judgingthefuture

Companies these days must be able to execute projects efficiently to drive innovation, growth, and strategic initiatives. Skilled project managers are the lynchpins making this happen. 

What Is Project Management?

At its core, project management involves carefully planning, organizing, and controlling all activities needed to complete a specific goal or objective. It applies knowledge, tools, and techniques across initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing out time-bound projects.

Effective project management ensures work gets done within set constraints like scope, quality, schedule, budget and resources. It’s a systematic approach for transforming ideas and requirements into concrete results and achievements.

Why Is It So Important?

In simple terms, skilled project management makes businesses run better. It provides essential practices and oversight for accomplishing key organizational initiatives, whether launching new products, implementing systems, remodeling facilities or countless other projects.

With disciplined planning and execution, projects avoid going over budget, missing deadlines and failing to meet intended goals. Instead of chaos, there is clarity on responsibilities, schedules, risks, and progress tracking. 

Driving Success from Initiation to Closure

Project management establishes rigorous steps to guide efforts through each phase, from the initial concept and planning stages all the way through delivery, monitoring and closing activities. This defined approach covers critical elements like:

• Clearly defining scope, objectives, and requirements.
• Establishing budgets, timelines, and resource allocations.
• Identifying assumptions, risks, and potential obstacles.
• Assigning tasks, responsibilities, and accountability.
• Determining communication plans and checkpoints.
• Creating quality standards, success metrics and acceptance criteria.
• Managing issues, changes, stakeholders, and vendor relationships.
• Providing reporting on status, milestones, and key performance indicators.
• Conducting post-implementation reviews to identify lessons learned.

By following structured methods and established guidelines, projects can avoid chaos, redoing work, unexpected scope expansions, and costly delays.

Cross-Functional Visibility and Alignment

Another key benefit of formal project management is that it enforces coordination and transparency across all involved teams, departments, and stakeholders.

Creating integrated plans with defined goals means everyone stays in lockstep toward the shared objectives. Project managers serve as central facilitators, maintaining communication, aligning priorities, escalating risks, and holding teams accountable.

Leadership Skills Are Essential

However, project management involves much more than just ticking boxes on checklists. It requires well-rounded leadership abilities like:

• Strategic thinking and planning to establish clear visions and roadmaps.
• Effective communication to convey actionable goals and manage expectations.
• Negotiation and conflict resolution to overcome challenges and blockers.
• Strong organizational and time management capabilities.
• Analytics and decision-making skills to evaluate data and course correct.
• Stakeholder relationship management across management and customers.
• Technical knowledge of processes, systems, and industry domains.

These big-picture leadership competencies, combined with tactical tools and processes, enable successful orchestration of complex projects.

Certification Bolsters Expertise

For organizations aiming to maximize their project management proficiency, investing in formal training and certifications is a wise move. According to the good folk over at ProTrain, respected programs like PMP training certification establish standardized practices and validate advanced expertise.

These rigorous certification paths cover all areas of effective project lifecycle management, from initiating through planning, execution, monitoring/control, and closing. The comprehensive courses and exams assess both theoretical and practical understanding of the most current methods.

Organizations instituting project management certification programs reap benefits like lower project failure rates, faster timelines, cost savings and a more disciplined, consistent approach to execution across teams and departments.

Conclusion

With intense marketplace pressures and constant disruption, the ability to efficiently execute projects is a make-or-break capability. Developing elite-level project management skills is no longer an option for thriving businesses; it’s an absolute necessity.

Through robust methodologies, processes, tools, certifications and leadership capabilities, organizations can streamline execution while keeping strategies, initiatives, and projects laser-focused on driving optimal outcomes. Mastering project management truly is the pathway to achieving better business results.

Interviews. They’re a challenge. However experienced you are, however confident you feel, it can be a tricky task to interview a person in a way that gives you all the information you need and allows them to tell you everything they want you to know. You have a limited time to find out what you need about what makes a person tick, their working style and personality, their attitude, career experience, skills, and knowledge. And that’s actually a big ask. 

Everyone knows a great interview means you connect well with the candidate, but it isn’t about interrogation. The job is so much subtler than that. If you’ve ever had a disappointing interview yourself, you’ll understand how unsatisfying it is for a candidate. If you’ve ever hired someone who turns out to be totally unsuited to the role, even though their interview seemed excellent, you’ll understand the risks you face as a hiring expert.  

