Global ICT Management cooperates with Re.M.I. blog.

As Re.M.I. focus on social media, Global ICT management focus on important items for (Global) ICT managers. Strategy, Project management, Technology and Social media.

There for we started a cooperate in blogging and informing professionals on interesting items.

For more interesting items visit: http://remi8.blogspot.nl

Blue Ocean Strategy

Blue Ocean Strategy is the best-selling book which launched a worldwide revolution in business strategy. Challenging the conventional competition based approaches to business strategy, Blue Ocean Strategy focuses on making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested market spaces, instead of trying to beat it. It is based on a decade long study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than 30 industries over 100 years and presents a systematic way of maximizing opportunities while minimizing risks for creating new demand in the marketplace.

The balanced scorecard.

The balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government, and nonprofit organisations worldwide to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organisation, improve internal and external communications, and monitor organisation performance against strategic goals.

Strategy

The starting point for every (IT) manager is a strategy. But how to make one? And more importantly, how to make an good one and implement it.

This is the interesting introduction lecture for Strategic Management. Good Luck.

Prince2

In this video Frank Turley explains Prince2 -the standard in project management.

Good luck!

This training provides the following information:
* High level introduction to the PRINCE2 Process Model
* Shows relationship between processes and components
* How projects starts and how it moves from one process to another
* When, where and by who the important documents are created
* Cover the role of the Project Manager and Project Board
* How the project board control the project
* And how a typical project closes
* etc...

Source:

Created by Frank Turley
Assisted by Eralp Tezcan
PRINCE2™ is a Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce.

Capex / Opex explaned

As a project manager you have to deal with financial items like Capex and Opex. But what are they exactly?

CAPEX
CAPEX is investment in the business. It adds shareholder value. But this new additional shareholder value is almost entirely created by the CASH FLOW created by the investment, not really the physical assets you buy, although there could be an element of this. This cash flow is why you invest in the first place and in the vast majority of cases is the prime component of the shareholder value that is added (ie stock price goes up). Assets depreciate so that value eventually disappears. What is left over is the cash flow. Put another way, CAPEX is the money you stump up today in the hopes of getting a nice stream of cash later on. Physical assets are merely a means to an end. Capital gains do play a part in it as well but let's keep it simple for now.

CAPEX can be externally financed. Collateral for debt financing can be anything you and the lender agree on. Anything. But all they care about is interest payments and getting their money back in the end. Equity investors are different - they're greedy. They want it all. If financing with equity, then you are in essence promising the entire future cash flow of the project to your investors.

OPEX
OPEX is COGS, SG&A and R&D. It's what you have to spend in order to keep your business running. OPEX is deducted from your revenue to get operating profit. Put another way, OPEX is a measure of the (in)efficiency of your business. It has a direct correlation with enterprise value. You reduce OPEX (without hurting your core business), and you increase enterprise value. Lay off a bunch of people, and your stock price goes up.

More on the accounting of OPEX/CAPEX:
After all of your operating expenses (COGS, SG&A, R&D) are deducted from revenue you are left with operating profit, aka EBITDA. This number is the most basic measure of the health of the business. If you can't make money by selling your products then it shows up here. And warning lights should be going off in investor's heads.

It is from this pile of money that CAPEX is drawn from amongst other things like tax, interest to service debt, and anything left over is put in the bank or returned to shareholders. This is a very simplistic view but is more or less how it works.

EBITDA is also where cash flow and accounting profit/loss (aka earnings, EPS, net profit - all the same thing) diverge. I won't go into it here, but cash flow does have a direct bearing on how CAPEX is allocated in many cases.

Source: K.Evans