Resource Library

This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the current Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your PMP certification exam.

When creating products, providing services and achieving results, consistency is the goal of quality management. This white paper gives you a basic overview of the tools and techniques you need for quality planning and quality assurance. Learn which resources help you to evaluate programs, prioritize objectives or discover problem areas. Featured within this white paper are Kaoru Ishikawa’s seven quality tools which include flowcharts, histograms and cause-and-effect diagrams. 

Projects are often complex, made up of a large number of moving pieces. This brings numerous challenges. By using the three key steps mentioned in this white paper, your projects will run more smoothly from start to finish.

Being able to play both roles of a project manager (PM) and a business analyst (BA) is a great skillset to have. Learn how to ensure your team gets what it needs in these two key roles so that you all can deliver successfully.

This paper is a high level, moderately technical understanding of Hyper-Converged Infrastructures. IT managers, data center architects, and administrators alike may find this information helpful in their pursuit to simplify the data center and improve application performance.

Most project team members report to a functional manager who controls their assignments, performance appraisals, raises, bonuses, etc. Until recently, project managers (PMs) had little input into any of these processes. In this paper, learn how a PM working in a functional or matrix organizational structure can get team members to perform.

A range of factors can influence the data center you choose. You should consider all of the factors listed in this white paper before deciding where to place your servers.

The tools described in this white paper are essential PM tools. Tools that will best be used, regardless of the project, are the WBS, communication model, and the precedence diagram. The other tools will be needed depending on the project.

Good global project managers develop their own competencies, and those of their team members. We can use technology to bridge distance, but also focus on the human aspects of culture, work habits, management style, English as a mandated language, communication, and uncertainty. Perform a self-assessment and assess your team members, then look for on-the-job and other improvement opportunities. A good way to learn more about how to overcome these challenges is to become involved in the international community.

Discover how Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) will revolutionize IT and change the way you think about network connectivity and perhaps even application development. This white paper is written for networking professionals but it may offer valuable insight for those in cross-functional roles such as DevOps, server virtualization, and data center management.

Effective requirements collection at the outset of the project is the key step that will ensure that the project manager can deliver what is actually expected. In this respect, the business analyst must become a key ally and advisor to the project manager. Most project managers are not trained business analysts, so taking advantage of the skill set that a business analyst can offer can greatly enhance the possibility of project success.

This paper proposes a unifying model for project plans. A distinction will be made between the outputs of project planning and the project plan itself. The significance of this distinction is to allow projects of all types to be described at a high level, in a common language, regardless of the type of analysis used to develop the plan.

Learning how to program and develop for the Hadoop platform can lead to lucrative new career opportunities in Big Data. But like the problems it solves, the Hadoop framework can be quite complex and challenging. Join Global Knowledge instructor and Technology Consultant Rich Morrow as he leads you through some of the hurdles and pitfalls students encounter on the Hadoop learning path. Building a strong foundation, leveraging online resources, and focusing on the basics with professional training can help neophytes across the Hadoop finish line.

Here are some secrets, tips, and tricks for virtualizing your datacenter. We want to introduce some best practices for virtualization, while not being too biased towards one virtualization vendor or another. We'll use some common examples of products and tools that work with VMware's vSphere and Microsoft's Hyper-V, but with an eye toward virtualization in general, and not the specifics of any of the capable platforms that could be used). We will assume, however, that bare metal hypervisors, in other words virtualization platforms where the hyper visor is the OS, will be used as opposed to running a hypervisor on top of an existing general-purpose operating system (which is great in a lab, but terrible for data center projects).