Eng. Ahmed Nasr

Try to be Positive in your Socity

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Mon, 5 Mar 2012 07:41:00 +0200

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:34:00 +0300

"A good plan today is better than a great plan tomorrow."

George S. Patton

"Once you surrender to your vision, success begins to chase you."

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

"If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they might have planned for you? Not much."

Jim Rohn

"It doesn't matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going."

Brian Tracy

"Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."

John Updike

"Just because you're a supernatural, unstoppable, manifesting machine, doesn't mean you can't ask for help. A lot of help. And fully expect to receive it."

Mike Dooley

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 08:13:00 +0300

"Imagine a hot tub for the mind. That is what meditation is; it can bathe your mind in relaxing thoughts."

Eknath Easwaran

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

Pablo Picasso

"The beauty of all things lies in your ability to appreciate them."

Author Unknown

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

Leo Tolstoy

"When we are conscious of our personal uniqueness and our universal nature we express ourselves creatively. In this way we fulfill our dreams and our life purpose."

Andrew Schneider

"If we are ever to enjoy life, now is the time - not tomorrow, nor next year, nor in some future life after we have died. The best preparation for a better life next year is a full, complete, harmonious, joyous life this year. Our beliefs in a rich future life are of little importance unless we coin them into a rich present life. Today should always be our most wonderful day."

Thomas Dreier

"Only by seeking challenges can we hope to find the best in ourselves."

Robert Rodriguez

"That are you doing today to become a champion?"

Drayton McLane Jr.

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:16:00 +0300

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."

Maya Angelou

"It's like driving at night in the fog. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow

"The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it."

Debbi Fields

"If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."

Michelangelo Buonarroti

"While we are postponing, life speeds by."

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"You create your opportunities by asking for them."

Patty Hansen

"There's always a way... You just have to find it!"

Paul Briganti

"It's not how much we give but how much love we put into giving."

Mother Teresa

"One step back does not mean defeated. It just means that you will take the same step forward again but wiser."

Jossie Estrella

"No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You want to look at your purpose in life. You want to find that meaning within. Once you find that meaning within, and you start to express your purpose, that's when the money starts coming. That's when you attract it."

Andy Fuehl

"Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy."

Wayne Dyer

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

Henry Thoreau

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try."

Beverly Sills

"Some people dream of success... while others wake up and work hard at it."

Unknown

"When we accept tough jobs as a challenge and wade into them with joy and Enthusiasm, miracles can happen."

Arland Gilbert

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:17:00 +0300

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

Thomas Edison

"Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries."

Corita Kent

"Trouble is only opportunity in work clothes."

Henry J. Kaiser

"If you really want to be happy, nobody can stop you."

Mary Tricky

"To guarantee success, act as if it were impossible to fail."

Dorothea Brande

"The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance."

Brian Tracy

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:46:00 +0300

"The responsibility for both present and future is in our own hands. If we live right today, then tomorrow has to be right."

Eknath Easwaran

"Time is not a line, but a series of now points."

Taisen Deshimaru

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:51:00 +0300

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."

Marcus Aurelius

"It is not what we get. But who we become, what we contribute ... that gives meaning to our lives."

Anthony Robbins

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:09:00 +0300

"Your only limitations are those you set up in your mind, or permit others to set up for you."

Og Mandino

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."

Lao Tzu

"The best thing we can do for ourselves and the people in our lives is to love them unconditionally, forgive them without reservation and to accept them exactly as they are."

Iyanla Vanzant

11 things you will never learn in school

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:57:00 +0300

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:26:00 +0300

"The best thing we can do for ourselves and the people in our lives is to love them unconditionally, forgive them without reservation and to accept them exactly as they are."

Iyanla Vanzant

CRM Value Chain

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:27:00 +0300

The CRM value chain is a proven model which businesses can follow when developing and implementing their CRM strategies. The ultimate purpose of the CRM value chain process is to ensure that the company builds long-term mutually-beneficial relationships with its strategically-significant customers “SSC”.

