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SWOT Analysis: Questions for Conducting an Analysis with your Team

Use SWOT Analysis to identify internal and external factors influencing and affecting
performance. SWOT may be used as an analysis tool to help you explore areas for change and growth, which
can help with goal setting and/or strategic planning. Here are some questions to help you get started.

👉Strengths:
1. What do we do best?
2. What unique knowledge, talent, or resources do we have?
3. What advantages do we have?
4. What do other people say we do well?
5. What resources do we have available?
6. What is our greatest achievement?

👉Weaknesses:
1. What could we improve?
2. What knowledge, talent, skills and/or resources are we lacking?
3. What disadvantages do we have?
4. What do other people say we don’t do well?
5. In what areas do we need more training?
6. What customer complaints have we had about our service?

👉Opportunities:
1. How can we turn our strengths into opportunities?
2. How can we turn our weaknesses into opportunities?
3. Is there a need in our agency that no one is meeting?
4. What could we do today that isn’t being done?
5. How is our field changing? How can we take advantage of those changes?
6. Who could we support? How could we support them?

👉Threats:
1. What obstacles do we face?
2. Could any of our weaknesses prevent our unit from meeting our goals?
3. Who and/or what might cause us problems in the future? How?
4. Are there any standards, policies, and/or legislation changing that might negatively impact us?
5. Are we competing with others to provide service?
6. Are there changes in our field or in technology that could threaten our success?

Spoken English..

If you want to improve your spoken English You have to listen English, you have to speak english, you have to read English, you have to write in English and you must think in English.

How to practice ?

There are five components of English language and you have to practice all of them in order to become fluent in English.

These components are Listening, speaking, reading, writing and Thinking.

1. Listening : Listening is very powerful, simplest and easiest way to improve pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Listening is art, be a good listener. A good listener is always a good speaker. Listen English every day. By listening, your listening ability will increase. Once you are able to listen, you can speak the same easily.

2. Speaking : We must talk every day in English in order to improve our speaking. Speaking is key factor to become good speaker. In order to practice speaking, we must make so many friends who are willing to practice spoken English and we should talk to them as much as we can.
Do not wait for tomorrow, speak from today. Don't hesitate to make mistake, mistakes are common in the starting.

Many people are willing to improve their spoken English but they never practice speaking that's why they are not able to speak. People have common excuse I am shy to speak but if you really want to improve your spoken English, you have to stop shyness and start speaking.
Shyness is the biggest barrier in improvement, so stop it and start speaking to your friends. Don't wait for perfection. Perfection comes by practice.

3. Reading : Reading is also very powerful method. By reading we can improve our grammar, vocabulary, spellings and sentence structure. Make a habit of reading and every day.

How to read ?
Read carefully. Its not necessary to read a lot. Read less but read effectively. If you read 10 pages but you can't learn or understood anything new, it's better to read two pages and read many times. Do not try to memorise, try to understand.

4. Writing : Every day write atleast one page or two pages. Make a notebook and every day write 10 to 15 correct grammatical correct sentences. Read them out loud many times.
Try to remember whole sentences rather than individual word.
Because if you know one correct sentence, you can make so many correct sentences from a single sentence but even you know many words it's difficult to make a single correct sentence. Every day learn some sentences and by learning correct sentences you can speak very fluently and confidently.

5. Thinking : Thinking is very important part of spoken English, because whatever you can think, you can speak. So make a habit to think in English. In the beginning it may seems difficult to think in English but by practice and practice, we can build a new habit of thinking in English. Once it becomes your habit then you can speak English naturally without making efforts.

Do not translate - If you want to speak English fluently and powerfully then stop translation. Learn English in English by listening.
By Speak English without Stop

Project Management skills:

Being a project manager is a tough job. It’s not enough to create project plans and delegate tasks. You also have to be a leader, a people manager and a clear communicator.

With so many skills to learn, which ones should you focus on developing first?

In this post, I’ll walk you through 8 vital but sometimes overlooked project management skills. You’ll learn the importance of these skills and get a brief lesson on how to develop them further.


What the Project Management Institute Says
Project Management Institute or PMI is one of the biggest PM organizations in the world. The Project Management Professional (PMP) it offers is quickly becoming a requirement for most PM positions.

To qualify as a PMP, you have to demonstrate a number of skills and competencies across different domains. Regardless of whether you want to get certified or not, a look at these skill requirements is a good way to orient yourself in project management.

