In my last blog, I have discussed about how you can come up with the practical definition of your successful life, and how you can break it down in achievable goals. In this blog, I will provide you with some pointers through which you can achieve those goals to become successful in life.
Ask for advice: My Dad always told me…….”If you want to become successful in life, then you need to take help from 2 different kind of people. ONE: Those who are successful according to you. SECOND: Those who followed the same path as you might want to pursue, but who are not as successful as others”. This approach will not only help you visualize your successful life, but also give you an idea on how your future would look like, if you couldn’t achieve all of your goals. One might ask…….where would I find those kind of people? The answer to that question is very simple. Internet. I would personally prefer to ask someone who I know, but you can’t always have people around you, who share similar career goals as you, and who are successful in that. Thus, you can become a member of few online forums, which are related to your interests, and then cultivate your relationships with those members. Once those relationships are established, you can then ask them for their advice. Chances are….they might be able to even help you with your goals.
Give your best to everything you do: I know, this seems to be very obvious, but hardly anyone follows this rule. For example: Let’s say……..you are stuck in a job that won’t lead you towards your ideal success, and you want to get out of that job as soon as possible. At that time, most of the people (8 out of 10) would focus their energy in looking for a better job, and won’t provide their complete attention to their existing job. While this approach might be able to get you a new job that you love, but in the process of finding this job, you might ruin your existing relationships with your current coworkers, and maybe establish a stereotype of being a slacker. Thus, I would recommend all of you to give your best to everything you do. You never know…..maybe your existing Manager might recommend you for the ideal job that you have always dreamed of.
I hope these tips will help to achieve your ideal life. Do you have any other ideas through which you can have a successful and filling life?
Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi.
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Showing posts with label Action Plan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Action Plan. Show all posts
Monday, July 16, 2012
Practical tips on how to become successful in life (Part 2)
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Practical tips on how to become successful in life (Part 1)
Few days back, I was advising one of my friend on how to expand his start-up. During that conversation, I realized that some of my advices are very common for everyone to follow. Whether you are a fresh graduate or an experienced professional or a proud new business owner, you should always follow some simple tips to become successful in life. With this blog post, I am going to share those tips with you.
Define success: Every person will have their own dreams, and hence their own definition of success. An engineer wouldn’t consider an artist a successful person, and vice versa. Thus, before you start hunting for an ideal successful life, you might want to self-analyze yourself and define your specific success criteria. And while you are in that process, make sure that you consider your happiness as a part of this process. After all, no one wants to be successful and not happy. Right? Let’s say………your definition of success is to make couple of million dollars in few years. To achieve that………you might need to work 7 days a week with existing salary that you earn. In this case, you might want to think if you are willing to sacrifice that time away from your family or not, and then adjust your definition of success accordingly.
Establish achievable goals: Once you have done the hard part of defining your success criteria, now it’s time to establish some goals. Make sure that those goals are achievable, otherwise you will be discouraged when you realize that you can never achieve your goals. Let’s say……..your success criteria is to become a highly paid artist. In that case, you want to establish few goals like…….I will draw at least 2-3 paintings a month, or I will display my art in 5-6 art exhibition a year. Ideally, these goals should be smaller milestones towards your successful life. So, make sure to keep a checkpoint on these goals. I would advise you to revisit these goals every 3 months.
In my next blog post, I will provide you with few ideas through which you can achieve your goals to become successful. Until then, if you have any other ideas or comments about becoming successful in life, then please feel free to share it here on my blog.
Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi.
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Monday, July 2, 2012
How to clearly define the scope of your project?
Have you ever wondered about …… What exactly does the ‘scope of a project’ mean? …..I have…. I kept on hearing this term from the time when I started my career. Though I have learned its meaning over the years; people around me still describe the term vaguely. Thus, I am going to provide you with some simple tips, which can help you to clearly define the scope for your project.
The deliverables: Let’s say, you are one of those project managers whose projects are very complex, and you don’t know where exactly to start for defining the scope of your project. If you are not sure about how to move forward with this process then you should at least try to define the deliverables of the project. Don’t stress yourself too much. Ask your customers to provide you with tangible (I mean tangible) deliverables that they would like to see at the end of the project. Once, you figure out the final deliverables of the project, you can then go ahead and try to define the interim project deliverables. These defined deliverables will tremendously help you to better understand the project.