What is a strategically significant customer “SSC”?

Self Evidently:The high life-time value customer is a key SSC. These must be the focus of the customer retention efforts. Life-time value potential is the present day value for all future margins that might be earned in a relationship. Not all high volume customers have long time Value if they are costly to serve, their value may be significantly reduced.
Benchmarks:These are the customers that other customers copy.
Inspections:Customers who inspire change in the supplying company. These may be customers who find new applications, come up with new product ideas, and find ways of improving quality or reducing cost. They may be the most demanding of customers, or frequent complainers, and, through their own long time value potential is low.
Cost magnets:There are customers who absorb a disproportionately high volume of fixed cost, thus enabling other, smaller customers to become profitable.

Five Steps to profitable relationships

Although we don’t discuss them here, at each stage of the value chain there are concepts, tools and processes to help create and implement successful strategy.

The CPA step Analyses the customer base to identify customers to target with different value propositions.
It involves the business in getting to know the selected customers as segments or individuals and building a customer data-base which accessible to all those decisions or activities impact upon customer attitude and behavior.
It involves in building a strong network of relationships with employees, suppliers, partners and investors, who understand the requirements of the chosen customers.
Involves in developing, with the network’s compliance, propositions which create value jointly for the customer and company.
Managing the customer relationship.

Customer Portfolio Analysis

CRM value chain acknowledges that not all customers have equal value to the company. Companies which have no customer history on which to base their analysis can use segmentations approaches to identify potential SSCs, An important consideration is to analyze and sort by profit potential, not by volume, whether that is by sector, segment or individual.

One CPA Tool sorts customers into 4 strategic groups:

Sack able customers are those who have no present or future profit potential or life-time value.
The invest group contains customers who are both valuable currently and have significant future potential.
The re-engineer group contains customers who are not presently profitable but who could become so if the relationship were re-engineered.
Nature group contains those customers who are currently profitable but have little future potential.

Customer Intimacy

Choosing customer to serve is one thing, getting to know them well is different.
Most companies collect data.
The challenge is to use the data to better understand the who, what, why, where, when, and how of customer behaviour.

Develop the Network

Company does not compete against company. Network competes against network. For Example, Sainsbury does not compete against TESCO. Their respective network competes. TESCO’s network, which include partners such as Royal Bank of Scotland (for its retail banking offer) and privilege insurance (for its insurance offer).
A company network position:
Its connectedness to other parties who co-operate in delivering value to the chosen customer; is a source of competitive advantage, For example software house partnering with IBM, the soft ware house will enhance its network position. IBM also benefits, as well as their joint customers.
What are the members of the network?
For CRM to succeed, the network of suppliers, employees, owners/investors, and partners must be aligned and managed to meet the needs of the chosen customer.
Employees will probably need reorienting and re-skilling, if not redeployment.

Suppliers also need to understand who the customer is trying to serve.
Owners and investors who will commit to the long-term investment in the people, processes and technology to implement CRM Strategies.

Value proposition development

Although it is traditional to focus on the product as the main source of value, many companies are finding that people, process and service offer more competitive advantage as products become more commoditized.
There may be small process such as how companies are handled; and big process such as how new products are jointly developed with customers. The value stars illustrate sources of customer value in a retailing context.
THE Value star consists of:

Communication
People
Process
Produce/brand
Price
Service
Location
Service scope

Managing the relationship

For relationship to succeed with strategically significant customers:
Customers have to re-invent structures and process.
On the way out are hierarchical structures and product mangers. Replacing them is flatter organization with empowered front-lines and customer or market managers.
We encourage companies to replace their single marketing strategy with a trio made up of a customer acquisition plan, customer retention plan and customer development plan. Each of these has metrics from those found in run-of-the-mill marketing strategies.
New Measures.
Include customer acquisition cost, customer retention rates, share-of-customer and customer development targets alongside more conventional measures such as customer satisfaction and sales volume, and addition measures relating to the performance of network members.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:19:00 +0300

What is CRM?