The reason being: if PMI evaluates a skill in its certification exams, you can assume that it’s important for managing a project in real life.

Here are a few project management skills you should have as part of the PMP exam curriculum:

Knowledge & Performance
Integration management
Scope management
Time management
Cost management
Quality management
Communication
Human resource management
Risk management
Stakeholder management
Personal
Besides the above knowledge areas, PMI also requires the following personal skills and competencies for its qualified professionals:

Achievement and action
Helping
Impact and influence
Managerial skills
Cognitive skills
Personal effectiveness
While not always necessary, the above list should tell you what qualities you need to be an effective project manager.

In the next section, we’ll look at the exact skills project managers need to have and how to learn them.

8 Essential Project Management Skills:

Regardless of your industry or specialization, there are a few skills that will serve you well on every project.

Some of these are:

1. Leadership
Leadership is a complementary to management. While the latter focuses on managing complexity, the former brings order and vision to projects. Little wonder that project managers are expected to have leadership talent alongside management know-how.

There is a direct correlation between the complexity of a project and the need for leadership. In fact, one influential paper even argued that positive leadership contributed almost 76% to a project’s success.

When you break down the elements that make a project successful, you’ll find that they’re all related to leadership in some way. Communication, team building, strategizing - these are all key PM skills that are also essential for leadership.

Be a better leader and you’ll undoubtedly be a better project manager.

How to learn leadership
Leadership is a difficult skill to learn. You can’t really learn it from a textbook; it has to be practiced.

Start by identifying the core areas that define good leadership. As Benis and Thomson noted in 2002, leadership has four key components:

The ability to adapt to changes.
The ability to motivate others.
The ability to communicate a vision
Integrity and authenticity
Strive to use these skills in your projects. Identify a few things you can do in all four stages of the project that would contribute positively towards leadership.

For instance, In the ‘initiate’ stage, you can focus on motivating resources and establishing the vision. In the ‘close’ stage, you can reward and recognize positive contributions.

2. Communication
Communication lies at the very heart of project management. Between outlining your vision, delegating authority and collaborating with stakeholders, you’ll have your hands full with emails, phone calls and Skype chats.

In an analysis of the most important project management skills among practitioners, Prof. Eddie Fisher notes that:

“Good people project managers need to have good effective communications skills with people at all levels of the organisation. They need to understand cross cultural behaviours better and need to accept people more for what they are”
Effective communication is also at the root of good leadership which, as we saw above, is also essential for project management.

How to improve communication
In a 2010 paper presented at the Project Management Institute, Rajkumar Sivasankari says that effective PM communication has six aspects - 5Ws and 1H:

What to communicate
Why the message is necessary
Who to send the message to
Where to send the message
When to send the message
How to send the message
For any complex project, you should have a project communication plan that defines each of the above for any scenario. Say, if you have an emergency, you should know exactly who to communicate with, what to communicate and how to communicate it. You can even take advantage of this project communication template from Workamajig to make this easier.

3. Influencing Others
All project management is, at its core, people management.

And managing people essentially means managing their emotions, building trust and persuading them to do their best.

In other words, project managers need to influence others effectively.

As Prof. Eddie Fisher writes in the PM practitioner survey mentioned above:

“Project managers need to be good natural influencers and persuaders and people need to feel at ease in the presence of the leader. Effective project managers need to...make the team feel as one team and that they are working together on the project”
In a project, you might use your ability to influence others in several situations, such as:

Selling the benefits of a project to a stakeholder
Helping team members to unblock their values to improve performance.
The more complex the project, the more you’ll need this critical skill. As the stakes get higher, the amount of resistance and objections increases as well. Wielding influence effectively can mean the difference between a successful or a stalled project.

How to learn this skill
Drawing from Dr. Robert Cialdini’s groundbreaking book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, your influence as a project manager will spring from the following:

Authority, i.e. your position as the manager, your job title, your proven expertise and your past performance record.
Social proof, i.e. your accomplishments, awards, past records and what others think of you both within and outside the team.
Commitment and Consistency, i.e. how detailed and committed you and the team members are to the project. Clear communication protocols help immensely here as they establish a cadence of commitment.
Liking, i.e. how much people actually like you as a manager, a person and a boss.
Reciprocity, i.e. how much you’ve done for your team members (who are then more liable to repay the favor).
Hard influence - using your position or title to persuade others - is effective but doesn’t lead to long-term team happiness. You’re much better off using soft influence through social proof, clear communication, good performance, reciprocity and likability.

