project basics- introduction

Today i delivered a lecture on basics of project cycle and management to assistants of Bank of Bhutan.  The powerpoint is here:



It is in fact, my first lecture in BIRD, Lucknow as faculty member though nth one in life. The lecture went on well though  entire ppt could not be run through as the effort was more to get the concepts imbibed than to give more inputs. Hence, we spent more time on concepts. The participation was good and fairly interactive. Participants were responding to discussions well. It is a pleasure to the speaker if he were not forced to speak to a wall.
I was trying to give example of tractor financing, house construction and others to drive home the point.  When I was running through monitoring, the a.c. guy came to check if a.c. is fine. Just before we complained that the room is not cool enough.  I could take that example for telling what the monitoring is about and what is the difference between offsite and on-site monitoring.  The guy telephones and checks if a.c. is fine- it is offsite and if he personally comes and checks if things are fine it is onsite!
I introduced the concepts of project, capital, investment, present vs. future consumption, economic life, project spiral (not exactly cycle), attribution problem in impact analysis, externalities, etc.
A few interesting questions were posed during the lecture.  One participant asked what is the link between research and project analysis. though the question appears to be linking two diverse topics, it seems there is a close link.  In fact, project analysis is research effort in itself and findings of research in terms of impact evaluation and research in related fields fed into the project formulation and implementation. In fact, project execution itself is a kind of action research. Another participant asked what happens if we we find in our evaluation that the project outcomes are not in tune with our expectations.  The answer is that it is a finding in itself which helps us better our future project formulation capabilities.  The same boy asked if we need evaluation at all.  Thinking like an individual who has to cry when his project fails, yes, one need not have evaluation. At least, it may seem like that. Evaluation cannot help the present project as would the effective monitoring and mid-course corrections that it may suggest. But evaluations help us bring smiles to many others if we can understand how someone else had to cry in a similar situation due to poor project fundamentals. By all means, we need credible evaluations.
By for now.
Satyasai   

PPT… the powerful point

I always considered PPT as a tool.  It is so powerful that we ask people to do power point by which we mean they should make presentation. Tool became the verb!.  I have mastered the art of ppt and was adept in using its several features like animations, motion paths, hyperlinks, inserting control/navigational buttons etc and finally found out that a black board (now a days everything is white) and a piece of chalk (read white board marker pen) is the most powerful tool to express yourself.  Once, I went to deliver a guest lecture in a small time management school.  When my office asked me to do that job I prepared a very elaborate and technically superior ppt so as to impress the students thinking that they being management students will give me accolades.  When I went there, I learnt that they do not have the projector and still operating the overhead projector for projecting the transparencies!  I almost collapsed out of surprise for their respect for tradition (if old things can be dubbed so) and disappointment for not able to entice the students with my PPTability.  Poor course coordinator offered to convert my ppt into transparencies which I declined out of vengeance and frustration.  I went on with green board (neither black nor white … something like intermediate technology). 

I remembered all this yesterday when I read article  by Ravi Subramanian in ET (13 Sept 2010) titled:

Death By PowerPoint: Beware of a presentation-dominated culture. 

I cannot agree more with the author and he echoed some of the feelings I often expressed to my colleagues.  I my office I have seen people copasting (copy pasting) long passages in a single slide with letters that appear smaller than ants to a person with 100/6 vision sitting 6 ft away. Their duty is to make ppt and not to communicate.  Tool is mistaken for the message. Similarly, scores of slides packed for a 15 minutes slot.  When I chaired a session in a conference last year, I found it really difficult and painful to ration time to people who came with unending ppt for 10 minutes slot.  And each slide packs volumes of information cluttered around. Ideally one should have minimum number of slides with each slide carrying a few lines or still better a few communicative drawings/pictures.  If presenting in a conference/seminar, better to highlight results in first 3 - 4 slides and keep the latter slides for explaining the methods, etc. and keep a few reserve slides for answering possible supplementaries.  Ultimately, our motto should not be communication or no communication, ppt zindabad.  But, ppt or no ppt, I should communicate effectively.  This reminds me of my teacher Shri Nagabhushanam who taught Botany  in our 9th standard in High School at Ichchhapuram. He explained us the cross section of a leaf without getting up from his chair and we all could visualise how the CS looked without seeing any diagram/picture. 