It is a strategy and process used to learn more about customers’ needs and behaviours in order to develop relationships with them.

This process aims to connect different players with in and organization so as to coordinate their efforts in creating an overall valuable series of experiences, products and services for the customer.

It also depends on building together pieces of information about customers, sales, Marketing effectiveness and market trends so the organization can sell and market its products and services more effectively.

The process is mediated by a set of information technologies that focus on creating two-way exchanges with customers, so that firms have an intimate knowledge of their needs, wants, and being platers. In this way CRM helps companies understand, as well as anticipate the needs of current and potential customers. It should be said that CRM is just the opposite of “one size fits all”, it deals with Customers or an individual level.

CRM Approaches

Operational CRM:

Designed to provide support to business process including sales, marketing and customer service, each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer’s contact history and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database when necessary.

One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customer can interact with different people or different contact channels in a company overtime without having to describe the history of their interaction each time i.e:Link.net Call center

Another example of operational CRM is the sales force automation (SFA) which is designed to automate sales force related activities, such as lead tracking. Such tasks performed as follows:

Keeping lists of leads.
Assigning list segmented to sales people.
Alluring list contacts to be called or e-mailed.
Generating reports.

Analytical CRM:

Designed to analyse customer data for a variety of purposes such as:

Design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimize marketing effort.
Design and execution of specific customer campaigns including customer acquisition and customer retention.
Analysis of customer behaviour to aid product and service decision making (pricing, new product develop)
Financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis.
Prediction of the probability of customer defection.

Collaborative CRM:

Its ultimate goal is to use information collected from all departments to improve the quality of customer service.

Example: a feedback from a technical support could be used to inform manufacturing staff about specific services and features requested by customer.

Geographic CRM:

Combines data collected from different trading areas with marketing information to be analyzed. This enables the organization to examine potential customers and manage existing customers.

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:58:00 +0300

"The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot."

Michael Altshuler

"True commitment begins when we reach the point of not knowing how we can possibly go on, and decide to do it anyway."

Author Unknown

"I like thinking of possibilities. At any time, an entirely new possibility is liable to come along and spin you off in an entirely new direction. The trick, I've learned, is to be awake to the moment."

Doug Hall

"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action."

Herbert Spencer

"Success is merely the process of fulfilling your own hopes and dreams--not the standards set by society, but by the standards set by you."

George Pataki

"You are accountable for what you do, and no one else is accountable."

Edith Martin

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The only way most people recognize their limits is by trespassing on them."

Tom Morris

"No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought."

John Stuart Mill

"Many say I am just one to try. I say I am one less to quit."

Diego Marchi

"First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do."

Epictetus

"It's also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that's sitting right here right now... with its aches and it pleasures... is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive."

Pema Chodron

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."

Eleanor Roosevelt

"If you are facing the right direction, all you have to do is keep on walking."

Unknown

"It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the master work. Now, I'm beginning what I could have started ten years ago. But I'm happy at least that I didn't wait twenty years."

Paulo Coelho

"Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism; the way you play it is free will."

Jawaharlal Nehru

"The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible."

Arthur C. Clarke

"Now is the time to act and solve all problems and not to succumb to lame excuses."

Brahma Kumaris

"The more you seek security, the less of it you have. But the more you seek opportunity, the more likely it is that you will achieve the security that you desire."

Brian Tracy

"If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances."

Julia Sorel

"When guilt rears its ugly head confront it, discuss it and let it go. The past is over. It is time to ask what can we do right, not what did we do wrong. Forgive yourself and move on."

Bernie S. Siegel

"A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human."

John Cogley

"My actions are my only true belongings."

Thich Nhat Hanh

"Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life."

Wayne Dyer

"Contentment is not the fulfillment of what you want, but the realization of how much you already have."

Author Unknown

"I enjoy every opportunity and live every moment. And that is why I have no regrets. It's when you are not scared of losing that you win everything."