4. Conflict Management
Conflicts are inevitable in any project. You’ll have conflicts between team members, between team members and stakeholders, and even between yourself and your team.

The ability to manage and resolve conflicts is an understated but critical skill for project managers.

Conflicts can arise due to a number of reasons, such as:

Clash of interests between stakeholders and team members, or between team members.
Scope and schedule changes especially post-initiation phase.
Project management conflicts over how the PM communicates, delegates and manages the project.
Vendor disputes that can hold back a project’s progress.
Given that managers spend roughly 15% of their time resolving conflicts, conflict management is a skill that will hold you in good stead as a project manager.

How to learn conflict management
Briefly, there are five approaches to resolving conflicts in a project in order of effectiveness:

Confronting, where both parties confront their problems and reach a resolution through direct communication. This is the preferred way to resolve most problems
Compromising, where the parties reach a resolution through ‘give and take’.
Smoothing, where one party downplays its own problems to ensure project completion. This isn’t always ideal since it leaves one party dissatisfied with the resolution.
Forcing, where one party forces the other party to accept its position. This usually leads to resentment.
Forcing, where one party forces the other party to accept its position. This usually leads to resentment.
For a more general-purpose approach to conflict management, read these two books:

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson
Confronting Without Offending: Positive and Practical Steps to Resolving Conflict by Deborah Smith Pegues


5. Task Management and Scheduling
Task management and project scheduling are the bread and butter of any project manager’s work.

Project scheduling, as you might know, is the process of breaking down a project into its constituent activities and allocating resources for them. You have to factor in the resources available to you and how to best utilize them.

Most projects start with a project schedule. This document will be the bedrock of the project.

Task management is where you list and manage the tasks involved in accomplishing project activities. For instance, if you’re conducting surveys to gather user feedback, you might have the following tasks associated with it:

Creating surveys
Sending surveys to users and collecting data
Analyzing survey data
Creating reports
You’ll need both project schedules and task management to run the project smoothly.

How to learn them

The best way to learn project scheduling and task management is to use a project management tool (like Workamajig). These tools typically include templates to help you create project schedules. You can then create tasks associated with each project activity and track their progress within the software.

Each activity in the schedule has a list of associated tasks in a to-do list:

This can help even beginners create detailed project schedules.

6. Risk Management

Any complex project is inherently risky. The risks can range from the sudden departure of a key team member to a delayed delivery from a vendor.

Foreseeing and planning for such risks is called risk management.

As CIO notes:

“Risk management measures the uncertainty involved when you 'roll the dice' during your project, and allows the project manager to obtain a consensus on how to best handle risks and unexpected events on the project”
Risk management makes you a better manager precisely because it is such an overlooked skill. Since most risks aren’t urgent, PMs often ignore or delay planning for them. Consequently, when risks do arise, managers don’t have failsafe systems to manage them.

This is why PMI calls risk management a “vital key to effective project management”.

How to learn this skill
In a project management setting, risk management is focused on identifying and creating solutions to potential risks.

This is a multi-step process:

Identifying risks through expert analysis or digging through project reports to spot gaps and potential conflicts.
Categorizing risks as technical (related to technology or quality), external (related to customers, vendors, etc.), organizational (logistics, budget, etc.) and project management related.
Analyzing risks based on their probability of occurrence and impact. A high impact, high probability risk is a high priority.
Planning responses to each risk, moving from high priority to low priority risks.
This PMI paper is a good place to learn about risk management for project managers. For a deeper understanding, consult PMI’s Practice Standard for Project Risk Management. Practicing integrated project management is another way of mitigating project risk.

7. Coaching Team Members

As the project manager, your job is to be the go-between the stakeholders and the people working on the project. The more complex the project, the more people you’ll have who don’t quite know what the project demands.

Being able to coach these team members and get the best out of them is a vital project management skill.

Coaching becomes even more important when you have external resources working on the project (freelancers, contractors, etc.). Since these people might not be familiar with your requirements and processes, you’ll need to coach them to get better results.

Generally speaking, the more inexperienced your team, the more coaching they’ll need.

How to learn this skill
As Susanne Madsen writes:

“Coaching is a way of helping others to make progress and overcome issues without directly telling them what to do...coaches help people to find the answers for themselves, by engaging in structured conversations and asking insightful questions”
Coaching, thus, is a form of leadership and effective communication.