The strength of your project lies not in the ppt, but in its content. I recently heard that the shortest ppt a person presented in  a seminar has only a single slide! Wow!

study report on rural industrialisation project

 

Here is a study report on evaluation of district rural industrialisation project.

Feel free to give ur feedback.

Satyasai

 

Technorati Tags: project evaluation

Modified internal rate of return

Hello friends. Meeting you all after a long time. You are all aware of the concept of Internal Rate of Return (IRR). It is return in percentage from investment. Or return from Rs 100 of investment. Though very popular due to ease in interpretation, it has certain limitations due to the restrictive reinvestment assumption. That is, the IRR assumes that the ivestment gives the return when the annual returns are reinvested o fetch returns @ IRR. Hence, Modified IRR concept was suggested in literature. An excel function also is available to compute it. However, the MIRR was hardly applied in Indian siutuations. In the following paper, I applied the method to watershed data. I also demonstrated the method suggested by Cary and Dunn (1997) to adjust MIRR for scale and time span differences across projects we compare.

Application of Modified Internal Rate of Return Method for Watershed Evaluation

K.J.S.Satyasai

Frankly the attempt is direct adoption of known method and I did not make any original contribution. Please read and give your comments.

Thank u all

satyasai

Reverse Murphy Law & Long blog(hol)iday

I am thankful to the visitors of this blog of mine. I feel guilty that I did not post any new topics thesedays - I enjoyed a long blog holiday- especially when I see the site meter stats which show that people are regulary visiting this blog - at least 5-6 on any day. Perhaps people are visiting to see any updates - I feel awckward for disappointing them. Of course the holiday is only for this and not to my telugu blog, notwithstanding the intermittant gaps there too.
One reason for the gap in this blog is the very fact that i did not come across with any material that I can post here. It is because I am not reading anything on these topics thesdays . .. :))).

Reverse Murphy Law or Satyasai' Law :))

In the previous post I wrote about Murphy's Law. Recently I experienced reverse of it. In nutshell, Murphy's Law says that when things can go wrong they go wrong. We experienced that Things, even when left to go wrong, may still go right.' The incident that prompted me to is like this.

My daughter did a project for her school as part of a team. On the day of the exhibition, she was not to go to school as she was not in the core team which need to explain the things to visitors. Her friend's status is the same. But both of them needed to send the charts prepared by them individually to school on the exhibition day so that the core team can arrange and open for public view. My daughter was to send the chart through my son who is in the same school and whose attendance was compulsory. When the friend called my daughter about the arrangements to send the charts to the core team, my daughter asked her to send it across to my son and never bothered to enquire about the person through who she would send and in which school bus she commutes.

Next day my son developed fever and could not attend the school. Not knowing the arrangements we did not wake up my daughter too. My dauhter got up started panicking as to what to do. I volunteered to take her to school. We went to school clueless as to where to search for who. My son's classmates we met at the venue of the exhibition were clue less too about anyone holding a chart coming in search of my son. We wandered here and there and thought of going to wait at my son's class room in another block. On the way we found a few students of my son's class coming and my daughter went and checked the red coloured chart in a girl's hand and found it to be the one her friend sent. On inquiry we found that the girl carrying the chart received from another boy who was asked by his teacher to carry it and keep in the room where my son's class students were displaying their exhibits.

In the whole process, my daughter did not plan for the contingencies and never took care to have right information . Ironically, we could not contact her friend too on her mobile on which we frenetically tried for over an hour. We have all conditions for ending up in failure to deliver the chart (which was very important and the first introductory chart to be displayed). Had we missed the students who were carrying it to the venue (which could have happened very easily) the chart would have landed in a 'blackhole'.

Murphy's Law operates when we take care of all possibilities of failure and still we may get a setback from unknown corner. Here, in our case, in contrast, we never took care of any possibility of failure and had ideal conditions for a set back.

Here is the Satyasai's Reverse Murphy's Law is at work.