Shailendra Singh

"Life does not happen to us, it happens from us."

Mike Wickett

EGYPT: Less prayer, more work

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sun, 8 Jun 2008 19:58:00 +0300

The call to prayer is a pervasive, comforting echo across the Middle East, but a fatwa by a prominent Islamic cleric urges Muslims to spend less time prostrating and more time working. Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi said worshippers often use prayer to slip away from their jobs longer then they should.

“Praying is a good thing . . . 10 minutes should be enough,” according to an edict posted on Qaradawi’s website. The sheikh’s opinion is shared by many clerics and highlights the dilemma between economic productivity and religious devotion in a part of the world where piety is prized.

Devout Muslims pray five times a day, two of which fall during working hours. They kneel in mosques or unfurl prayer mats and recite the Koran in offices, clogging aisles and bringing work to a halt. The time between ablution -– washing hands and feet -– and a prayer can take 10 minutes, but many Muslim spend as many as 30 minutes on the ritual.

Companies and store owners have been complaining for years about lost labor minutes and inefficiency. The problem goes well beyond prayer time. A recent government study found that Egypt’s 6 million government employees, a massive platoon of bureaucracy, are each estimated to spend only 27 minutes a day working.

If frustrated citizens or customers ask to speed things up, they are met with a sigh, a roll of the eyes and the centuries-old reply: "Inshallah" (God willing).

--Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

Photo: Muslims at prayer. Credit: Associated Press, Hasan Sarbakhshian

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:19:00 +0300

"Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do."

Voltaire

"If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause another to know that they are safe. If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand. If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another."

Tenzin Gyatso

"Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome."

Samuel Johnson

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."

Gotama Buddha

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Fri, 9 May 2008 07:17:00 +0300

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

Eleanor Roosevelt

"Be great in act, as you have been in thought."

William Shakespeare

"Obstacles can't stop you. Problems can't stop you. Most of all, other people can't stop you. Only you can stop you."

Jeffrey Gitomer

"Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new."

Brian Tracy

"Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves."

Germaine Greer

"Instead of telling the world What it is supposed to do, Why don't you immediately do it yourself? In this way, I assure you, Your happiness will be surprisingly multiplied."

Sri Chinmoy

"If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room."

Anita Roddick

"If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not planned enough."

Edward Everett Hale

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult."

Seneca

"Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game."

Donald Trump

"The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen."

Frank Lloyd Wright

"God has no other hands than ours."

Dorothee Solle

"Isn't everyone a part of everyone else?"

Budd Schulberg

"The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work."

Robert Frost

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Mark Twain

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time."

Sir J. Lubbock

"Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can."

Danny Kaye

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time."

Sir J. Lubbock

"Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance."

Oprah Winfrey

"Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone."

Louis L'Amour

"Action is the foundational key to all success."

Pablo Picasso

"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."

William Arthur Ward

"Love is the answer.
Now, what is your question?"

Author Unknown

Introduction to operations Management

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Thu, 1 May 2008 13:19:00 +0300

Operations management is an area of business that is concerned with the production of goods and services, and involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient and effective. It is the management of resources, the distribution of goods and services to customers, and the analysis of queue systems.

The main three major functional areas of organizations are finance, marketing, and operations. Finance is responsible for securing financial resources at favorable prices and allocating those resources throughout the organization, as well as budgeting, analyzing investment proposals, and providing funds for operations. Marketing is responsible for assessing consumer wants and needs, and selling and promoting the organization’s goods or services. Operation is responsible for producing the goods or providing the services offered by the organization.

Manufacturing and service organizations differ chiefly because manufacturing is goods-oriented and service is act oriented. The differ involve in the following: Degree of customer contact, uniformity of input, labor content of jobs, uniformly of output, measurement of productivity, production and delivery, quality assurance, amount of inventory, evaluation of wok, and ability to patent design.