To coach team members to do their best, you need to:

Communicate clearly with stakeholders to fully understand their requirements.
Document all processes and requirements to help team members (internal and external) get on board quickly.
Work with team members to help them understand their weaknesses and strengths.
Influence team members to deliver their best results by focusing on the project’s benefits, creating a positive work environment and emphasizing the big picture.
Do this and you’ll be a better coach, leader and project manager.

8. Cost Management

As a project manager, the budget is the canvas you work with. What you can do (and can’t) will depend on the budget you have access to.

Since budgets are usually fixed, managing costs becomes a vital skill for project managers. While the quality of the final work is important, what often matters more is whether you were able to deliver the work within budget.

As the Project Management Journal notes:

“The cost management function maintains its important focus at every stage throughout the life cycle of a project..the management of cost is the most important as all project aspects affect this function. What counts for the owner is the “bottom line.”
This is why cost management is one of the ten key knowledge areas in the PMBOK guide.

How to learn cost management
Effective cost management is rooted in practice, not theory. The more projects you plan and deliver, the better your estimates.

That said, there is a step-by-step approach to cost management:

Resource planning to figure out the resources required to deliver results using Work Breakdown Structures and past records of successful projects.
Estimating costs using one of several different project estimation techniques such as analogous, top-down, bottom-up, parametric or three-point estimating.
Creating a budget based on the cost estimate and project schedule. This will tell you what resources you require at what time.
Cost control by keeping track of actual vs. expected spending, usually with a project management tool, and taking steps to reduce costs if things are going over budget.
Case studies are a great way to learn cost management. Google “cost management case studies” and go through a few results to see how managers plan and control costs in actual projects across industries.

SMART Goals:

George T. Doran developed the SMART goal planning acronym in 1981 to make goal setting more practical. It helps organizations set their goals and objectives in a more practical way. The SMART method readies individuals and teams for increased productivity. They can focus their efforts, clarify their ideas, use their time and resources wisely, and increase their chances of achieving more. The SMART goals acronym stands for:

S-pecific M-easurable A-chievable R-elevant T-ime bound

SMART Objectives

Once a project goal is set, setting objectives is the next step to advancing with a clear understanding of how to reach the desired outcome. The difference of objectives from goals is that objectives are precise actions or measurable steps that companies and teams can take to move closer to their goals.

Specific:

Specific answers the question, ‚what needs to be done?’ and ‚how do we know it is done?’ It should also describe the end result of the specific work. By specific, the project manager formats the objective statement in the way that everyone who reads it interprets it the same way. It helps to use the 5W method, namely:

What do I want to accomplish?
Who is involved in this?
Which resources are involved?
Where is it located?
Why is it important?

Measurable:

Measurable answers the question, how do I know it meets expectations?’ It also answers ‚how much’ or ‚how many’ the stakeholders expect to achieve. When checking for this, quantifiable terms like costs, deadlines, frequency, quality, and quantity are helpful. Additionally, groups should make sure that they can measure objectives against any specific standard. There are two types of measurements: quantity measurement and frequency measurement. Quantity measurements would be percentages, while frequency measurements can be daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, among others. The issue with measurable objectives is that they are difficult to formulate. As a result, stakeholders trade objectives that add more value to the business for those that are measurable.

Achievable:

Achievable answers the question ‚can I achieve it?’ or ‚is this goal achievable by this person?’ or ‚am I equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to meet the expectation?’ Furthermore, teams and companies should take note of the constraints that can hinder them from achieving their goals. An objective shouldn’t be too high to be stressful for anyone to even try to achieve it. It shouldn’t be too simple or low that it wouldn’t push a team or individual to realize their potential. It should be ideal but within reach to ensure that it is possible without causing undue stress.

Relevant:

Relevant answers the question ‘do the goals align with the business strategies?’ They have to be relevant and tie up to the company’s mission and vision. This is best achieved by employees consulting with their managers on how they can formulate relevant objectives. In order for a company to succeed, its employees should also aim for goals that are in line with the organization’s goals. Otherwise, organizations and employees will not harmoniously journey towards development. Organization leaders sometimes interpret R in SMART as Realistic, Reasonable, Resonant, or Results-based. While the exact definition of R is not critical, it should be meaningful and not redundant to the other acronyms. For example, Achievable and Realistic are somewhat close in meaning, so Realistic does not particularly add significantly to the method. However, Relevant adds the criteria that objectives should align with strategic direction. Goals can be attainable and realistic but do not necessarily move the company in the desired direction.

