One thing I really appreciated and enjoyed about the project management and enterprise integration courses is that all the new concepts and technical information being introduced in the class, including paradigms and paradigm shift. I still remember the video we watched in the class and the story about how Swiss “failed to patent or market the quartz watch, even though they invented it, because they couldn't shift paradigms”. That’s my first impression about paradigms. For me, paradigm seems all about changes and how you react to the changes.
After some research, I found out paradigms can be described as a set of assumption, beliefs, philosophies, and the way of doing things. They are habits and processes. We all have our own paradigms, but we may not notice them until they changes. When the “traditional way of thinking” switches to “new way of thinking”, paradigm shift happened. Paradigm shift is a different view of same things and it is a change in perspective. It could be happened everyday because of new technology, new knowledge, new people, and new circumstances. For example, when we first started the Project Management course, how many of us really think we could have a career in Project Management, it seems so difficult and so irrelevant to an accountant; but in two months, by doing a case study, we experienced a project management through setting up project scope, developing project schedule, preparing estimated budget, and assigning task etc. We learned not only the technical skill, but also the soft skill through the communication and cooperation while working with the team members. Now after two months, I believe many of us including myself are not so afraid of project management and would be more confident when we are assigned a project at work.
I believe there is more personal paradigm shifts happened comparing one year ago. I just realized this today after an interview with Robert Half. The interview was in the morning, a lady and a gentleman talked to me about my experiences, education, and expectation for the next job and plan for the future. The conversation was enjoyable and finally the gentleman said: “you look very professional, and your communication skill is very good, we should be able to send you out very soon.” I was very happy, not just because what he said, the real reason is I am more confident with myself and my language, I cannot wait to meet my new employer and new colleagues, and cannot wait to start my new journey in Vancouver. I am very sure I am not the one just want to enjoy my quite and peaceful life without thinking too much about CGA. All those new concepts and new technology information we learned makes me feel young and active, makes me excited about the changes in the world; and makes me want to make some difference, and want to be part of it again…
“Paradigm shift", http://skepdic.com/paradigm.html
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
BP1 - XBRL
XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It is a common, global language to label data used worldwide in business reporting. XBRL was developed by XBRL.org, an international consortium of companies and organisations. Their member includes many large accounting firms and institutions, such as AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants), IASB (International Accounting Standards Board), and the CICA (Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants).
I believe there are three reasons that company should use XBRL:
First, XBRL meets the need to exchange accounting information with a digital standard. As an investment consulting company, we have to collect data from financial statements prepared in various formats such as xls, pdf, html, doc etc. With XBRL tag, computer software can easily collect, process and distribute all the financial information, and achieve more efficient internal processes.
Second, XBRL offers cost saving and improves accuracy of financial information. By reducing the time to re-enter the information collected and limiting the error of data entry, company can provide accurate and reliable business information.
Third, XBRL allows simplified data selection and comparison. Since gathering data is more easy and efficient, we can spend more time comparing and analyzing information, and provide more valuable and timely information to our clients.
As a standardized language, XBRL is mainly used for collecting, processing and distributing financial and business information between business and on Internet. By adding unique identifying tags to each financial data, showing the relation between the data, computer software can easily search, select, analyze, and publish the data.
There are two methods to implement XBRL depending on the complication of business report and financial information: use taxonomy created by another entity, or develop and publish your own taxonomies. The latter could involve the following steps from my research at http://www.xbrl.org/CaseStudies/:
- Identify the goal of implementation of XBRL;
- Set up a working group including accountant, financial analyzer, computer specialists with experience in system analysis, and software vendor;
- Join XBRL jurisdiction Canada for more support;
- Study the business process and flow of information, determine what information needs to collect and exchange, how it should be standardized, and develop an XBRL taxonomy to categorize data file;
- Present a draft taxonomy to XBRL jurisdiction for review or comments and any improvement;
- Test, modify and publish;
- Maintenance and upgrade;
In order to stay up to date on XBRL standards, accountant can join in the local XBRL international membership; take part in training or information session hold by jurisdictions and member organisations; and check on latest news on XBRL at http://www.xbrl.org/LatestNews/.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
BP1 - Week 2 - Using Performance Measures
Traditionally, business performance is measured only by financial results, such as return on investment (ROI) or earnings per share (EPS). These measurements however have many drawbacks. For example, your vice-president has informed you that a promotion is possible if revenue is increased by 10%. In order to be promoted, you may extend your working hours, improve customer service or learn new skills. On the other hand, you may use cheaper raw material, cut the outlay of development and research for new product, or lay off employees, any tactic though will likely have negative consequences for the business in the long run. This situation was changed by a new management system – balanced scorecard.