Operations management people are involved in product and service design, process selection, selection and management of technology, design of work systems, location planning, facilities planning, forecasting, capacity planning, scheduling, managing inventories, assuring quality, motivating employees, and quality improvement of the organization’s products or services.

The operations manager is the key figure in the system: he or she has the ultimate responsibility for the creation of goods or provision of services. The kinds of jobs that operations managers oversee very tremendously from organization to organization largely because of the different products or services involved. The operation manager is more involved is day-to-day operating decisions than with decisions relating to system design.

System design involves decisions that relate o system capacity, the geographic location of facilities, and arrangement of departments and placement of equipment within physical structures, product and service planning, and acquisition of equipment. These decisions usually, but not always, require long-term commitments. Moreover, they are typically strategic decisions. System operation involves management of personnel, inventory planning and control, scheduling, project management, and quality assurance. These are generally tactical and operational decisions. System design essentially determines many of the parameters of system operation. E.g. (Costs, space, capacities, and quality)

Operations management professionals make a number of key decisions that affect the entire organizations. These include the following: What: what resources will be needed, and in what amount? When: when will each resource be needed? Where: where the work will be done? How: how will the product or service be designed? Who: who will do the work?

The historical evolution of operations management: the industrial revolution; in the earliest days of manufacturing, goods were produced using craft production. Craft production had major shortcomings. Because products were made by skilled craftsmen who custom fitted parts, production was slow and costly. A major change occurred, the development of standards gauging systems. This greatly reduced the need for custom-made goods .Despite the major changes that were taking place, management theory and practice had not progressed much from early days. What was needed was an enlightened and more systematic approach to management. Whereas the scientific management movement heavily emphasized the technical aspects of work design, the human relations movement emphasized the importance of the human element in ob design. Decisions models and management science; after the world war II, efforts to develop and refine quantitative tools for decision making continued, resulting in decision models for forecasting, inventory management, project management, and other areas of operations management. The influence of Japanese manufacturers, a number of Japanese manufactures developed or refined management practices that increased the productivity of their operations and quality of their products.

Major trends in business: the internet, e-commerce is consumer-to-business transactions. , and e-business is using the internet to transact business. Management of technology is the application of scientific discoveries to the development and improvement of goods and services. Globalization, management of supply chains is a sequence of activities and organizations involved in producing and delivering a good or service, outsourcing is obtaining a product or service from outside organization. Agility is the ability of an organization to respond quickly to demands or opportunities, ethical behavior, operations strategy, working with fewer resources, revenue management, process analysis and improvement, increased regulation, and lean production.

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:23:00 +0200

"I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do."

Jana Stanfied

"I enjoy every opportunity and live every moment. And that is why I have no regrets. It's when you are not scared of losing that you win everything."

Shailendra Singh

"Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life."

Wayne Dyer

"The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be able to correct them."

Kimon Nicolaides

"I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate."

George Burns

"The purpose of relationships is not happiness, but transformation."

Andrew Schneider

"To touch someone with kindness is to change someone forever. Heavy, huh? But that's not the half of it. Because for everyone you touch you also reach everyone they will ever know. And everyone they will ever know. And so, for the rest of all time, your kindness will be felt in waves that will spread long after you move on."

Mike Dooley

"Men do not fail; they give up trying."

Elihu Root

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Helen Keller

"There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other."

Douglas H. Everett

"An enterprising person is one who sees opportunity in all areas of life."

Jim Rohn

"We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released."

Jean Houston

"Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience."

Victoria Holt

"Contentment is not the fulfillment of what you want, but the realization of how much you already have."

Author Unknown

"My actions are my only true belongings."

Thich Nhat Hanh

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:14:00 +0200

"If you follow no other truth, follow the truth that within your being is called joy. If you follow that, you're always going to be right where you need to be, and you will always have life within your being."

Sheradon Bryce

"Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open up a window and look out to see who's there."

Jalal ad-Din Rumi

"The smallest change in perspective can transform a life. What tiny attitude adjustment might turn your world around?"