Murphy's Law

In this post I talk of Murphy’s Law, which I read on www.mindtools.com. This website is an excellent source for many management topics. They are not only professional but also appealing to the layman. In Hindu philosophy, we talk of karma. When something has to go wrong it will go wrong.Everything happens according to our karma. This is simple fatalism. But the hidden spirit behind this karma theory is to inculcate the habit of taking things in proper perspective and without getting frustrated. In practice people tended to misinterpret and practicing in a negative way. Murphy’s Law resembles this karma theory in its intent according to my understanding. The following excerpts are from www.mindtools.com. Read and comment:
“In its simplest form, Murphy's Law states: If anything can go wrong, it will. However, as with many successful business theories, the original law has been extended over time to cover specialist areas, several of which are given below:
• Project Planning: If anything can go wrong, it will. Usually at the most inopportune time.
• Performance Management: If someone can get it wrong, they will.
• Risk Assessment: If several things can go wrong, the one you would LEAST like to happen will occur.
• Practical creativity: If you can think of four ways that something can go wrong, it will go wrong in a fifth way. “
How To Use The Tool
You feel stressed when events that you did not expect to happen occur. And your stress is increased when this happens at the least ideal time. To reduce the stress you feel, you need to take back control!
The following steps will allow you to predict the outcome, and because you are initiating the event, you also know when it will occur. As you go through the steps, your confidence will increase thanks to your application of Murphy's Law.
Step 1:
Butter a piece of toast.
Step 2:
Think of two or more things that could happen if you dropped it. Are any of these more likely to happen if you are wearing suede shoes or are about to set off for a job interview or meet your prospective parents-in-law?
Here's an example of how Murphy's Law can help when things go wrong.
Simon L Tod had recently been promoted to the role of Production Manager at a toy manufacturer. He felt honored to have been chosen, and knew it was because he had always worked hard. But as the peak production season loomed, he was feeling more and more stressed. Things kept happening that he wasn't expecting, and they always seemed to go wrong at 5pm on a Friday, or just as the team were starting work on an urgent order.
Simon mentioned his concerns to his boss, who suggested he apply Murphy's Law to his work to identify what would go wrong and when.
So, on Monday Morning, Simon drew up a list of the key things he had to do that week, when they needed to be completed by, and some of the ways they could go wrong. He also estimated the likelihood of things going wrong in this way. His list included the following items
Task Schedule Risks
Stuff batch of 1,000 teddy bears Delivery to Customer by 8am on Wednesday Stuffing machine will break (10% chance)
Stuffing Machine operative off sick (5%)
Courier company won't deliver on time (5% chance)
Assemble 2,000 toy cars 1 to boss for his son's birthday (on Friday). Remainder to Customer any time on Friday. Wheel supplier sends wheels late (20% chance)
Wheel supplier sends wrong size wheels (10% chance)
On Monday, everything progressed to plan. It was all looking good on Tuesday morning too. But after lunch, when there were still 200 teddy bears to stuff, Simon was called to the workshop by an anxious Quality Control Supervisor who was holding quite the lumpiest teddy bear he'd ever seen.
Simon picked the toy up and squeezed it. Instead of being soft and cuddly, it seemed to be filled with solid items that crunched against each other. Soon, all became clear: the stuffing machine operator had managed to fill the teddy bear stuffing machine hopper with car wheels. The machine had broken these up as they passed through it, but it had still managed to fill the bears. All of the car wheels were now in little fragments; Mostly inside furry bear bellies.
As Simon stood holding the crunchy bear, he saw the courier company van draw up outside the loading bay doors. He now realized that Murphy's Law had predicted that something other than the risks he'd predicted would go wrong, just before the deadline. This allowed him to stay calm and think fast.
He got his packaging supervisor to print out extra labels to put on each bear's box, offering $200 to the first purchaser who sent a bear back to the factory, un-tampered with, correctly identifying what the bear was filled with. The crunchy bear line turned out to be one of the company's bestsellers that year.
Simon ordered more wheels from his supplier, who thought the teddy bear story was so funny that he gave Simon an excellent discount, not only on the repeat order but on future orders of the wheels too.
That left one problem to resolve - a little boy's birthday present. The new batch of wheels couldn't get to the factory till Friday morning - which was too late. So Simon suggested that his boss bring his son down to the factory after school on Friday for a special treat - to see his new car have its wheels fitted. The little boy was thrilled and so didn't mind the fact he'd not has his present at breakfast that morning.
By apply Murphy's Law, and expecting the unexpected, Simon L Tod remained in control throughout a week that would otherwise have proved to be very stressful.

Try this out and be happy.
Que sara sara
(whatever will be will be)

Modelling the project system 1

This post gives the presentation on the overview models used in the planning process.
see the presentation here