PM1 – Week 9 – What’s happened to my paradigms?

Before starting this blog it’s very important to understand what paradigms are?

Paradigms are how you see the things. How you perceive and interpret the situations, you encounter in your life. Your paradigms depend on your focus through which you select one, most significant to you from all of the possibilities and also on your attitude through which you interpret what you focus on the basis of you culture, knowledge, and experiences.

Everyone has paradigms and these paradigms have very significant impact on ones behavior. That’s way we see that for a given situation different individuals behave differently depending on how they perceive and interpret it.

A paradigm may be positive or negative. Positive paradigms help you in achieving success in your life while the negative work opposite. Most of our paradigms are natural primarily influenced by our culture, our upbringing, and our life’s experiences but we can change them any time if we have awareness and desire to change them. Also, paradigms do not remain constant but keep changing with time due to change in our environment, knowledge, and experience.

I remember when I applied for ACIT program. As my objective was to get my CGA designation for which I didn’t need IT courses. My background was also in accounting and finance and I didn’t have enough knowledge about IT so my paradigm at that time was not to take IT courses for which I got an appointment with the department head of ACIT program to discuss the possibility to take only accounting courses. In our meeting she told me the significance of this combination (Accounting & Information Technology) in recent and future. Then I changed my paradigm and took this program. As the program started my paradigm also start changing and I start getting interest in IT courses. Now my perception about accounting is totally different from what I had before taking this program. Before, I perceived it in traditional way but now I see it in a big picture like project accountant, accounting software consultant, and ERP consultant etc.

Here, I would like to describe specially about PM1 course when I was working on my case study using different project management tools. At that time I was also thinking how I can apply it in my future life if I get an opportunity to work in a role of project manager to implement ERP system in an organization. How it will help me in problem identification area, identifying processes, need analysis, identifying KSF (Key Success Factors), identifying different alternatives, making recommendations, creating WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) and managing human resources by allocation work to individuals according to their expertise and temperament, Cost estimations using WBS and cost controlling by comparing estimates with actual, variance analysis, and risk management by identifying potential risk and their potential solutions etc.
This has changed my paradigm to see myself as traditional accountant, now I see myself in big picture like project manager, consultant etc.

Now I realize that my decision to take ACIT program was actually a shift of my paradigm from negative to positive because today we are living in IT age where information technology is used in every field of life including accounts. If I didn’t change my paradigm at that time, today I left behind in competition as I don’t possess the skills and knowledge required to be competitive in current market. So, it is very important to change your paradigm in positive with time and you can do it if you are aware of it and have a desire to change it.

In mine case after taking IT courses in my ACIT program, now I am aware of my paradigms and whenever I encounter a situation that demands a change, I first think about my paradigms to see if they are influencing my decision in any way. Then I make a decision by keeping all positive and negative effects in view.

This has changed my life. Now I am more open to adopt positive changes and my thinking has also been changed from conservative to rational one which I hope will bring success in my life.


Reference:

http://www.evancarmichael.com/Business-Coach/348/What-Is-a-Paradigm.html