As someone with recruitment responsibilities, it’s your job to get the best out of the people you interview. Luckily there are some powerful yet simple ways to make sure you do a really good job. Here are three ways to conduct better interviews.     

First, be prepared. It’s great when an interview flows and you find yourselves getting along smoothly, but that can mean you forget to ask essential questions and gather vital insight. Prepare the questions you want to ask your candidates formally, so nothing goes astray. Figure out which questions are the most relevant to assessing and evaluating the person in the context of the vacancy.  Pin down the queries that’ll reveal their capabilities as a potential team members. And establish the questions that’ll give you a really good picture of their achievements, skills, and personality. 

Second, prepare for a conversation that doesn’t just involve you asking questions, but also includes giving answers to candidates. Being human is so much more powerful than just asking someone a list of dry questions. While it’s essential to be prepared, it’s also important to put people at ease. A conversational interview is a good way to do it, much better than sticking to a formal script. When genuine conversations develop, you get a much better overall sense of what makes the person tick – and what turns them off. You’ll understand the basics of them better, and you’ll get hints about the way they’ll fit into your team as human beings, not just a talented employee. Conversation-led interviewing also means you naturally listen better, so sense better and learn more. 

Third, boost your hiring performance with psychometric assessments. Testing people online at home is an excellent way to create a shortlist you can rely on without having to call everyone in for a formal interview. It helps you identify the most relevant candidates with the best skills and attitudes.  Because it’s very hard to ‘play the system’, the tests you choose – as long as they’re relevant to the role and to your business – will reveal all, preventing unscrupulous candidates from misleading you. It saves you trawling through tens or hundreds of CVs and covering letters. Any unconscious prejudices you might have been taken out of the equation. And all this saves you time, hassle, and money, as well as minimizes employee churn. Result!

For many years now, photography has been used to tell stories – an image that captures a part of a story, and in a longer version, a series of photos can tell a larger story. 

Story Planning Through Photography 

Pictorial or written, a good story does not simply appear out of thin air. They take a lot of time thinking and planning that involves different aspects that you must carefully consider. What is your story about? What memory are you sharing? What emotion are you trying to elicit in your viewers? And so many more. 

To ensure that you do not get stuck mid-story, it always helps to jot down your photo ideas before going ahead with the process. Consider making a list of shots you want to take; a place you want others to see, people that you need to include, angles where the shot will be taken from, etc. You can even leave some places in your picture story so that you have the option to take a picture of something unexpected and add it to your story. 

Focusing on the Start, Middle, And End 

Similar to how a novel works, when making use of pictures to tell a story, you need to focus on what picture to use to captivate your audience when the story begins. The middle part should be impactful so that viewers can stay focused on the story, and the last part should be impactful enough so that people can never forget your work. 

Some photo ideas for the starting can be environmental portraits of your story, such as a wide landscape shot or a place that is going to hold significance in the story. For the middle, you need to show the interactive parts of the story, so it needs to involve some kind of action such as people being involved in some activity, etc. As for the ending, you need to have an impactful ending shot that shows the apparent conclusion of the story, such as a sunset or the blowing out of candles or even people waving goodbye. 

Themes And Purpose 

One of the main things about any picture or a series of pictures that talk about a story should be centered around a particular theme that brings value to your theme. 

Many artists use their photography to talk and share stories about things that they strongly believe in. For example, consider the work done by one of the finest photographers of our time Sam Yari. 

As the founder of the Sam Yari Studios, Yari uses this place to develop, photograph, and exhibit work advocating the liberation of artists in strict regimes. After experiencing the impacts of the Spider Operation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where many models and photographers were arrested in 2016, Yari felt that he had to use his platform to share the stories of these creators who were treated unfairly for working on things they are passionate about. 

In 2021, Yari held a photography exhibition, Pravda, in Ukraine that focused on the imprisonment, restrictions, and killing of artists and photographers in extremist Islamic cultures. He shared their story through 15 photographs that were captured by him, showing pain and the strong character of all the victims in the fashion industry as one model, creating a phenomenal impact on the viewers that included prominent artists around the world.