Project boundaries: Once you got some handle on how the project should look like through its deliverables, you should now define how it shouldn’t be looking. For example: Chris is going to look for a software third-party provider within the US. In this case, third-party software providers from China are out of scope. If Chris was considering the needs of the entire global company, this would not have been a good boundary statement since he could not have stated a good out-of-scope statement.
Project Features: Once you have described the deliverables and the boundaries, you have completed high-level scope. Now, it’s time to describe the physical characteristics of the deliverables, called features. If you were building a software framework, for instance, most of the functionalities would count as features. These might include the number of GUIs (graphical user interface), number of APIs (application interface), etc. So, follow the top-down approach and start defining project’s features from its well defined deliverables.
Project Functions: Once you finished describing project’s features, now you need to describe how people interact with a deliverable and how a deliverable interacts with other deliverables. For example, if you need to change invoicing and billing transactions, most of the requirements could end up being process oriented. This would include how billing transactions move from orders to invoicing to accounts receivable. Basically you are defining the information flow in this phase. Thus, make sure to involve all the stakeholders, who will be affected by this information.
I hope these simple tips will help you to better define the scope of your project. Let me know, if you have any other ideas through which you can make this process simpler. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi.
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Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Conduct result-oriented meetings with your Virtual Team
I hate those video conferences, where people around the world meet in a virtual setting, and at the end of the meeting, the only thing that they can decide is the date for the next meeting. I am sure I am not the only one who has been through these kinds of meetings. Am I right?
In my current position, I manage a diverse team of people from 3 different locations. And I have developed few techniques to conduct effective meetings, which I would like to share with you here.
Know your audience beforehand: The first step is to clearly define the audience that will be attending this meeting. If you are conducting the meeting for the first time, and if you don’t know the background of anyone attending the meeting, then ask around. Try to contact each individual through phone or e-mail to get a better idea of their goals and expectations.
Identify the meeting need: Ideally the meeting originator need to develop an agenda. But I have seen that it doesn’t happen often. Thus, if you don’t know the agenda then your best bet is to as the meeting organizer about the problem that he/she is trying to resolve through this meeting. This will give you an opportunity to prepare yourself before the meeting. And your preparation can be helpful in prioritizing the learning objectives for the next set of meetings.
Create an action plan: Whether it’s running a government or running a company, team works better when there is a shared and visible accountability. I would always suggest you to create an action plan in the meeting, instead of creating it afterwards. By doing this, you are making sure that an action plan is in place before you leave and that action plan is visible to everyone in the team. Thus, there won’t be any situations of miscommunication of the information.
Create support materials: The next to last step of the effective meeting is to determine the materials you will need to supplement the meeting’s outcome so that the learning objectives are achieved. I would recommend following checklist for supporting materials:
Continuously monitor progress: The final step is to continually monitor the progress of the meeting and the business need for the meeting. One should make changes based on the successes, or weaknesses, of the meeting. I would recommend creating a shared action plan document, which is visible to the entire team. If you have this set-up, you only need to discuss the status of each individual task during the meeting. And that’s all.
I hope these tips help you in better conducting/attending a virtual team meeting. If you know any other ways to make a virtual team meeting more interesting then feel free to share it with me. I am always looking for people’s feedback to improve my knowledge. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi
In my current position, I manage a diverse team of people from 3 different locations. And I have developed few techniques to conduct effective meetings, which I would like to share with you here.
Know your audience beforehand: The first step is to clearly define the audience that will be attending this meeting. If you are conducting the meeting for the first time, and if you don’t know the background of anyone attending the meeting, then ask around. Try to contact each individual through phone or e-mail to get a better idea of their goals and expectations.
Identify the meeting need: Ideally the meeting originator need to develop an agenda. But I have seen that it doesn’t happen often. Thus, if you don’t know the agenda then your best bet is to as the meeting organizer about the problem that he/she is trying to resolve through this meeting. This will give you an opportunity to prepare yourself before the meeting. And your preparation can be helpful in prioritizing the learning objectives for the next set of meetings.
Create an action plan: Whether it’s running a government or running a company, team works better when there is a shared and visible accountability. I would always suggest you to create an action plan in the meeting, instead of creating it afterwards. By doing this, you are making sure that an action plan is in place before you leave and that action plan is visible to everyone in the team. Thus, there won’t be any situations of miscommunication of the information.
