Privately and publicly owned companies have different attitudes

about sharing profits and taxation. The company�s willingness

to show profit is based on items such as its legal form. Generally, a
publicly owned company looks for opportunities to maximize its net
profit, while its financing is dependent on its market value. Investors
use profitability and the ability to pay dividends as criteria for valuing
the company and its shares. Publicly owned companies use accounting
rules to their advantage to maximize net profit.Around the World in a Trading Day
The forex market is open and active 24 hours a day, from the start of business
hours on Monday
morning in the Asia-Pacific time zone straight through to the Friday close of
business hours in
New York. At any given moment, depending on the time zone, dozens of global
financial centers
� such as Sydney, Tokyo, or London � are open, and currency trading desks in those
financial
centers are active in the market.
In addition to the major global financial centers, many financial institutions
operate 24-hour-a-day
currency trading desks, providing an ever-present source of market interest. It may
be a U.S. hedge
fund in Boston that needs to monitor currencies around the clock, or it may be a
major international
bank with a concentrated global trading operation in Singapore
My efforts to translate a career�s worth of currency trading experience into a book
would be
extremely thin were it not for the many lessons I garnered from colleagues in the
market over the
years. Readers of this book will benefit from the experience I�ve gained from many
of you. Thanks
to Mark Galant, for founding GAIN Capital and offering me the opportunity to write
this book. To
the trading team at GAIN: Tim O�Sullivan, Anthony Piccolo, Paul Spirgel, Rob
Voorhees, Mike
Goret, Damon Gallo, and Alan Viola � it�s an honor and pleasure to work with some
of the best
in the business. To Glenn Stevens and Samantha Roady, for setting the whole process
in motion
and encouraging me to go the full distance. To Christa Conte and Henry Feintuch of
Feintuch
Communications, for getting the word out to the media and then some. To my research
team for
picking up the slack while I wrote: Eric Viloria, CMT; Chris Tevere, CMT; Kathleen
Brooks; and
Dan Hwang. To Susan Hobbs for her fine editing assistance that made me get to the
point, clearly.
To McLean D. Giles for his technical review. And to the editors and staff at Wiley
Publishing,
especially Stacy Kennedy, for organizing the book in the first place.Using a Joint
Project Planning Session to Build the WBS
The best way to build a WBS is as a group activity. To create the WBS, assemble
a facilitator, the project manager, the core members of the project team, and
all other managers who might be affected by the project or who will affect the
project. The important thing is to have the expertise and the decision makers
present in this part of the planning session who can give input into the WBS.
This exercise should be continuous; you do not want to interrupt it while you
go looking for input from people who should already be in the session. The
exercise is easy to explain, as we will do in the text that follows, but it is
difficult
to execute, as we will also explain in the text that follows. The tools are
low-tech (Post-It notes, marking pens, and whiteboards), and they greatly
facilitate the orderly completion of the task.
�� The first step is for the whole planning team to decide on the first-level
decomposition of the goal statement. One obvious approach would be to
use the objective statements from the POS as the first-level decomposition.
Objectives are generally of great interest to senior managers, and this fact
might be a major consideration in the team�s choice. For a software development
project, the systems development phases will often be a good
first-level decomposition.
�� Once the first-level decomposition is developed, the team has two choices
on how to proceed:Acceptable Duration Limits
While there is no fixed rule for the duration of an activity, we recommend that
activities have a duration of less than two calendar weeks. This seems to be a
common practice in many organizations. Even for long projects where contractors
may be responsible for major pieces of work, they will generate plans
that decompose their work to activities having this activity duration. There
will be exceptions when the activity defines process work, such as will occur
in many manufacturing situations. There will be exceptions, especially for
those activities whose work is repetitive and simple. For example, if we are
going to build 500 widgets and it takes 10 weeks to complete this activity, we
are not going to decompose the activity into 5 activities with each one building
100 widgets. There is no need to break the 500-widget activity down further. If
we can estimate the time to check one document, then it does not make much
difference if the activity requires two months to check 400 documents or four
2-week periods to check 100 documents per period. The danger you avoid is
longer-duration activities whose delay can create a serious project-scheduling
problem.