MY WRITING JOURNAL

Saturday, June 22

Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> The Florida Panthers look to win their first Stanley Cup tonight (8 pm ET, ABC) with a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series against the Edmonton Oilers (More) | Los Angeles Lakers reportedly hire NBA veteran JJ Redick as next head coach (More)

> Donald Sutherland, Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning actor known for roles in "M*A*S*H" and "Hunger Games," dies at 88 (More) | Rapper Travis Scott arrested in Miami for trespassing and public intoxication (More)

> 2024 Copa América kicks off; see previews for all 16 teams in the soccer tournament (More) | Team USA track and field Olympic trials begin today from Eugene, Oregon (More)

Science & Technology
> AI startup Anthropic releases Claude 3.5 Sonnet, three months after releasing its previous version; model is meant to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google's Gemini (More)

> Paleontologists discover potential new triceratops-like dinosaur species, dubbed Lokiceratops; 78-million-year-old fossil suggests the dinosaur family saw region-specific evolution in horn and skull shape (More)

> James Webb Space Telescope captures aligned streams emanating from newborn star clusters; first direct observation of the phenomenon confirms current theory of star formation (More)

Business & Markets
> US stock markets close mixed (S&P 500 -0.3%, Dow +0.8%, Nasdaq -0.8%); S&P 500 closes lower after briefly surpassing the 5,500 level for the first time (More)

> Bank of England keeps interest rates at 16-year high of 5.25% despite inflation slowing to 2% annual rate in May (More) | Construction of new US homes in May drops to slowest pace in four years, falling 5.5% month-over-month to seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.28 million per year (More)

> US Supreme Court rejects challenge to one-time tax on certain offshore business income; the 2017 tax law provision is expected to generate $340B (More)

Politics & World Affairs
> At least four people killed after Tropical Storm Alberto makes landfall in eastern Mexico, bringing flooding and heavy rainfall to Mexico and Texas (More) | See photos (More) | US heat wave breaks records across Midwest and East Coast due to a high-pressure system known as a heat dome (More)

> The US reallocates air defense missiles originally intended for other countries to Ukraine; initial deliveries to arrive in Ukraine by end of summer, with deliveries for other allies delayed by at least 16 months (More) | See war updates (More)

> Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fails to qualify for CNN's June 27 presidential debate with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump; Kennedy, an independent presidential candidate, is on five state ballots (More) | View latest polls (More)

SOURCE: 1440 NEWS

Project Management - Part III

Project resource management requires you to know and work with the bandwidth of your team. Identify their individual strengths, weaknesses, and synergy with other team members. It all comes back to that part about helping team members grow.

Project communications management is making sure everyone involved is informed on changes, updates and issues at the right time. A breakdown in communications can be problematic, so it’s not an area where you want to be weak.

Project risk management can flag upcoming problems and equip you with the means to work around and through them, rather than causing major complications.

Project procurement management is about making sure you have the outside resources and materials when you need them, working with suppliers, vendors, other contractors, and specialized personnel

Stakeholder project management is about identifying all those that have a vested interest in the project outside of those directly working on the project. These stakeholders are usually the ones who have authorized or funded the project.

It is true that you can work as a project manager without having any knowledge of the phases of a project or the ten knowledge areas of the project. However, at the conclusion of your first project you will intuitively know about all of this, even though you may not be aware of the specific terms that you have learned in these three project management postings.

Having this knowledge upfront is simply a shortcut but in no way any kind of indication that you cannot be a project manager without this knowledge.

My knowledge of project management came from my MBA training and actually working on numerous projects after graduation.

I found out on my own that I needed to keep a detailed communications notebook of all communications, including making notes about my telephone calls, always making sure I had the names of everyone involved on the call.

Through experience, I learned to lay out an overall map of the project (Project Scope) to make sure I fully understood what needed to take place from beginning to end. Through this scope, I was able to anticipate what personnel/supplies that I needed when and when I would have a short fall of people and needed to hire others.

Through experience, I learned what tasks needed to be done when or what tasks needed to be done before another one could start, as well as what tasks could be done simultaneously to reduce time and costs.

The ultimate goal of a project manager is to have the project be completed ON TIME and UNDER BUDGET with 100% of the quality mandated by the Stakeholder or project originator. Understanding project management through the PMBOK and PMP certification is not required but is damn helpful with that process.

Somewhat Political

Putin's Semi-Automated Military

Russia increasingly looks toward artificial intelligence (AI) to address deficiencies in its battlefield capabilities and capacities that the invasion of Ukraine has exposed, according to experts.

"Russian futurists, Russian technologists, Russian developers are envisioning this slow evolution away from larger human involvement to where humans are going to be involved as little as possible," Samuel Bendett, adjunct senior fellow in the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), told Fox News Digital.

"Some of those statements were made prior to Russia's disastrous invasion of Ukraine and Russia's conduct in this war, which is very much manpower intensive… but this is something that the Russian military is keeping sort of on the horizon," he said. READ MORE...