Balanced scorecard is a multi-dimensional measurement tool for organizational performance. It was developed in the early 1990’s by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton. It was called “balanced” because it balances the financial perspective with the learning and growth perspective, the business process perspective and the customer perspective. The steps to applying balanced scorecard is from top to bottom: the leaders set up the strategy while senior- level management identifies scorecard measures for the organization and this flows down to departments and individual employees.
The major benefit of implementing a balanced scorecard is that the business objective is shared through the entire organization from top management to individual employees. Meanwhile, by setting up a target and rewarding the individual(s) who meet the target, this motivates employees to make full use of their energies, abilities and specific knowledge toward achieving objectives. I think this is the most powerful part about balanced scorecard. It can help management accomplish business goals through managing people. After all, people are most important element. Regardless of how powerful the software and equipment are, they are useless without poeple. For expample, in a large manufacture company, there are maybe over 50 or 100 employees working for one department, I wonder how many of them know whether their supervisors are satisfied with their performance, how many of them really think their work matter to the company’s objective, and how many of them receive the guidance from their manager on their personal career development. So the implementation of balanced scorecard will push management communicate timely and effectively with employees, change employees' attitude, improve their performance, and promote good practices. Since the measurements affect employees’ performance and behaviour, management has to be careful when they set up the criteria.
There are other business performance measurement tools including activity based costing (ABC) and Six Sigma. ABC evaluates costs based on business products or services. For example, it allocates manufacture overhead into accounts such as “machine set up”, “running machines”, “inspection” based on the process activities, while traditional cost accounting allocates overhead to cost objects based on product volume. ABC provides more accurate cost management by making those indirect expenses direct. ABC's cost objects are activities and the resources consumed by those activities. The company with high overhead and diverse products will benefit most from ABC. Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving towards six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. (From “what is six sigma”, http://www.isixsigma.com/sixsigma/six_sigma.asp) The relation between those measurements is that the balanced scorecard concept builds on the idea of ABC while Six Sigma is the product of the balanced scorecard. (From “An Introduction to Balanced Scorecard”, http://www.cio.com/article/123750/ABC_An_Introduction_to_Balanced_Scorecard)
Balanced scorecard is a multi-dimensional measurement tool for organizational performance. It was developed in the early 1990’s by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton. It was called “balanced” because it balances the financial perspective with the learning and growth perspective, the business process perspective and the customer perspective. The steps to applying balanced scorecard is from top to bottom: the leaders set up the strategy while senior- level management identifies scorecard measures for the organization and this flows down to departments and individual employees.
The major benefit of implementing a balanced scorecard is that the business objective is shared through the entire organization from top management to individual employees. Meanwhile, by setting up a target and rewarding the individual(s) who meet the target, this motivates employees to make full use of their energies, abilities and specific knowledge toward achieving objectives. I think this is the most powerful part about balanced scorecard. It can help management accomplish business goals through managing people. After all, people are most important element. Regardless of how powerful the software and equipment are, they are useless without poeple. For expample, in a large manufacture company, there are maybe over 50 or 100 employees working for one department, I wonder how many of them know whether their supervisors are satisfied with their performance, how many of them really think their work matter to the company’s objective, and how many of them receive the guidance from their manager on their personal career development. So the implementation of balanced scorecard will push management communicate timely and effectively with employees, change employees' attitude, improve their performance, and promote good practices. Since the measurements affect employees’ performance and behaviour, management has to be careful when they set up the criteria.