Oprah

"Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change in attitude."

Katherine Mansfield

"Whatever you fear most has no power; it is your fear that has the power."

Oprah Winfrey

"Your imagination is your preview to life's coming attractions."

Albert Einstein

"One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody everything every night before going to bed."

Bernard Baruch

"Whatever you fear most has no power; it is your fear that has the power."

Oprah Winfrey

"A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone."

Robert Frost

"A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror."

Ken Keyes Jr.

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sun, 2 Mar 2008 16:13:00 +0200

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Anne Frank

"I take nothing for granted. I now have only good days or great days."

Lance Armstrong

"If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it's moving you away from your goals."

Brian Tracy

"If you can dream it, then you can achieve it. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want."

Zig Ziglar

"If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much."

Donald H. Rumsfeld

"It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from. The ability to triumph begins with you. Always."

Oprah Winfrey

"Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future."

Paul Boese

"Energy and persistence conquer all things."

Benjamin Franklin

The Dimensions of an Organization

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sun, 2 Mar 2008 11:16:00 +0200

This article is adapted from Marc Hamilton's book, Software Development: Building Reliable Systems (Prentice Hall PTR, 1999, ISBN 0-13-081246-3).

Many CIOs recognize that the organizational structure of their software development group has an impact on the success of their application development efforts. Unfortunately, there is not always the same level of consensus between CIOs on what the correct organizational structure should be. This article describes organizational structures for small, medium, and large software development organizations and examines the importance of these structures to successful software development. We also discuss centralized versus decentralized organization and the use of virtual project teams.

The Dimensions of an Organization

An organization is defined by much more than boxes containing job titles and names connected by lines representing a reporting structure. In addition to structure, there are multiple dimensions to an organization:

People. Each individual in an organization has certain skills, and these skills are typically measured against formal or informal performance metrics leading to rewards (compensation) as incentives for future performance. The people in an organization establish its culture—those behavior patterns and values that are generally recognized as being adopted.
Process. The procedures and methodologies used by people in the organization. Almost all organizations define their own internal economies through processes for budgeting, priority settings, and project approval.
Technology. The specific skills and tools that people in the organization use to carry out the business functions of the organization.

The Importance of Organizational Structure

Of the different people, process, and technology dimensions of an organization, structure is by far the most fundamental. Without a sound structure, people in the organization lose their culture and compete for individual rewards rather than for the good of the organization. Without structure, processes have no home, and internal economies collapse because of conflicting objectives. Without structure, technology is pursued as a research interest rather than for the good of the organization. While these concepts hold true for any information technology organization, they're especially applicable to software development organizations, no matter what their size.

Many a software startup begins life with no more than a couple of developers working out of a garage. Not much organizational structure is required at this point in a company's history, but organizational structure still exists. For instance, in 1977, when Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed their partnership and officially named it Microsoft, the company had minimal organizational structure. Fewer than a dozen employees worked at Microsoft's first office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and everyone knew who was in charge. No complicated organizational charts were needed to figure out everyone's reporting structure. At the same time, all employees knew their role in the company and what they were trying to accomplish. This was because any organizational structure that was needed could be informally communicated between each of the employees.

At the other end of the spectrum are IT departments of Fortune 500 companies, large independent software vendors, and commercial system integrators. An entry-level programmer at Microsoft today probably needs several different organizational charts to show the reporting structure among 20,000+ employees and up to Bill Gates. Having organization charts alone, unfortunately, is no guarantee of a healthy corporate structure. In any large organization, there are many dimensions to measuring the success of the corporation's structure. While no organizational model fits all development departments, certain traits stand out among companies that routinely produce successful software products.

Streamlining Bureaucracy

One of the side effects suffered by many development organizations as they grow is increased bureaucracy. Although we focus on people and process issues here, the aim is to help streamline bureaucracies, not develop new ones. For instance, at some companies, a standard operating procedure is that, with few exceptions, no document shall ever require more than two approvals: one from the person who authored the document and one from the final approver. In addition to empowering employees, this strategy makes it very simple to place blame when an incorrect decision is made. It also removes the possibility of two superiors rejecting a document and sending it back to the original author with conflicting modifications.

