OfficeBIZ 3.0: February 2010

Feb 3 2010 – is an important date for all mobile application developers – particularly who works for Nokia, Samsung and LG devices. The spectacular Symbian Mobile Operating System became Open Source. Symbian Foundation finally announced that the code for its Operating system would be available for free.

As per reports, there are 330 million devices worldwide using Symbian Operating System. Nokia already provided many free tools, including UI development apps, as enhancement building products for nokia devices.

We expect more new initiatives in Symbian platform this year – applications, tools and multimedia content are going to be the high numbers.

Are we ready? – if interested, communicate with me for more discussions.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

10 Professional Resume Building Tips

Professional Resume writing is an art. The best practice is updating the resume document at least once 3 months. It makes you prepare yourself for every new opportunity in your professional line. Let’s discuss 10 professional resume building points, helps you for formulate your resume into a professional key for success.

1. Choose a Right Template: There are many free templates available in internet – but choose the one match to your requirement and professional activities. A freelance painter’s resume template is not going to be the best option for engineering professional. Let the font be clearly readable.

2. Have Fewer Pages: I would suggest having just 3 pages max. No one will read the entire story pack – everyone needs the essential points for their requirements. Organize your resume with only important information – for ex: Professional Exp, Education, Contact information etc.

3. Profile Summary: Keep this between 10 to 15 Statements. Give a clear vision about what your profile is all about.

4. Professional Experience: List only required information. Start from current profile – Role with type of Projects, Organization, and Location – followed by your key activities.

5. Core Competencies: List your Technical knowledge areas in detail. Ensure your categorize them in small groups

6. Domain Knowledge: This is very important if you are more then 5+ years experienced. List your knowledge domain in business groups.

7. Use Header and Footer: Give your contact information Phone# and Email ID in footer. Let every page header carry your name and current profile Information.

8. Professional Certifications: Group your professional certifications for business and technical lines. Ensure you list them from latest one.

9. Cut your Project Details: Let your professional Experience section have a simple one line about the type of projects you handled. Don’t write client information, project scope details and etc in Resume document. Instead talk about them in interviews to give your new employer a clear visibility about your experience.

10. Blogs, Social Groups, Twitter: Mention your Blog URL (Technical or Professional only), any Social Groups you involve (PMP Desk etc), and Professional Twitter address. This gives an opportunity to your new employer to know your knowledge and attitude.

Build you resume in professional way. Keep it simple and sharp. Publish them in right portals and promote it always as your key for success in professional life.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

5 Simple ways to use Social Networks for Job Searching

Social Networking sites give a large base to build good network of friends. There are numerous students and professionals using Social Networks for many purposes including create new friends group, sharing personal interests and even professional benefits. Let’s discuss 5 simple ways to use Social Networks to find new jobs, or switch to new opportunities.

1. Update your Profile fully: Many are having their profiles with very basic information. This will not give any visibility about your knowledge and strengths to anyone. Fill your profile with required details – as much as possible to make it attractive. Make sure the information you give are only facts.

2. Connect with Friends: Try to connect with all your known friends and friends of those friends. Get introduced to new friends and build a healthy network. Don’t limit your friends group inside your office or personal friends – you can even add friends who are not in your professional line – but they can definitely give you an idea about new opportunities.

3. Participate in Groups: There are many communities with specific interest groups. Do join in them and participate actively. Share your knowledge and thoughts. Ask questions and answer to other’s questions. Participate and comment in Polls.

4. Blog your knowledge: Create a small blog to share your knowledge points. Every social networking site is having a small blog section. Use it. Also read other’s blog posts and comment your points. Make yourself visible with your knowledge. Update your status information regularly and use it to promote your professional activities.

5. Connect with other Social Tools: Add your micro blogs, Photo blogs with professional network and promote your personal + professional activities. Share the technical or management news, information though micro blogs and follow other micro bloggers.

