The Project Manager's Life: Knowing Your Goal

A project manager’s ability to lead the project team to the successful completion of its task is predicated upon his or her understanding of the task itself. If the requirements are not clear and the final deliverable is not firmly defined, the team will surely encounter obstacles that block its progress. These may be in the form of confusing or constantly changing requirements or an imprecise definition of what constitutes completion. They will surely block progress and perhaps jeopardize the attainment of the goal. Gopal Mittal clearly depicts the issue when he writes:

One who is not sure of what his destination is
Will seldom be able to clear the rocks from his path
Gopal Mittal

ख़ुद यक़ीन होता नहीं जिनको अपनी मंज़िल का
उनको राह के पत्थर कभी रास्ता देते नहीं
गोपाल मित्तल*

خود یقین ہوتا نہیں جنکو اپنی منزل کا
اُن کو راہ کے پتھر کبھی راستہ دیتے نہیں
گوپال متّل

When the requirements are clear and the deliverable defined, a strong project manager will be able to lead his or her team to help them define approaches to circumvent or resolve issues that are blocking progress. Make sure that you and those working with you or for whom you are working always know what your goal is and that they are in agreement!

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A word about the shaayar (poet):

Gopal Mittal (1909-93) was a journalist and poet who wrote for a number of newspapers and literary magazines. He moved from Lahore to Delhi after Partition, where he started a monthly Urdu magazine Tahrik or Tahreek (तहरीक, تحریک, The Movement) which he continued to edit until his death.

* Sher provided by Manish Modi

Typing Text in Urdu

Many readers have contacted me for instructions on how to type text in Urdu script.

There is an excellent site, South Asia Language Resource Center, provided by The University of Chicago at the following link:

http://salrc.uchicago.edu/resources/fonts/available/urdu/ .

This site will provide links to a wide variety of fonts as well as instructions on how to install them and how to install keyboard layouts. I recommend using the Windows 2000/XP Keyboard Layout if you are a Windows user.

To get the best presentation of the Urdu script as compared to regular Arabic, the Nafees Nastaleeq and Farsi Simple Bold fonts provide the best results. It is important to understand that your documents or Web postings will not appear in these fonts on other readers' computers unless they have them installed as well. Documents or Web pages created using the Arial, Times New Roman, or Tahoma fonts will not have this problem, however, since those fonts are standard on Windows systems.