Skill Web School

Technology marvels have blessed us a lot and given us a lot of comfort and security. On the other hand New technology is always highly risk prone when you apply it in a project. The first problem arises is the uncertainty as you are perhaps applying a technology which is not time tested. Some major giants release a Beta version at the initial stage with a lot of glittering commitments and in many cases it has been observed that there is a gap between the reality and commitment.

This not only increases the risk of the project management, but at times, it can lead to a catastrophe, where you might have to scrap the entire project and start afresh.

We live in an age, where new technologies emerge every fortnight, and you like to apply them in your running or coming projects, which is NOT yet proven or even stability has NOT been ensured.

New technologies create another mess in your home front. As the technology has just emerged, neither your people master the technology before applying it, NOR you get good trainers, as the trainer might also be just picking it up. Even if you have the in house skill, the number gets limited to one or two, which brings another risk for a project management, which is person dependency. The market witnessed a similar problems, when Oracle launched OAS for the first time mainly in the Asian counterparts.

People have got the habit of running after newer technologies irrespective of the platform or environment. There is a sustainable amount of risk, the new technology may not have an intermingling relationship with the environment, which may really fall flat on your face.

We conclude like, we must welcome new technologies, but we must give it a time before applying it in projects.

Even a kid of 8 years knows that the customer is an asset as he fills your bank A/C with dollars and any new customer is a fortune as this is the indication for growth of business. On the other hand Customer is that entity, which needs ‘handle with care’.

The biggest disadvantage for a New customer is that his pulse is still unknown to you. As you had never worked with him earlier you are completely unaware of his likings and dislikings, which play a crucial role for determining the success of the project. At times, the customer changes specs very frequently, which makes your PM plan Topsy turvy.

As this is the first project with you, a tendency of getting everything on the earth becomes apparent at times.

The Project Manager and the Customer relationship manager should be enough tactful to handle such request and be firm but polite in bringing reality to the fore.

There are some customers, who prefer to remain mum through out the project and may be after completion, they will come up with their issues. We call them silent customers. The major drawback is as they hardly they pass on any comments, you hardly come to realize what they want or where do you vary?

The best way of handling such customers is interaction through clearly specified documents. Send the document after completion of each module and get his feedback.

You may be a bit lenient, but insist on a specific time period for receiving the feedback.

Any business house is always concerned about the most important customers. As the company classifies the most important customers to a very limited number, the handling becomes a bit easier. The tendency of frequent change may obscure some of the fundamental philosophy of your PM plan, but as a Project Manager, you need to be cautious.

As the important customers draw attention of various top notches of the organization, the pressure has got a tremendous ripple effect even among the team and project manager. At times, the effect becomes adverse and even detrimental.

A sincere look into the issues by the Project Manager and raising of issues in the correct forum in correct time may save a lot of hazard!

SEO, the buzzword of Internet era, has given enough exposure for research and experiment for the web professionals in various forms. As the proven fact is that Search Engines emphasize significantly on content, so the efforts towards SEO driven content have taken the pillioneer’s seat.

Let us explain, what we term as SEO driven content. Every web professional is aware that keywords play a vital role in ranking.

So, for obvious reasons, people have started writing content, where the keyword gets repeated even without making sense. In the world of Search Engine Optimization, this is popularly known as keyword stuffing.

Some smarter guys have gone one step ahead, where they have started camouflaging the keywords in the content or even beyond the content in a most unethical manner. They use to hide them by color ballgame.

Search Engine crawlers, might have taken a little bit time to realize the reality, but gradually they have become smart enough to trace such camouflaging keywords. Naturally they have started penalizing such websites or web pages.

So, SEO driven content like unethical ways of keyword stuffing do not yield any positive result, rather they lead to the risk of penalty.

CSS Or Cascading Style Sheet has become a buzzword in today’s web world. People even without knowing much about CSS demands their websites to become CSS based. But why is CSS required?

The primary advantage of CSS is that it uses the class concept. So, once you declare a class, it gets automatically replicated on all the relevant pages as well as any change in any of the declared class in CSS will affect all the web pages, which have instantiated that class. So, the concept of reuse becomes highly pertinent as well as advantageous also.

People adapt some peculiar ways for CSS. Like, web page is designed say using dreamweaver, the classes created by that software is grouped together and placed in another document with an extension of .CSS. We call it a quack method.

What one needs to do is to frame the entire design in the beginning and then declare the required classes. Dont worry! You can change the color, font or anything of that class at any point of time.