things but that’s because we believe that it is one thing over another that will bring us the best feeling.

So if we are all really chasing feelings how then can we make this work to achieve what we want? The answer is simpler than you would think. Chase the good feeling things every day in every aspect of your day. The newest way of describing this approach is called “playing to your strengths rather than your weaknesses”. Discover what empowers you. What are the things that you love to do?  What are the things you look forward to doing? These are the things that strengthen you.  To reach levels of advanced success you need to find ways to do more of what excites and uplifts you.

So if you are not playing to your strengths most of the day (73% of 198,000 workers polled by the Gallop organization, don’t use their strengths most of the time) think of the improvement that is possible.  That’s over 7 out of 10 people at your company who are not working to their potential.  If your business has room for improvement look at what you have to tap into. If you would like greater profitability look at the potential.  With over 7 out of 10 people not playing to their strengths everyday, any wonder there were 1.6 million people according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics who started a new job in the 2006-2007 financial year.

One of the main reasons a person leaves their job is because of lack of job satisfaction.  People will even accept lower pay if they have high job satisfaction. If you can increase the amount of time that people do tasks that strengthen them they are more likely to be more productive as they are efficient at what they are doing, they can perform the task well many times because they are good at it and they enjoy it.  You are more likely to hold on to valuable company members and therefore reduce the need for training and retain valuable company knowledge.  Absenteeism is likely to be reduced due to increased job satisfaction.  The list goes on and on.

Focusing on people’s weaknesses will further drain already dissatisfied employees.  Certainly there may be a case for neutralizing some weaknesses that people possess, but exponential growth will not come from minor increases of people’s weaknesses. Don’t forget, our aim here is to achieve large, decisive, exponential growth, not small improvements.  So if people aren’t playing to their strengths what are they doing? They are trying to “fix” their weaknesses. A weakness is something that depletes you that you hate to do, that you avoid at all costs.  Spending the majority of your time doing these tasks means your performance is most likely to be negatively affected. All the opposites of what we have talked about with strengths are more likely to occur.

As we all know, a great way to get ahead of your competition is by reducing costs and increasing productivity.  Encouraging people to play to their strengths instead of labouring over their weaknesses is certainly a way to achieve these goals.  It has many far-reaching positive effects and can be used to the advantage of all.

Project Management Success with the Top 7 Best Practices

Managing a project can be daunting. Whether planning your wedding, developing a new website or building your dream house by the sea, you need to employ project management techniques to help you succeed. I’ll summarise the top 7 best practices at the heart of good project management which can help you to achieve project success.

Define the scope and objectives

Firstly, understand the project objectives. Suppose your boss asks you to organise a blood donor campaign, is the objective to get as much blood donated as possible? Or, is it to raise the local company profile? Deciding the real objectives will help you plan the project.Scope defines the boundary of the project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to the blood bank within scope? Or, should staff make their own way there? Deciding what’s in or out of scope will determine the amount of work which needs performing.

Understand who the stakeholders are, what they expect to be delivered and enlist their support. Once you’ve defined the scope and objectives, get the stakeholders to review and agree to them.

Define the deliverables

You must define what will be delivered by the project. If your project is an advertising campaign for a new chocolate bar, then one deliverable might be the artwork for an advertisement. So, decide what tangible things will be delivered and document them in enough detail to enable someone else to produce them correctly and effectively.Key stakeholders must review the definition of deliverables and must agree they accurately reflect what must be delivered.

Project planning

Planning requires that the project manager decides which people, resources and budget are required to complete the project.You must define what activities are required to produce the deliverables using techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures. You must estimate the time and effort required for each activity, dependencies between activities and decide a realistic schedule to complete them. Involve the project team in estimating how long activities will take. Set milestones which indicate critical dates during the project. Write this into the project plan. Get the key stakeholders to review and agree to the plan.

Communication

Project plans are useless unless they’ve been communicated effectively to the project team. Every team member needs to know their responsibilities. I once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by huge paper schedules. The problem was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he hadn’t shared the plan with them. The project hit all kinds of problems with people doing activities which they deemed important rather than doing the activities assigned by the project manager.

Tracking and reporting project progress

Once your project is underway you must monitor and compare the actual progress with the planned progress. You will need progress reports from project team members. You should record variations between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You should report variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations get too large.You can adjust the plan in many ways to get the project back on track but you will always end up juggling cost, scope and schedule. If the project manager changes one of these, then one or both of the other elements will inevitably need changing. It is juggling these three elements – known as the project triangle – that typically causes a project manager the most headaches!

Change management

Stakeholders often change their mind about what must be delivered. Sometimes the business environment changes after the project starts, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may no longer be valid. This often means the scope or deliverables of the project need changing. If a project manager accepted all changes into the project, the project would inevitably go over budget, be late and might never be completed.By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of project success because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and can plan when and how the changes are made. Not managing changes effectively is often a reason why projects fail.

Risk management

Risks are events which can adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. I’ve worked on projects where risks have included: staff lacking the technical skills to perform the work, hardware not being delivered on time, the control room at risk of flooding and many others. Risks will vary for each project but the main risks to a project must be identified as soon as possible. Plans must be made to avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to mitigate the risk to lessen its impact if it occurs. This is known as risk management.You don’t manage all risks because there could be too many and not all risks have the same impact. So, identify all risks, estimate the likelihood of each risk occurring (1 = not likely, 2 = maybe likely, 3 = very likely). Estimate its impact on the project (1 – low, 2 – medium, 3 – high), then multiply the two numbers together to give the risk factor. High risk factors indicate the severest risks. Manage the ten with the highest risk factors. Constantly review risks and lookout for new ones since they have a habit of occurring at any moment.

Not managing risks effectively is a common reason why projects fail.

Need of time management training.

So little time so much to do, a line that sounds all too familiar for almost everyone whether you are an employee or a housewife. It gives you the feeling to add more hours in the day just so you can accomplish everything. Can time really be managed when you can’t control its movement? Time management training is more of being able to manage the time that you actually have; the ability to make the most out of your time or your day. It is not just about having a day-to-day plan, time management training lets you learn the ability to prioritize things and be able to maximize time to improve productivity whether at work or at home. 

If you are still wondering what you need time management training for, below are the things considered to be a waste of your precious time. 
� No set daily plan 
� Poor setting of priorities 
� Phone calls 
� Doing things simultaneously. It may seem like the best thing to do but you might just end up not being able to finish anything by attempting to do things all at the same time. 
� Poor task delegation. There are some tasks that can be given to other people. Give yourself a break and give other people a chance to settle things. 
� Cluttered desk. Having a disorganized desk is already stressful especially when you can’t find what you are looking for. Clean desk saves you a lot of time and visual stress. 
� Procrastination. You know you lack time, don’t waste it by doing nothing. 

Once you undergo time management training, you will have a totally different outlook on how you work and on how you spend your day. Time management training will give you basic steps on how to combat time stealers. 
� Clear your desk. Clear your mind Philosophy. 
� Have a daily plan and incorporate your daily priorities and objectives. 
� Stick to deadlines so you won’t have to adjust everything. 
� No procrastination 
� Do not entertain non-important calls. If you must, make phone calls very brief. 
� Delegate tasks 
� Perform the most difficult job when you are at your best. 
� Learn how to say no to tasks that you think will accumulate too much of your time. 
� Give yourself a time to take a breather especially when you feel you are not functioning well enough to perform. You might just ruin your work more. By taking breaks, you also avoid stress to come over you. Stress is not a time-killer but a mind-killer.