What is Agile Methodology?

Engineering methodologies required a lot of documentation thereby causing the pace of development to slow down considerably. Agile Methodologies evolved in the 1990s to significantly eliminate this bureaucratic nature of engineering methodology. It was part of developer’s reaction against “heavyweight” methods, who desired to drift away from traditional structured, bureaucratic approaches to software development and move towards more flexible development styles. They were called the ‘Agile’ or ‘Light Weight’ methods and were defined in 1974 by Edmonds in a research paper. Agile methodology is an approach to project management, typically used in software development. It refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development. Requirements and solutions evolve through cooperation between self-organizing cross-functional teams, without concern for any hierarchy or team member roles. It promotes teamwork, collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the project life-cycle with increased face-to-face communication and reduced amount of written documentation. Agile methods break Continue reading

Management Planning and Control

The essence of the management process is decision-making. Decision making is an unavoidable and continuous management activity. It may be directed towards some specific objectives, or it may result as a reaction of environmental factors as they occur. The decision-making process should be both efficient and effective. It would be effective when management’s objectives are achieved. It is said to be efficient when objectives are realized with the minimum use of resources. The process of decision-making involves two basic management functions of planning and control. Planning Function of  Management   The decision-making process starts with planning.   Planning is a statement of what should be done, how it should be done and when it should be done. It is the design of a desired future state of an entity and of the effective ways of bringing it about.   Its basic purpose is to provide guidelines for making decisions.   Continue reading

Methods of Corporate Restructuring

The important methods of Corporate Restructuring are: Joint ventures Sell off and spin off Divestitures Equity carve out (ECO) Leveraged buy outs (LBO) Management buy outs Master limited partnerships Employee stock ownership plans (ESOP) 1. Joint Ventures Joint ventures are new enterprises owned by two or more participants. They are typically formed for special purposes for a limited duration. It is a combination of subsets of assets contributed by two (or more) business entities for a specific business purpose and a limited duration. Each of the venture partners continues to exist as a separate firm, and the joint venture represents a new business enterprise. It is a contract to work together for a period of time each participant expects to gain from the activity but also must make a contribution. For Example: GM-Toyota JV: GM hoped to gain new experience in the management techniques of the Japanese in building high-quality, Continue reading

Emerging Markets for International Capital Investments

Of late emerging markets have become a buzzword among the  international investors for reaping greatest potential rewards which would be  impossible if they stayed put in their affluent hinterlands. The term emerging  markets (EMs) is a collective reference to the stock markets of the developing  nations.  A question, which overpowers a discerning mind, is why the  international investors are looking towards emerging markets for investing  their funds instead of established markets like US? Three reasons can be  given to answer this question. First, the average total return of emerging  markets  has outstripped those of  developed markets. Investments total return index computed by the IFC (International Finance Corporation)  which  measures the total return for each country based on those stock available to  foreign investors shows that return on investment in IFC composite of EMs is  61.64 per cent higher than the return on investment in US market over the  years. The Continue reading

Augmented Reality (AR) – Meaning, Operation and Benefits

Augmented reality refers to the utilization of computers to modify reality, usually in order to provide additional assistance when a human user is interacting with the real environment. The real world around humans provides a wealth of information which the human user must absorb and process through their senses. The most useful and informative of all human senses is the sense of vision and a huge amount of information about the ambiance is required to be sensed as well as processed by the human visual system. Computers are useful because they can provide an overlay of information to assist with the human processing of the information which they perceive through their senses, mostly the visual sense.  As an example, a human who is walking around an urban area can be provided additional information through a head mounted display which superimposes textual information about identification of buildings and other important landmarks Continue reading

Ketan Parekh Scam and It’s Impact on Financial Institutions

Ketan Parekh was threatening to sue the Bank of India for defamation, because it complained about the bouncing of Rs 1.3-billion pay orders issued to the broker by the Madhavpura Mercantile Cooperative Bank. He seemed to suggest there is nothing more that the authorities would be able to pin against him. At last investigations by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Board of India reveal that the sheer magnitude of money moved around by Parekh or available to him for his market manipulation was a staggering Rs 64 billion. Money abroad The CBI called a press conference to announce it had unearthed a Swiss bank account in which Parekh was listed as the beneficiary. The Bureau claimed there was $ 80 million (Rs 3.4 billion) in the account, which has since been frozen. In the past, CBI announcements were usually followed up with a quick arrest, Continue reading