The Best Son

In epic Ramayana, one side there is Ram, the son of King Dashratha, who is crowned as maryada purshotam(the Perfect Man). He left his all happiness and luxuries by leaving the palace by accepting the exile period of 14 years. He accepts his stepmother’s two wishes which King Dashratha given her in war time when she saved king’s life. Ram along with his wife and brother went to forest where he fought and killed many evils like Ravana, Kumbhkaran etc. He made the society peaceful and safe from these evils. Ram never did anything which is against society and kingdom. He even left his wife Sita to fullfilll the judgement with king’s role for their peoples. He established the unmatchable standards as a son, a human being, a ruler and a king.

On another side there is one other son of blind hermits, called Shravan Kumar. Shravan Kumar decided to take his blind parents to various pilgrimage places.  He places his parents in two baskets and carries the baskets on his shoulder to the various places of pilgrimage. According to the legend in Ramayana, while hunting in the forest of Ayodhya, King Dashratha heard a sound near a lake and unleashed an arrow, hoping to hit an animal. When he crossed the lake to collect his kill, he found that his arrow had struck a boy who was bleeding. The boy, Shravan Kumar, told Dashratha, that he had come to the lake to collect water for his sick and aged parents, who were both blind. He requested the king to take water to his parents. After telling his tale, Shravan succumbed to his wounds and when the king took water for his parents and told them of his tragic mistake, they were unable to bear the shock. They cursed Dashratha and both died.

Shravan Kumar is known as the best son in the universe but not the Ram. Every mother compares his son to be like Shravan not like Ram. Why? Ram is ideal man but the scale on particular role like son is not reached as marked by Shravan Kumar. Ram had lots of thing to left and hold but Shravan don’t. Sharavan have only his devotion for his parents by which he served his parents in the best way. He himself was bleeding but had strong wish to fullfill his parents thirstiness. Shravan don’t have facilities and resources available like Ram. 

The best project manager is not who did many things but he who manages the project attributes in minimal resource and best throughput. No matter what you have or what you equipped with but it only evaluates what you do and how. In project environment many times one can feel the lackness of resources, time & money which leads to crisis of man, machine and money to finish the project. There may be so many risks like Dashratha's bow, hitting you to die, but the project manager has to focus to his deliverable in targeted boundary lines.

Copyright © 2012 Prashant Pathak. All rights reserved.

Balance Score Card

When I was in my MBA 2^nd semester then there was a topic in curriculum to study & design the BSC for the team members. Being a project manager you are require to track the project activities and its deliverable  One has to ensure that the project should be finished “in-time”, ”with in the cost” and “to-the-specifications”. There is no team appraisal is required at all to accomplish the project, then why the team appraisal & growth is indeed. But the practically the team is the back end which is working for you when you are managing the project. The biggest challenge ever I found is to manage the human behaviors. It becomes much complicated when you have members with different culture, education, country, age and expertise. Whatever may be the team’s background but every one should be focused in single goal i.e. Success of Project.

Ensuring the contribution of each and every team member and its tracking can be done in many ways. There are lots of management tools available to do this activity. One such tool is “Balance Score Card” or “BSC”. According to Wikipedia,”The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategy performance management tool - a semi-standard structured report, supported by proven design methods and automation tools, which can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff within their control and to monitor the consequences arising from these actions. In its simplest form the Balanced Scorecard breaks performance monitoring into four interconnected perspectives: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes and Learning & Growth.

Balanced Scorecard Perspectives

Following are the detailed definition for the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives:

• Financial Perspective covers the financial objectives of an organisation and allows project managers to track financial success and shareholder value contributed by team. E.g. Turnover targeted vs actual.

• Customer Perspective covers the customer objectives such as customer satisfaction, market share goals as well as product and service attributes impacted by each individuals as per share contribution. E.g effectiveness of employee to close the issues raised by customer in time and customers satisfaction.

• Internal Process Perspective covers internal operational goals and outlines the key processes necessary to deliver the customer objectives. It covers measurement of core & regular activities e.g. coding/programming for a software developer.

• Learning and Growth Perspective covers the intangible drivers of future success such as human capital, organisational capital and information capital including skills, training, organisational culture, leadership, systems and databases.

Project manager should distribute different weightage to each perspective summing to some mutually agreed scale say 100. All tasks performed by employee should be mapped to any one of perspective. The weightage should be reflection of efforts contributed by employee to respective tasks. For example there are 25 working days in month and one spent 15 days to Task-A then its contribution to BSC will be =(100/300)*15 points i.e. 5 points out of 100 total points.

The calculation logic can be change depending upon the type of tasks and organization's business category. The strategy to use the BSC to measure the performance of an individual and its effectiveness in organisational growth is exetremely powerful and impacting  The project manager must make a strategic initiave and keep on monitoring the cause-and-effect on regular basis.