Thirteen Organizational Structure Mistakes

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sun, 2 Mar 2008 11:13:00 +0200

Whatever the size of your software development organization, there are certain mistakes you need to avoid. Good organizational structure is a matter of management theory, science, and experience, not luck. Following are our "unlucky 13" mistakes:

Combining software development and operations into a single organization.

The job of operations is to keep applications up and running. The easiest way to do this is to never change anything. Combining development and operations into a single organization has the natural tendency to stifle innovation. Software development organizations should be separated from operations to allow new and modified applications to be developed as required to support the business needs of the company.
Organizing software technology specialists by project.

A modern day software development project requires a wide range of software specialists during different times in the software lifecycle. If you have a small organization with only one specialist and two projects, the specialist clearly needs to work on both projects, perhaps at different times. As your organization grows and develops more specialists, you still want to have specialists work across projects wherever and whenever they're most needed. But what happens if you assign technology specialists by project and each project ends up having a small number of specialists that must act as generalists, while doing the work of another specialist assigned to a different project? The result is that your organization as a whole cannot take advantage of all its specialists where they're most needed, and fails to take advantage of the synergies of being one integrated development organization.
Organizing software technology specialists by application domain (financial, manufacturing, and so on).

This results in the same problem as mistake 2 above. Given a fixed headcount, each application domain receives a smaller group of specialists who therefore are driven to become generalists. There is no room for software technology specialists who span across application domains, such as a GUI design specialist.
Organizing software developers by delivery platform (Windows, UNIX, mainframe, and so on).

Developers tend to develop a bias in favor of their assigned platform. As a result, there tends to be little or no innovation in new platforms (such as network computers) or cross-platform approaches (such as web-top computing or client/server systems).
Separating software development and software maintenance groups.

When you separate software development and software maintenance, you end up requiring the same types of software specialists for each group. This means you either have to double headcount in your organization for specialists or force one group to reduce specialization. In addition, it becomes harder to create incentives for software developers to do things right the first time, as they know another group will ultimately be responsible for fixing any mistakes. Such an organization also tends to develop two classes of software developers, leading to morale problems.
Representing projects in the formal organizational structure instead of defining project teams that cut across organizational boundaries.

This strategy leads to reorganization whenever a major project ends. As a result, software developers spend an inordinate amount of time looking for their next job or find unnecessary reasons to prolong their existing projects.
Organizing software developers into long-term and short-term development groups.

Again, this type of organization requires two of every software specialist and builds unnecessary competition between the two groups. In addition, this organization often encourages point solutions that may be quicker to implement but cost more in the long term, because of higher maintenance costs and difficulties in integrating with enterprise-wide applications.
Designing organizations that need "super-developers" to succeed.

In today's complex software development environments, no single developer can be a specialist in all fields. The organization should allow developers to become true specialists in a single field and reward them accordingly. The workload should also be managed to allow software developers to lead balanced lives. No one can work 18 hours a day forever and be expected to maintain his or her work quality and personal satisfaction.
Designing organizations that tolerate underachievers.

This is the corollary of mistake 8. A healthy organization employs everyone's complete range of talents to the fullest. Software developers who are allowed to underachieve will become bored with their work, which will only lead to poorer quality and further poor performance.
Designing organizations that reward empire building.

Organizational structures should eliminate all incentives for empire building. This means providing equal career paths for both senior-level software engineers and software development managers. Along the same lines, career paths should be provided both for software generalists and software specialists, as both are needed in a healthy organization.
Setting organizational goals that compete against each other for customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction should be the ultimate goal of all software development organizations. One organization should not have goals whose achievement negatively affects the customer satisfaction of another organization. For instance, if two development groups are working on applications for the same customer that must ultimately be integrated together, one organization should not be rewarded for meeting its timelines if this was only done at the expense of creating a more difficult integration task for the second group.
Organizing around individuals instead of personality types.