Using the above given simple ways, you can get more friends and your visibility in social groups gets you focus. Your friends can refer you in their organizations – by seeing your thoughts and knowledge sharing content. Many HR networks are finding professional with right attitude through social networks only. Use these simple ways and get opportunities.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

5 Key Elements of Project Planning

Planning is the compulsory activity for projects of any size – it can be for few weeks, or for years. Project planning gives a complete visibility about tasks to be completed, schedules / milestones to be followed, and resources / skill sets required to complete the project in successful way. It helps a lot in committing deliverables with clients. Basically it improves the accountability, quality of deliverables and trust on overall management.

Let’s discuss about 5 Key elements required for any project planning – it can be a software project, or a social activity, construction or even any engineering work.

Work Breakdown: Basically a detail list of tasks to be completed. Start from the day one work and try to break big tasks into details as much as possible. Let the duration of activity be minimum 1 day – (8 Hours) - the maximum 5 days (40 Hours). If many activities are going to be completed in one day – group them and assign 0.5 / 0.25 type of durations. This helps you to understand what all we have to do in given time.

Resources: It can be people who for the project, or even the equipments required completing the job. For every task in your Work Breakdown List – assign a resource, and make sure the resource is not overloaded anywhere – you can do this by seeing, how many hours the resource is loaded with tasks per day. Add resource cost to see the cost of overall execution. You can even group resources to identify group level resource usages in future.

Connect Tasks: Predecessors help to connect each task with its pre-requisite task. For example – Task 1 should be completed before we start Task 2. In this case, the Task 1 is the predecessor for Task 2. Task 2 becomes successor for Task 1. You can have multiple predecessors, if a single task requires more than one task to be completed before its starting date. There are different type of predecessors – Finish to Start, Start to Start, Start to Finish and Finish to Finish – lets discuss about this more in future articles.

Calendar: Update your calendar in Plans with holidays and resource available status information. This will have an impact with schedules. Using a calendar with expected holidays, and leave status, resource availability statuses is always a good practice in project management.

Baseline: This is an important process with project plans – Baseline you plan for any future tracking and status updates. Baseline helps you to generate management reports with tasks, schedules and resources. If your scope is increased after few weeks of project start date – update the new activities, assign resources and re-baseline the project plan – but remember to re-baseline only new and updated tasks.

The Project plan should be tracked for status updates every day. Add milestone tasks under each important deliverables and flag them once it is completed. You can generate all management level reports with project management tools – there are many tools available in online & offline.

Monday, February 1, 2010

New wave - Mobile Internet Development

Internet is growing rapidly, and mobile internet adds jet to it. Few months before, many mobile companies started to introduce smart phones and internet ready mobile devices. The browser manufactures also started to release their mobile version of popular browsers – one best example is Opera mini browser. Opera mini is one the best browser I have used for mobile internet browsing. I am using a Nokia S40 Device, but I heard that Opera mini is showing a lot of magic in Nokia S60 and other advance models, including smart phones.

As many of us know, the websites for mobile should be little different than usual websites. If you take a look for available mobile websites – they will have less graphics, easy navigations, and smart way of information display. This helps to load the pages quick, and saves the internet browning cost.

There are many developers working on developing websites and web designs. The emerging mobile internet world will give them more opportunities to build mobile websites, mobile web apps and related content managers etc.

While developing mobile websites – just keep these points in mind.

1. Always choose Single Column Layout for Mobi Site Web Design. Two or more Columns make the site slow and also incorrect content display with many devices.
2. Decide your menu Items while planning for mobile site– and show them as breadcrumbs. It helps for better navigation in many devices. Limit the website for less than 10 pages.
3. Use XHTML for coloring the

tags – avoid images as much as possible. If you want to show photo gallery or similar stuff – give them options to use Flickr viewers, Picasa Viewers through Snaptu or related tools.
4. While using Images, compress them to low file size – keep them with always.
5. Try using simple Server side plug-ins for RSS integration or Twitter calls. It saves the loading time. For Videos, and other downloadable content – give them options to download in PC / and save it to device later.

The future devices will have more facilities to browse internet sites – I expect the mobile browser providers will also come up with new additions. The internet browsing cost is also becoming less now days, it will improve the usages. I suggest – the small and medium size teams, should learn more on working with mobile internet apps / sites – I am sure it’s a next level business.