Enhancements:

• Projects, contexts and statuses can be setup now - motivated by GTD.
• A nice dashboard that gives you idea about your remaining tasks.
• Better embedded documentation.
• A 5 week calendar to help you plan your due-dates

If you are interested, you can download the zip file (43KB) that has the Excel file. Extract the zip file. Open the Excel file and look at Dashboard sheet. The Excel has some sample data that you can use as a starter.

I did nod quite a bit while reading these. Now, next step is to make sure that I don't do these things whenever I manage stuff :-)

I believe the template I've come up with answers these questions. Here is the sample output file. Let us see how the sample looks and how different sections help me.

A great man, indeed. Humble, brilliant, visionary and inspirational.

One of my basic beliefs about project management is that it's first and foremost about promises -- making reasonable promises and keeping them. As I've written elsewhere, effective project management is about turning significantly uncertain efforts into reasonably certain outcomes. That's the outcome. That's the "why" associated with project management. But the question that I had in mind with this new spin was more related to "how?"

If project management is the answer, what's the question? My contention is that it's "What should I be working on?"

A must-read for all project managers. I like extend this a little bit.

A brief introduction on setting up preferences, the concept of views and tables, text styles and file organization recommendations follow.

Most of the definitions are based on how I understand it, while I use MSP. Again, if you are trying to get PMP certification or needs to gain solid theoretical knowledge of Project Management terms, this is not the place to get that information.

Your feedback on the idea is greatly appreciated.

This means that 20% of each block is reserved for future updates: When the block gets filled(used) to 80%, the block is no longer available for more inserts. As records get deleted from the block, the used space in the block decreases. When the used space gets below PCTUSED, the block becomes available for new insert. This process repeats itself over and over again.

Similar thing happens when you have management processes defined by a committee that doesn't consider how people work in real life. That can be very easily depicted by using a parameter called PCTUSELESS.

Question: how much more cost-effective would it be to just fix your processes first?

I'm not going to argue on how 10 people in US are capable of delivering the work of 70 people in India. Last time I checked, programming skills were not proportional to race, nationality, religion or gender.

Summary of results are below.

Many industry reports give you information about what to look for, when planning to outsource. Most of these reports I've seen evaluate different outsourcing vendors. However, each organization needs to do a candid self-evaluation first, before evaluating vendors.