Resource Library

While the recent trend towards cloud computing might make it seem like virtualization is new, it has existed in some form for many decades.

Implementing business analysis (BA) in organizations needs to be done in a well-planned process. The three steps are contingent on the BA maturity of the organization, its vision for how BA will be used and the degree of executive sponsorship.

As IT departments struggle with skills gaps and businesses attempt to recovery economically from the COVID-19 pandemic, these 10 IT skills are essential to drive success. Job roles in these areas pay well, but decision-makers are struggling to find qualified candidates. If you’re looking to make an IT skills investment or start a new career path this year, these are the areas to consider.

A quick 30 minute introduction to Business Analysis for those who are considering the field. This webinar looks at why the BA is essential to the business, what BAs do, and certification paths for Business Analysts. View the slide deck>

A quick 30 minute introduction to Business Analysis for those who are considering the field. This webinar looks at why the BA is essential to the business, what BAs do, and certification paths for Business Analysts. View the slide deck>

VMware vSphere: ICM 6.7 is the foundation for most other VMware technologies in the software-defined data center. The recent update from 6.5 brings important new features and enhancements.

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.

Take your VMware vSphere training to the next level—set up your own training lab environment. This paper is broken down into three major sections: the hardware required, the VMware Workstation configuration, and installing vSphere and vCenter (vC).

Virtualization is an umbrella term that continues to evolve to include many different types that are used in many different ways in production environments. Originally virtualization was done by writing software and firmware code for physical equipment so that the physical equipment could run multiple jobs at once. With the success of VMware and its virtualization of x86 hardware, the term virtualization has grown to include not just virtualizing servers, but whole new areas of IT. This article is going to look at the origins of virtualization and how some of the historical development has spurred on today's virtualization. In addition, we will discuss different types of virtualization that are being utilized in the marketplace today and a listing of some of the leading vendors.

There is a wide-range of services available in GCP ranging from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to completely managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In the first part of this series, we will discuss the available infrastructure components and how they provide a powerful and flexible foundation on which to build your applications.

This article defines many of the most commonly used terms in the virtualization vocabulary.

As organizations embark on agile initiatives, business analysts can serve a critical role in ensuring the success of those initiatives. This one-hour webinar will explore why business analysts embody core values and skills to thrive in an agile world. In this one-hour webinar, you will learn: Common myths about agile and business analysis, Agile roles for business analysts, BA skills for succeeding in an agile world, and Maximizing value – at the core of the BA role

When designing a structured business analyst interview, it’s crucial to have a goal in mind, a clear set of questions planned, and an understanding of how those questions may deviate from the intended goal. An interview has an intended line of questioning; it may also have alternate lines of questioning and unanticipated paths where the interviewee has raised issues or answered questions in a way the business analyst had not considered or planned. In short, an interview is a social process.

A structured business analysis interview is much more than a conversation; it is a controlled event requiring attention to detail, cautious design, and a strong social foundation from which to build a trusting and lasting relationship.

Resource management is always an issue in any project, especially when the stakeholders from whom we need time have operational duties to perform.  If our requirements team was at our disposal 100 percent, always completed activities on target, and worked a full eight hour day without distraction or a loss of productivity, then estimating time would be simple. In this paper, we explore standard approaches to time estimation, the dangers of multi-tasking, and estimation alternatives, which consider work habits and productivity norms.

Linking business analysis skills with the methods of The Open Group’s Architecture Framework, TOGAF®, facilitates stronger IT results that drive business value.

VMware announced Horizon 7 in February and subsequently released the software updates. Horizon 7 provides a more streamlined, high-performance virtual desktop and application experience. New updates include features such as Instant Clones, Smart Policies, Blast Extreme and greater scalability with Cloud Pod Architecture. Let’s dig into the seven key features that Horizon 7 brings!

Business processes are complicated, and mapping them is not a trivial task. Modelling standards give us the tools to model complex processes, but they do not tell us the best way to approach a model or effectively use the tool. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor Rod Fage will guide you through the best way to develop a model, from determining the goal and scope of the process and measuring its effectiveness, to modelling the process in a hierarchical top-down approach, enabling business analyst to continuously validate the model.

In this hour-long webinar, IT service management expert Nasser El-Batal will introduce you to the TOGAF framework. You will learn about its business benefits, critical factors for implementation success, and TOGAF's relationship to and integration with other best practices.

The past months have seen the release of both the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA)'s long-awaited A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK® Guide) v3 and the Project Management Institute® (PMI®)'s Business Analysis for Practitioners. While both represent interesting developments in the field of business analysis, they also provide lots of information to process. There's no need to go it alone! Join Global Knowledge instructors Cheryl Lee and Adam McClellan for this complimentary, hour- long webinar to learn about the differences between the two guides, how both guides compare to the previous version of the BABOK ® Guide, and where all this might be going.

We build requirements at a quantum level to connect the vital elements, which are needed to realize a requirement. As we consider the relationships between the behaviors, actions, and responses, we begin to identify and associate the characteristics and conditions, which will drive and constrain the behaviors. Realizing a requirement means joining these elements together and noting them as elements of the requirement.