Time-bound:

Time-bound answers the question ‘when will it be done?’ Objectives have to have a deadline. Life moves fast and if people don’t have a timeline to follow, tomorrow may be too late. Nobody likes deadlines, but they are important. Without setting a timeline, people will keep procrastinating and achieve nothing. In some instances, tasks have a fixed end-point or a milestone. Other times, a task’s end signifies the start of another.

What is a Gantt chart:

A Gantt chart is a project management tool that helps in planning, scheduling and monitoring a project. Using a Gantt chart can improve your planning and scheduling, remote work collaboration, resource allocation and task delegation.

A Gantt chart represents all information visually through a horizontal bar graph. Project managers and team members can view the task schedules, dependencies and progress by just glancing at the chart. Planning for all tasks in advance and making them visible in one place empowers teams to deliver on time.

A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart used to display the start date and duration of each task that makes up a project. It is one of the most popular project management tools, allowing project managers to view the progress of a project at a glance.

Although the Gantt chart is named after Henry Gantt, an American engineer and project management consultant, he was not the first one to devise it. It was devised first by Karol Adamiecki, a Polish engineer, in the 1890s. He created it for his steelworks unit but Henry Gantt customized it for his clients. Today, Gantt charts are used most popularly for project scheduling and control.

Gantt Chart Example:

The tasks in a project are represented on the Y axis of the Gantt Chart, with its duration on the X axis. Each task is represented by a bar. The length of the bar represents its duration. If you see two bars overlapping on the X axis, know that they occur simultaneously.

As you can see in this example, a Gantt chart enables project managers to have a quick view of project information like:

1. List of tasks that comprise a project
2. Start and end dates for each task
3. Dependencies between tasks
4. Scheduling
5. Progress of each task
6. Task owners

A Gantt chart proves useful in keeping a project on track, especially when you have multiple dependencies and many tasks happen simultaneously.

Credits: Forbes

SWOT Analysis

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate office environment, you may have come across the term “SWOT analysis.” This has nothing to do with evaluating militarized law enforcement response units, and everything to do with taking a long, hard look at your company.

Conducting a SWOT analysis is a powerful way to evaluate your company or project, whether you’re two people or 500 people. In this article, you’ll learn: what a SWOT analysis is, see some SWOT analysis examples, and learn tips and strategies for conducting a comprehensive SWOT analysis of your own. You’ll also see how you can use the data a SWOT exercise yields to improve your internal processes and workflows.

A SWOT analysis is a technique used to determine and define your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats – SWOT.

1. Strengths
The first element of a SWOT analysis is Strengths.

01. Things your company does well
02. Qualities that separate you from your competitors
03. Internal resources such as skilled, knowledgeable staff
04. Tangible assets such as intellectual property, capital, proprietary technologies, etc.

Weaknesses
Once you’ve figured out your strengths, it’s time to turn that critical self-awareness on your weaknesses.

01. Things your company lacks
02. Things your competitors do better than you
03. Resource limitations
04. Unclear unique selling proposition

3. Opportunities
Next up is Opportunities.

01. Underserved markets for specific products
02. Few competitors in your area
03. Emerging needs for your products or services
04. Press/media coverage of your company

4. Threats
The final element of a SWOT analysis is Threats – everything that poses a risk to either your company itself or its likelihood of success or growth.

01. Emerging competitors
02. Changing regulatory environment
03. Negative press/media coverage
04. Changing customer attitudes toward your company.

Credits: wordstream

Risk Management elements:

Roll out a business strategy that aims to identify, assess, and prepare for any dangers, hazards, and other potentials for disasters that may impact your organization’s operations and goals.

Similarly, identify opportunities and assess them, and maximize benefits by putting plans to address positive risks.

Introduce plans of actions, and make them accessible to all stakeholders. Ensure all risks and opportunities are under control while running the business successfully exceeding customers and stakeholders’ expectations.

Setup and define risk responses of different types:
o Mitigate
o Avoid
o Accept
o Enhance
o Remove

Define plan of actions for each risk response, defining what needs to be done immediately, and what needs to be done based on a risk trigger.

Have the different actions assigned to the team to ensure parallel processing with full collaboration.
Setup controls with drills and tests to ensure your risks and opportunities are controlled by a solid process in place.

Reassess your risks to ensure they are mitigated to acceptable levels.

Ensure all risks are in a controlled state and run. Iteratively identify new risks based on changing business climate and address them.