The Goods and Services Tax or GST Council, under the chairmanship of Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and his state counterparts, has decided rates for over 1, 200 goods and 500 services, placing them in four tax slabs of 5, 12, 18 and 28 percent.As we know GST is one of the most important tax reform since independence, it will be a disruptive influence. However, it is expected that it will promote new investment and contribute to the overall growth in GDP.The GST is expected to remove the cascading effect of taxation, avoid multiple taxation, and result in reduced prices ... Read More

Start-ups are promising, innovative and conducive to the ever expanding business environment. According to NASSCOM, India is gaining the third spot globally with the fastest growing base of start-ups. The growth rate has been almost 40% with more than 4000 being added every year since the beginnings in late 2014. Worldwide, US leads the way in the start-up ecosystem followed by Indonesia, UK, Germany, Brazil, Spain, Canada, and France.While all start-ups require financial support to flourish, they also need a technology stack to build their applications for the user/customer. The technology stack is simply the software tools/programming languages used for ... Read More

Isn’t it difficult to tackle certain situations when one wrong step can change the entire consequences? Yes, some situations make us dumbfound, and paralyze our decision-making capabilities whether that has a positive or negative impact on our project’s life. So, don’t you think that it is better to have some tools and techniques to deal with such threats and opportunities?Irrespective of the project’s duration and intricacy, risks are always there and in the case of long-term complex projects, the level of risks increases manifolds. So, to minimize the negative impact on our projects, we should have a concrete plan with ... Read More

Last week, while discussing with my colleagues on various topics, the discussions took an unexpected turn and reached to one of the trending topic called ‘Employee Attrition’. Frankly saying it was not unexpected, actually for the last couple of months we have been seeing many ‘good-bye’ or ‘keep in touch’ kind of parting emails almost twice or thrice in a week. Everybody is discussing on it, whether it is during lunch time or coffee breaks, the gossip and rumors are in the air!These type of discussions are not only restricted to one company. Actually, you can see such trends in ... Read More

Managing a project is not everybody’s cup of tea. There are many aspects of the projects which we need to plan and manage perfectly to achieve the desired success, whether it is the scope, schedule, cost or quality. It is also seen that many times, the project runs into trouble only because the Project Manager fails to monitor and control the project cost.So it is important to manage the project cost throughout the project with proper planning and controlling the project budget. To manage the project cost effectively, there are certain activities which we need to perform initially.Planning the Cost: ... Read More

The world is moving fast, consequently the technologies which we are using also keeps improving day by day. So to maintain the pace of transforming technologies, we need to keep upgrading ourselves. Gone are the days, when Project Managers across the world use the traditional processes to estimate the Scope, Schedule, Cost and other project constraints to manage the project.But these days, we have privileges to use many established tools and techniques which are evolved after years of research and practices. There are some proven techniques which can help the Project Managers to manage the projects in a more organized ... Read More

Managing the schedule of a Project is not an easy task. Once the project schedule is delayed then the Project Manager and the team has to burn the midnight oil to get back the schedule on track. So, instead of waiting to cross that bridge when you come to it, better plan it properly as early as possible. During planning, one of the important steps is to sequence the activities using proper methods and techniques.Sequencing the activities is the process of identifying the dependencies and relationships among the activities, and then putting them in a logical sequence to obtain accurate ... Read More

Managing a project is not everybody’s cup of tea; it is certainly a tough row to hoe. Whether it is a large scale project or a medium scale project, there are many important facets of the project which require a constant monitoring to keep them on track. You cannot encapsulate your project for a safe run, changes are inevitable, and it is impossible to turn down the change requests. Thus, it is a bitter pill to swallow for the managers to control the project by simultaneously accepting the expected and unexpected changes.So, the project managers have to be alert enough ... Read More

A common nightmare for the project managers across the industries is to keep the schedule on track. But most often, for various reasons the schedule goes hay-way. It can be an unrealistic schedule planning which often happens in today’s competitive market, or due to any unforeseen incidents or in-case of any force majeure. For instance, if project schedules gets out of hand, the managers for the respective projects will have to run pillar to post to bring the project on track. But, that is not the same case always, it is also observed that sometimes due to the client or ... Read More

Augmented Reality or AR is where artificial objects are simulated in the real world and incorporates or merges the information as part of the live view. The technology functions by enhancing a person’s concept of reality by overlaying the information over their view and merging it together. This perspective gives information and data of the object/scene viewed and in some cases, lets you manipulate the projected image to suit our needs.AR enhances the real environment whereas, VR creates a new environment altogether.A fragment of Augment Reality was seen with the release of Google Glass, the world saw a glimpse of ... Read More