Productivity planning

Core scope or idea for the product or service. This is the first step for any project and this article was thought of as a separate one after writing the next one about IT projects. The scope is important for whatever be the work. This was written for an IT  project but can apply for any task whether designing a bicycle or a software application.

1. The scope will define what is the end product and its requirements, user profile, pricing and visual appearance amongst others. Pricing will include acquisition cost and others such as maintenance, accessories , consumables . For example a car would include expected selling price, running costs, yearly maintenance, accessories, marketing costs , expected resale value after certain years. These will also influence or be influenced by the expected customer and usage. Sometimes the pricing and time to complete a task is decided to secure orders and not based on actuals.

The scope will include 

  1. Basic description 
  2. Price 
  3. Function 
  4. Usage
  5. User profile and Marketing Strategy
  6. Branding and relationships with strategies 
  7. Resources available including financial and human capital.. Human capital will include technical, marketing, management, quality assurance, support and more.working capital, office or factory space can be owned or leased at a convenient location.


If there is no clarity of purpose or preparation, Time estimates will be incorrect and productivity will come down.

Hiring the right people

A big challenge when hiring people is that of choosing someone for skilled jobs like programming or marketing. Both of these cannot be done on academic performance or simply asking questions that test memory and knowledge. My favorite approach is to test programmers by giving them a small task to be done on the computer. This not only tests their speed but also attitude apart from programming skill. While interviewing , As an Oracle database developer, I myself have faced interviews where the interviewer assigns tasks that are often offline and places trust on doing it and explaining the solution ranging to interviews that are largely about memory and involve questions that are straight out of the Oracle manual like what is the syntax for xyzzy command.