Every experienced software development manager recognizes the importance of matching a developer's job to his or her personality; however, even in the most stable of organizations, individuals come and go. You shouldn't design organizations around individual personalities. Instead, organize them around more general personality types. This allows the organization to recognize the value of individual diversity without having to reorganize every time someone comes and goes.
Mandating organizational changes from the top down.

All software development organizations eventually must change to adopt to new business models, technologies, or clients. However, mandating a structural change has little or no effect if it's not accompanied by cultural and process changes. The best way to assure successful change is to manage it via a participative process in which all developers are given a chance to affect the final outcome.

Managerial ethics and corporate Social responsibility

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 18:56:00 +0200

Ethics and social responsibility are hot topics for today's managers. The ethical domain of behavior pertains to values of right and wrong. Ethical decisions and behavior are typically guided by a value system. Four value-based approaches that serve as criteria for ethical decision making are utilitarian, individualism, moral rights, and justice. For an individual manager, the ability to make correct ethical choices will depend on individual and organizational characteristics. An important individual characteristic is the level of moral development. Corporate culture is an organizational characteristic that influences ethical behavior. Strong ethical cultures become more important in turbulent environments because they help people make the right choices in the face of confusion and rapid change.

Corporate social responsibility concerns a company's values toward society. How can organizations be good corporate citizens? The model for evaluating social performance uses four criteria: economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary. Evaluating corporate social behavior often requires assessing its impact on corporate social behavior often requires assessing its impact on organizational stakeholders. One issue of growing concern is environmental responsibility. Organizations may take a legal, market, stakeholder, or activist approach to addressing environmental concerns. Sustainability is growing movment that emphasizes economic development that meets the needs of today while preserving resources for the future.

Ethical organizations are supported by three pillars: ethical individuals, ethical leadership, and organizational structures and systems, including a code of ethics, ethics committees, chief ethics officers, training programs, and mechanisms to protect whistle-blowers. Ethical and socially responsible companies perform as well as – and often better then – those that are not socially responsible. Social entrepreneurship is burgeoning as new leaders create innovative organizations that blur the boundaries between business and welfare, these organizations may or may not make a profit but the overriding goal is to improve society.

Timberland decided to continue its commitment to social cases. In fact, later the same year that Swartz was faced with this dilemma, the company doubled the number of hours it underwrote for employees to do community service. That number has increased to a full 40 hour week, plus the company offers paid sabbaticals for people to work six months full time in community nonprofits. This commitment to discretionary responsibility has contributed to exceptional loyalty many employees because people feel good about the work they do. One vice president says she has turned down lucrative offers from other companies because at timberland she doesn't feel as if she has to check her values at the door. Timberland consistently ranks in fortune magazine's survey of the 100 best companies to work for, and more than 50 percent of timberland's employees say the focus on community is the main reason they work there. However, some people felt that timberland should have cut out the charity activities to focus on meeting its economic responsibilities when company hit difficult times. In addition, some felt that the company was failing to meet its ethical responsibilities by spending money on community service when it was laying people off and shipping jobs overseas. Some employees bluntly asked, "Doesn't charity begin at home?" Swartz said he believe, however that cutting out community service would damage morale and lower commitment without solving the financial problems. Fortunately, Timberland rebounded from its difficulties and continued to grow. However, managers will continue to face challenges concerning how to best meet their responsibilities to all stakeholders.

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 10:43:00 +0200

"The world is more malleable than you think, and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape."

Bono

Motivational Quote of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eng. Ahmed Nasr) — Tue, 5 Feb 2008 08:59:00 +0200

"Goals provide the energy source that powers our lives. One of the best ways we can get the most from the energy we have is to focus it. That is what goals can do for us: concentrate our energy."

Denis Waitley