There are other business performance measurement tools including activity based costing (ABC) and Six Sigma. ABC evaluates costs based on business products or services. For example, it allocates manufacture overhead into accounts such as “machine set up”, “running machines”, “inspection” based on the process activities, while traditional cost accounting allocates overhead to cost objects based on product volume. ABC provides more accurate cost management by making those indirect expenses direct. ABC's cost objects are activities and the resources consumed by those activities. The company with high overhead and diverse products will benefit most from ABC. Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving towards six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. (From “what is six sigma”, http://www.isixsigma.com/sixsigma/six_sigma.asp) The relation between those measurements is that the balanced scorecard concept builds on the idea of ABC while Six Sigma is the product of the balanced scorecard. (From “An Introduction to Balanced Scorecard”, http://www.cio.com/article/123750/ABC_An_Introduction_to_Balanced_Scorecard)
Saturday, September 15, 2007
PM1 - Week 2 - The Project Management Office
As the number of projects increase within a business or organization, project management offices (PMO) are set up to help improve the project performance. PMO is a department that gathers technical and management personnel to standardize the process of project management, especially the methodologies for repeatable processes in order to deliver projects on time and within budget. However, a PMO doesn’t manage individual projects directly. Instead, it acts more like a resource centre that keeps all of the essential elements including documentation, guidance, template and metrics for execution of a project and its management across the whole organization. PMO can also be called a project office, program office, program management office or project control centre. “Setting up a project office”, http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_setup_po.php, Regardless of its name, here are some basic functions a PMO provides:
· Administrative and operational support to projects
· Maintenance of project management standards
· Project consulting and mentoring
· Project management training across the organization
· Provide project managers and project staff
· Portfolio management including capacity planning and risk analysis
“Project Management Office” Sept. 29, 07 http://www.aisc.com/Service/2
We know a PMO helps deliver projects more efficiently but what types of industries or organizations can benefit most from a PMO? I believe those large engineers, construction companies, IT and manufacturing companies, financial and investment companies and governments can benefit most, mostly for two reasons. First, those organizations could carry on multiple projects constantly every year and the benefit received will be bigger than the initial cost for setting up a PMO. As the author of “The Value of PMO” said, “A PMO reflects an overhead investment.” If the organization does not have many projects, to continue with a PMO would be an unnecessary fixed cost. Second, the similarity exists in many different projects at different locations for all those industries and governments. Since a PMO tries to standardize methodologies of repeatable processes, it can ensure all the managers who deal with different projects have the same core skills, standard processes and templates. In the long run, it can save organizations and government money by reducing the time and cost for planning; execution and control; providing better resource management; increasing project successes and; supporting those projects that offer the biggest payback.
After identifying the industries that can benefit most from PMO, you may ask how to measure the success of the implementation of PMO. What performance metric organization can be set up to evaluate this return on investment? The very straightforward one could be the measurement of cost saving, such as what we did in the Management Accounting course: find out the difference by comparing the two alternatives, adding PMO or leaving it out. But this seems too difficult since a PMO doesn't deal with an individual project and it's hard to allocate the cost to a different project. The web article I read “Office Discipline: Why you need a project management office” http://www.cio.com/article/29887/Why_You_Need_a_Project_Management_Office_PMO_/2 provides one quantitative and one qualitative metric: project success rate and customer satisfaction rate. The only problem with these measurements is that it may take a long time to find out this amount since many projects' life cycles may be longer than one year.
If you would like to know more about PMO, check out this website:
Understanding the Project Management Office
http://www.cio.com/article/12263/Understanding_the_Project_Management_Office/5
Friday, September 14, 2007
BP1 - Week 1 - System Integration
Systems integration (SI), a huge and interesting topic! Again, let’s start with the definition. From my understanding, SI is a process to connect different systems used by different departments or functions, making them work together in unity. The purpose of SI is to provide the precise information to the right people in the shortest time thereby permitting the business to react faster to changes within the global environment and remain competitive.
