Krishna Pérmi

Stories By Krishna Pérmi

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  Buying Guides

  Buying Guides By Krishna Pérmi

  Essential Free Travel Apps — 2016 Edition

  This is not a list of unique and trendy apps of the year. These are just essential, reliable popular solutions that you can depend on. Whether you're traveling with your phone or with your laptop, these apps come to your rescue when you're away from home. I have compiled this list of apps and services considering you're travelling the world and your country may have its own list. Google as a company provides many useful tools for travelers. You can easily find the weather of the place you're traveling to, using very simple terms. Or find out what's happening in that place with Google News. Google Flights helps you find the best price for the flights you're searching. The Google app for mobiles provides relevant and time-to-to information via its card interface by scanning your emails and knowing your interests and location. The Maps app or Waze app from Google are very hand for navigation if you're on road trips or if you're looking for a coffee shop near you. Using Google Keep you can note down your travel ideas, plans or even make a checklist of important places to visit. Google Keep is available on mobile as well as the web. Google Trips is a new addition to the slew of their app this year. I found this very useful when I was planning a short trip to a location that has a lot of places of interest. The app helps you plan the places to visit on an any particular day. You could ignore a certain places that have lesser ratings. It also pulls the flight, hotel or travel ticket info from you Gmail. All this information can be downloaded for offline use within the app. Google Translate is very versatile translation app for the number of languages it supports: 90 languages with the words you type and about half the languages you speak, and 26 languages with the picture (of the languages you capture on your phone's camera) input. Similar to Google Trips, this app also allows offline usage if you've downloaded the necessary data prior. WhatsApp This is one single app that has changed how we communicate in 2016. With its newly added support for free video calls over the internet, WhatsApp has become a standard for text, voice, and video communication world-wide. You may no longer need to use the separate free options like Viber for calls and Skype for video calls. Just install WhatsApp during travel and be in touch with your friends and family all along. Instapaper This one is my favorite travel companions. Save articles to Instapaper to read later while you're offline. I absolutely love this app on iPad during long journeys to read longform articles. You can read in the airport, on the plane, in the car, and just about anywhere. It's also one of those important things perfectly suited for use on iPad. Airbnb If you don't wish stay in a hotel that you might find costlier in certain places, Airbnb is what you all need. Air, bed and breakfast offered by individuals property owners for your homestay. Airbnb hosts share their spaces in 190 countries and more than 34,000 cities. Uber With Uber you don't have to be a local in a foreign place. Just fire up the Uber app and enter the destination and get moving. It is that simple. I found it very useful in a neighbouring state when some of the local taxis were deceiving and tried to overcharge me. TripAdvisor I depend more on TripAdvisor than Google reviews for hotels and local interests because of its very active community. It is the largest repository of destination reviews. Photo and video reviews are a big advantage. It is also a dependable service to compare hotel prices. Not only hotels, it's useful for bars, restaurants, hotels, airlines, and much more. Yelp TripAdvisor provides the reviews of restaurant and bars but Yelp does it a lot better. Yelp is really good with local businesses. Also, Tripadvisor encourages hotels and business owners to ask travelers for reviews but Yelp discourages it. If you're looking for a place to eat in a new city, Yelp is an useful service. WiFire WiFire is a new but a great free app that helps you find all open Wi-Fi networks around you. The app displays how far you are from the network. The app is useful for locating Wi-Fi networks at railway stations, airports, and coffee shops. Sometimes these connections are not sure and it's highly advisable to use a VPN. TunnelBear If you're connecting to networks in places like hotels you need to sure about the security of the connections. VPNs protect your privacy by creating a secure connection to another network over the internet. TunnelBear is my choice because of the simpler interface and faster connectivity. TunnelBear is not completely free but the monthly cap of up to 1GB usage can be sufficient while you're travelling.

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  News

  News By Krishna Pérmi

  5 Tips For Successful Project Management

  The best project managers are the ones who can deliver high-quality projects consistently within the deadline and are also able to meet or exceed the client's expectation. However, managing a project is not a cakewalk and requires proper project management skills and coordination among the team members. Here are few tips that you can make use of for successful project management and delivery: Understand Your Project Well It's duty of the project manager to gather and understand project requirements and make sure to get them approved by the stakeholders. Ensure that it includes a timeline and budget which should be enough to cover the project requirements. Set an action plan as when to start the project, what to do when, and when to finish, but be flexible for any inevitable changes. Being flexible doesn't mean proactive planning but reactionary measures, which let you adapt to the change before it becomes too late. You can give your team members the freedom to work the way they want to, to complete the tasks they've been assigned. But make sure to create an overall schedule and maintain it throughout. Set Realistic Goals It's really important to understand the limitation of the project not only for you but everyone in the team including your client as well. You also need to understand that you can deliver a project on time and within a budget, only when the expectations are reasonable. Unrealistic expectations can only lead to project failure. Select Your Team Members Carefully You may be working with a predetermined team or you might have to assemble your team yourself. Regardless of what the situation is, you need to keep in mind the strengths and weakness of each of your team members, while assigning them their tasks. This is one of the most important thing when it comes to project management and the success of your project depends on this. Ensure that your team members understand their deliverables and keep a tab of interdependencies among your team members and outside resources as well. Encourage the team members to ask questions so that they can clarify anything they're uncertain about and to come to you when things seem going awry. Open and clear communication is important for success of your project. Keep and Be On Track One of the most important responsibilities you have is to ensure that your project on track. Interim milestones are important to help determine whether you're working toward your goals or straying from your path. If you fall behind a milestone, it's a sign that your project schedule is at risk. You'd need to ensure that the remaining milestones are crossed before the scheduled time to compensate for the missed one. As the project manager, you also need to have foresight to see project risks and do whatever is necessary to minimize such risks. Evaluate Once you deliver the project successfully, sit back, relax, and spend some time in assessing how you can improve in your next projects. In many organisations, the project managers meet with the entire team after project delivery and celebrate success and also talk about what went wrong and how they can improve. Make sure to keep the tone of the meeting positive, if it's just a meeting. Most effective project managers keep addressing all their concerns while the projects are going on. This keeps your team engaged and motivated. Either way, both are good and ensure that you and your team perform better in future undertakings. Remember, you're the director of the project and so make sure to act that way—no other team member should be able to assert dominance over your position. It's your job to bring the best out of your team members and leave no stones unturned in the process. You're not just their project manager, but their mentor, coach, and motivator too. Be strong and remain calm during turbulent times, no matter how difficult it is. That is what a good leader needs to do.

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