An important announcement

I am very happy to announce to the world that i have taken up Independent consulting role after working for more than 12  years in Cambridge solutions pte ltd Singapore (Advanced business partner of IBM). It's been a very long journey with the company from the level of programmer to presales consultant / project manager / solution architect  all in one role :) I should say i had enjoyed most of the time but at times you feel tired of going to work especially after very long hours and some week end work. (They are some of the reasons to take up Independent consulting role but doesn't mean IC will need you to work less though the feeling is truly different and it's been some time i have been thinking of Independent consulting)

In any case, i have taken the decision and am going to enjoy the journey and look forward to it.. I am taking up work in my core areas first mostly with IBM Lotus and WebSphere Portal technology projects consulting and Project Management services while am also working with some Business process re-engineering projects etc. But i am very sure i would be evolving a lot in the years to come.

Hence, i have a request to my readers.. If you know of any work related with IBM Lotus technologies, Project Management requirements or BPM / BPR related work please let me know. I live in Singapore and would be willing to travel also. You can hire me on a project basis or for a specific duration. Drop me a note skumar75atgmaildotcom and we can discuss :)

Lotus Notes - Project Management Thoughts

This was in my draft for quite some time and finally released today.
In the early morning today, i was thinking of day to day situation where as a PM, i need to know what my team members are working on today and how much of that is already completed.
I will be using this information in the regular status meeting with the customer, so that when the action items coming out during that meeting i can easily visualize when can it be accommodated considering the current work load. The customer also will be able to see exactly what the team is working and which resource is doing what. This will be particularly good when the whole team executes the project in the customer site which we did for one of the migration project recently ( more will come soon on that)
Eventually, one would come to know what are the activities we did for the complete project and who are the people worked on those. And this data will be really helpful when we bid for the next project.
MS-Project would probably help me out if the information is required  only for me and of course with the help of Project server, i would be able to share this information with others. But i am not sure how complicated would that be. And i doubt they have something like a local replica which i can carry across to my meetings all the time. Even in this era of connectivity all the time, there are definitely still places where a local replica is going to help you a lot.
In those situations, IBM Lotus Notes will help address the needs. You can build a functional application in few days time using the Lotus Domino Designer which is free.
There are some very good products that are already available in Lotus Notes and Domino platform. For eg: Genius4Domino is a very good product for project management tool for a project group available as both Lotus Notes client and Domino web based application.