There are two approaches to process SI. First, integrate existing disparate systems. Second, abandon the old systems and implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or enterprise system (ES). To choose the right approach really depends on the financial situation and the complication of the business process. For small businesses to integrate an existing system should be a cost-effective way. But for a larger company the problem with integration of disparate systems is that many businesses have spent millions of dollars to improve their current systems but end up with some unsolvable technical problems. To re-engineer an existing system could be more challenging than to install a new one. So I believe ERP is a better solution for mid-size and large companies, especially with the improved flexibility of ERP software. Instead of buying the whole package companies need only to install one or two modules (such as finance or HR) while leaving the others for later.
By undertaking ERP, businesses can benefit from different ways such as integrating customer order information and financial information; reducing inventory; speeding up business processes, etc. However, some costs maybe under estimated while business expects the benefit from ERP, such as training, integration and testing, customization, and data conversion. Also, as ERP focuses on the improvement of the internal business process, employees may have to understand the new set of process, change their old methods of doing their work in order to adapt in with a newly-installed ERP system. Failure to do so may result in a waste of this huge technological investment.
ABC: An Introduction to ERP
http://www.cio.com/article/40323/ABC_An_Introduction_to_ERP/8
There are two approaches to process SI. First, integrate existing disparate systems. Second, abandon the old systems and implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or enterprise system (ES). To choose the right approach really depends on the financial situation and the complication of the business process. For small businesses to integrate an existing system should be a cost-effective way. But for a larger company the problem with integration of disparate systems is that many businesses have spent millions of dollars to improve their current systems but end up with some unsolvable technical problems. To re-engineer an existing system could be more challenging than to install a new one. So I believe ERP is a better solution for mid-size and large companies, especially with the improved flexibility of ERP software. Instead of buying the whole package companies need only to install one or two modules (such as finance or HR) while leaving the others for later.
By undertaking ERP, businesses can benefit from different ways such as integrating customer order information and financial information; reducing inventory; speeding up business processes, etc. However, some costs maybe under estimated while business expects the benefit from ERP, such as training, integration and testing, customization, and data conversion. Also, as ERP focuses on the improvement of the internal business process, employees may have to understand the new set of process, change their old methods of doing their work in order to adapt in with a newly-installed ERP system. Failure to do so may result in a waste of this huge technological investment.
ABC: An Introduction to ERP
http://www.cio.com/article/40323/ABC_An_Introduction_to_ERP/8
Monday, September 10, 2007
PM1 - Week 1 - Do I want a career in Project Management?
Do I want a career in Project Management? Well, probably not, at least not right now. I still feel more comfortable dealing with numbers. Besides, I barely know much about it. So far as I know, project management (PM) is the process to manage a series of project activities by applying your knowledge, skill, techniques and tools in order to accomplish the project targets. But is this definition a little vague? What are those skills and bases of knowledge? What techniques and tools are normally used? Also, having a career in PM, what are the job duties and responsibilities? Are any specific credentials or education required? How are the job opportunities? With all these questions, I searched on http://www.monster.ca/
First of all, I searched under the job title of "project manager" in BC. As a result, there are 37 job postings between July 27 to September 10, 2007. Twenty-seven of them are available in the Vancouver and Lower Mainland area, including three junior positions, 19 intermediate and five senior positions. From the listings, businesses and organizations hire project managers from all different industries and fields. Also job titles differ such as "project coordinator", "IT manager", "product leader", "business analysis manager" and "project manager." Actually, there can be seven types of position for PM based on the duties and responsibilities: project coordinator; project scheduler; assistant project manager; project manager; senior project manager; program manager and; portfolio manager. (From Kathy Schwalbe, "Information Technology Project MGMT", fourth edition.)
In addition, I took a closer look at those jobs. I went through all the postings from junior to senior positions and compared them based on some basic criteria.