Create support materials: The next to last step of the effective meeting is to determine the materials you will need to supplement the meeting’s outcome so that the learning objectives are achieved. I would recommend following checklist for supporting materials:
- Create the facilitator notes.
- Create an action plan with task items, individual’s responsibilities, and deadlines.
- List of people attending the meeting so that you can send these documents to them.
Continuously monitor progress: The final step is to continually monitor the progress of the meeting and the business need for the meeting. One should make changes based on the successes, or weaknesses, of the meeting. I would recommend creating a shared action plan document, which is visible to the entire team. If you have this set-up, you only need to discuss the status of each individual task during the meeting. And that’s all.
I hope these tips help you in better conducting/attending a virtual team meeting. If you know any other ways to make a virtual team meeting more interesting then feel free to share it with me. I am always looking for people’s feedback to improve my knowledge. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi
Sunday, January 23, 2011
How to create a perfect Action Plan
Thanks to LinkedIn, this weekend I met my old friend from high school. He is now a Manager at one of the biggest MNCs (Multi National Companies) in India. While we were talking on skype, I came to know that he is also facing similar work challenges as other Managers.
Almost all the Managers create Action Plans to make sure that a particular amount of work gets done. But most of the times, they forget to follow up on the assignments. I have seen many managers, who work on problem-and-solution kind of approach. They will have many action plans for other items, but they don't get any priorities until failure to execute those plans disrupts the normal operation of the business. In that case, they forget about the old action plan and work on resolving the current issue. This keeps on happening again and again. So, what can you do to ensure that Action Plan is taken seriously?
I can't tell you the perfect answer for this question, but I have developed few strategies throughout my experience, which helps me in ensuring that my Action Plans are implemented properly.
- Request your managers to kick off biweekly meeting, stressing the import-
ance of the Action Plan. This meeting will help you in getting all mangers on one page, and ensuring the importance of the Action Plans.
- Invite different team leads in these meetings to share their stories about some of the key competencies and why they are critical to the success of the organization.
- Don't forget to send a copy of the Action Plans after every meeting. This action plan should contain: action item, person responsible to finish that task, probable end date for that task, etc.
- Ask the group members to set up a meeting with their supervisors to
go over their Action Plans as homework.
- Make sure that your supervisor or leader must attend this meeting on regular basis to stress the importance of these meetings.
- As homework, ask each participant to meet with each of his or her team members to informally listen to each worker’s career goals.
- And yeah! Don't forget to review the results in a follow-up session. Even if your goals have changed from the last meeting, you should still follow-up. This will give you the opportunity to at least document the to-date progress of that particular action item.
So, what do you think? Do you have any other ideas to create a perfect and workable Action Plan? If you do, then please feel free to share your opinion with me. I would love to hear from you. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi
Almost all the Managers create Action Plans to make sure that a particular amount of work gets done. But most of the times, they forget to follow up on the assignments. I have seen many managers, who work on problem-and-solution kind of approach. They will have many action plans for other items, but they don't get any priorities until failure to execute those plans disrupts the normal operation of the business. In that case, they forget about the old action plan and work on resolving the current issue. This keeps on happening again and again. So, what can you do to ensure that Action Plan is taken seriously?
I can't tell you the perfect answer for this question, but I have developed few strategies throughout my experience, which helps me in ensuring that my Action Plans are implemented properly.
- Request your managers to kick off biweekly meeting, stressing the import-
ance of the Action Plan. This meeting will help you in getting all mangers on one page, and ensuring the importance of the Action Plans.
- Invite different team leads in these meetings to share their stories about some of the key competencies and why they are critical to the success of the organization.
- Don't forget to send a copy of the Action Plans after every meeting. This action plan should contain: action item, person responsible to finish that task, probable end date for that task, etc.
- Ask the group members to set up a meeting with their supervisors to
go over their Action Plans as homework.
- Make sure that your supervisor or leader must attend this meeting on regular basis to stress the importance of these meetings.
- As homework, ask each participant to meet with each of his or her team members to informally listen to each worker’s career goals.
- And yeah! Don't forget to review the results in a follow-up session. Even if your goals have changed from the last meeting, you should still follow-up. This will give you the opportunity to at least document the to-date progress of that particular action item.
So, what do you think? Do you have any other ideas to create a perfect and workable Action Plan? If you do, then please feel free to share your opinion with me. I would love to hear from you. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi
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