In this paper, we explore the basic usage of PowerShell in the pursuit of automating the management of Hyper-V deployments. This paper is targeted to IT professionals who have been "GUI-bound" to their management interfaces and have been working with or are embarking on the journey of Hyper-V administration. We'll explore the usage of Hyper-V specific cmdlets with the intent of ultimately being able to include multiple cmdlets in a "script" to allow for pushing one button and accomplishing the combined actions of many multiple mouse clicks in the GUI. No more repetitive tasks!

When we learn a concept for the first time, the newness of it tends to become embedded with the learning process. We remember the new idea's significance and forever after remember it as new. The initial impact of a discovery can prevent the concept from aging. At the same time, we realize how quickly technology advances. Is it time to evolve your expertise?

One of the most significant new features in Microsoft Windows Server 2012 is the Hyper-V Replica (HVR) capability. Whether you are considering this for your own organization or just prepping for your Windows Server 2012 MCSA, this white paper presents the essentials of deploying this disaster recovery feature.

Business analysts have the responsibility to gather, analyze, and validate business and technical requirements for their projects, thus they need structured facilitation skills to manage requirements meetings and workshops. In this one hour webinar you will learn the most important things to remember when planning a facilitated workshop and what types of questions to ask when eliciting requirements.

Successful transformation initiatives are driven by Business Architecture. The Business Architect plays a key role in bringing all of the portfolio components together and consistently reinforcing senior management's voice throughout the ADM lifecycle. This begins with establishing strategic goals and outcomes that set the context for the entire program and service transformation. Establishing context serves as the basis for strategic project portfolio definition and integrated execution. This approach mitigates the risk of executing projects in isolation without considering the needs of the entire portfolio as a whole. This session will boost your knowledge of these concepts and help you and your team to achieve the best possible outcomes for your organization.

The demand for skilled business analysis (BA) professionals is on the rise, and a great way to declare your expertise is with a BA certification. But which BA certification is right for you: PMI-PBA, CBAP or CCBA? Here is a look at the eligibility requirements and steps for obtaining each.

The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a powerful tool for managing storage on Linux servers. This video provides an overview of how LVM works and explores several ways that LVM makes storage management easier and more flexible. Examples include how to expand storage capacity on the fly using LVM and resize2fs, and how to migrate data from local storage to a storage area network (SAN) without downtime using pvmove.

Many people believe that cloud computing requires server (or desktop) virtualization. But does it? We will look at using virtualization without cloud computing, cloud computing without virtualization, and then look at using both together. In each case, we'll look at where each deployment might be most useful, some use cases for it and some limitations.

The project manager (PM) and business analyst (BA) have to be key allies in the management of any project. That can be difficult when project work is duplicated because of the overlapping tasks defined by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) and the Project Management Institute (PMI®). Still, as long as roles are clearly defined and understood, the two can cooperate and collaborate, instead of competing. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor and PMP-certified project management expert Daniel Stober will explain how to delineate the roles.

The principles in this white paper help you introduce greater predictability into your own Agile requirements activities, both individually and across your organization. As you start to apply these ideas and pose these questions, you'll likely see certain patterns emerge that will help you establish your own set of practices that make Agile work for you.

Kirsten Lora, Global Knowledge Senior Product Director, explains why business analysts are essential to organizations and how our Business Analysis Essentials and Business Process Analysis courses can help them in these roles

Kirsten Lora, Global Knowledge Senior Product Director, explains the difference between our Business Analysis Essentials course and Business Process Analysis course.

The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF) provides a structure for describing all transformational work within an enterprise. While TOGAF focuses on the role of an enterprise's architects, it also very much addresses the space in which business analysts (BAs) play. This can lead to role confusion, blurred deliverables, and duplicate work. In this one-hour webinar, business analysis expert and Global Knowledge instructor Adam McClellan will focus on those parts of TOGAF in which the business analyst is typically the most active, and he will outline how the analyst's work contributes to the broader architecture. He will also provide perspective for architects who work with BAs and for BAs interested in the architecture disciplines.

Whether you're a Project Manager or a Business Analyst, you can certainly relate to a situation where you've felt like your cohort on a project was from a completely different planet! This panel discussion webinar between our PM expert, Ori Schibi, and our BA expert, Cheryl Lee, will explore some of the misconceptions that each role has and learn how to play nicely with each other in the project world.

Communication is vital within projects and contributes significantly to project success. PMs and BAs have important—and different—roles. Let's take a look.

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.

In 2013, VMware announced VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN), which is VMware's native version of Software Defined Storage (SDS). It is simple, easy to setup and managed by user-defined policies. This paper explains VSAN, its basic requirements and how it works.

The technologies examined reduce operational expenses (OpEx), not capital expenses (CapEx) that has traditionally been the focus of virtualization. Many companies implemented virtualization with the goal of saving money in the form of fewer servers to buy with a side benefit of reducing the footprint of the servers and lowering the required power and cooling. Most of the savings were in capital, but do not expect the same with many of the technologies listed here, because some may even require some additional capital expenditures, at least for software, in order to save on the day-to-day operations of IT. The bigger cost in running an IT department is in the OpEx category anyway, so savings there are recurring.

Organizations launch projects with the assumption that the new or improved solution will provide worthwhile benefits for stakeholders and a suitable return on investment. By understanding your business requirements you ensure that your teams actually deliver those benefits. Keeping user and functional requirements aligned with the business requirements is a key to successful solution delivery.