Education and experience
As a project manager, besides the professional education and experience related to specific industry, it's required candidates also have the management background and experience. The education requirement varies but basically the more executive a position in a bigger company, the more education and experience are required. At the other end, junior positions often ask for only a college diploma with no experience in management while intermediate and senior position applicants are required to have a Bachelors Degree with 3-10 years experience respectively. A couple of companies require their candidates to have the experience in working with large projects, such as over $30M. One thing that surprised me is that only one employer - TELUS -requires formal PM training while most employers didn't even mention it prefering experience in project management as a higher priority.
Job duties and responsibilities
The work for a project assistant involves project liaison and the preparation of reports, schedules, budgets and related documents. The intermediate position of project manager is the most challenging one as it requires a lot of detailed work from initiation, planning, execution and control to its completion. Project managers need to deal with not only scope, time, resource, cost and quality of the project but also the general management process including human resources, communication with project team member, vendors and project stakeholders and reporting. For senior project managers, the key responsibilities are: plan and control the project; ensure its success; coaching, mentoring and building an effective team; communicate and negotiate with internal project teams and; to build a strong relationships and loyalty with customers.
Skills
Almost all of the employers require strong written and verbal communication skills from their applicants. Moreover, they have to have demonstrated expertise in their professional areas by showing their skills as team leaders, problem solvers and decision makers. Overall, effective communication and well-developed social and inter-personal skills are key factors to become a successful project manager.
The job list:
Project Assistant
Project Coordinator
Project Manager
Senior Project Manager
Business Analysis Managers
Project Engineer
Project Support Specialist
First of all, I searched under the job title of "project manager" in BC. As a result, there are 37 job postings between July 27 to September 10, 2007. Twenty-seven of them are available in the Vancouver and Lower Mainland area, including three junior positions, 19 intermediate and five senior positions. From the listings, businesses and organizations hire project managers from all different industries and fields. Also job titles differ such as "project coordinator", "IT manager", "product leader", "business analysis manager" and "project manager." Actually, there can be seven types of position for PM based on the duties and responsibilities: project coordinator; project scheduler; assistant project manager; project manager; senior project manager; program manager and; portfolio manager. (From Kathy Schwalbe, "Information Technology Project MGMT", fourth edition.)
In addition, I took a closer look at those jobs. I went through all the postings from junior to senior positions and compared them based on some basic criteria.
Education and experience
As a project manager, besides the professional education and experience related to specific industry, it's required candidates also have the management background and experience. The education requirement varies but basically the more executive a position in a bigger company, the more education and experience are required. At the other end, junior positions often ask for only a college diploma with no experience in management while intermediate and senior position applicants are required to have a Bachelors Degree with 3-10 years experience respectively. A couple of companies require their candidates to have the experience in working with large projects, such as over $30M. One thing that surprised me is that only one employer - TELUS -requires formal PM training while most employers didn't even mention it prefering experience in project management as a higher priority.
Job duties and responsibilities
The work for a project assistant involves project liaison and the preparation of reports, schedules, budgets and related documents. The intermediate position of project manager is the most challenging one as it requires a lot of detailed work from initiation, planning, execution and control to its completion. Project managers need to deal with not only scope, time, resource, cost and quality of the project but also the general management process including human resources, communication with project team member, vendors and project stakeholders and reporting. For senior project managers, the key responsibilities are: plan and control the project; ensure its success; coaching, mentoring and building an effective team; communicate and negotiate with internal project teams and; to build a strong relationships and loyalty with customers.
Skills
Almost all of the employers require strong written and verbal communication skills from their applicants. Moreover, they have to have demonstrated expertise in their professional areas by showing their skills as team leaders, problem solvers and decision makers. Overall, effective communication and well-developed social and inter-personal skills are key factors to become a successful project manager.
The job list:
Project Assistant
Project Coordinator
Project Manager
Senior Project Manager
Business Analysis Managers
Project Engineer
Project Support Specialist
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