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As organizations look to do more with fewer resources and better leverage scarce knowledge across their entire organization, they have found that the traditional hierarchical management structure no longer meets the needs of the business. Enterprises have turned to the matrix organizational structure for increased flow of information across departments and greater flexibility and responsiveness.

Look back at the some of the highest paying IT certifications of 2020.

Every manager wants to get the most out of every employee and maximize team cohesion and efficiency. Making your team members feel as if they are being heard, understood, and acknowledged is critical to any management strategy. Actively listening to team members’ thoughts, ideas, and challenges drives employee engagement and satisfaction, which drives better results. View the slide deck>>

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.

Here are five date points from the 2020 IT Skills and Salary Report that illustrate important trends in professional development, skills gaps, hiring and top-paying certifications.

Keep your project on time and within budget by controlling the baselines, budget, and schedule. View our comprehensive guide to project management, from project scheduling to cost control, from the experts at Global Knowledge.

Project quality management is the process of determining the quality standards that are applicable to a project and devising a way to satisfy them. Learn more here.

Project Scope Management sets the foundation for the creation, development and successful delivery of a project. Learn about the project management process here.

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.

These technology job roles are proven to be essential during a crisis as enterprises scramble to change strategies and meet goals. The skills demonstrated by IT professionals in these 10 positions can make the difference between business success and failure, especially during a recession.

For women in IT, advancing your career can be a challenge in itself. In the Global Knowledge 2019 IT Skills and Salary Report, only eight percent of senior- and executive-level IT professionals are women. We have pulled data from our research that sheds light on the job roles, skills, challenges, certifications and experience of women in tech who have progressed to the highest levels of an organization.

According to the Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report, women make up 16% of the tech workforce, and an even smaller percentage (8%) are at the senior or executive level. Here’s an overview of the most popular and most pursued certifications by women in tech.

In 2020 we will see the complete ITIL4 education portfolio released and in all likelihood the start of the retirement of the ITIL v3 qualifications. Our ITIL guru, Barry Corless lead author for ITIL4 incident and problem management practices, will talk about the course content, the practical skills you’ll learn, and who will benefit from attending each courses. If you plan to continue your ITIL education then you cannot afford to miss this webinar.

This webinar will discuss our Python offerings and how it is proving to be the language of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. View the slide deck>

Explore how IT decision-makers’ training views have changed since we first released our annual IT Skills and Salary Report 12 years ago. Once viewed as an expense, IT leadership now sees professional development as an investment. Even with shrinking budgets and a recent rise in skills gaps, the value of training is currently at an all-time high.

The value of IT certifications has grown considerably over the last decade. Examine the evolution of certification trends, see the top-paying certifications and learn how decision-makers are struggling to hire certified employees.

There are two types of networks: those that have been hacked and those that will be. To defend against hacks, cyber professionals can benefit greatly from ethical hacking programs.

For organizations with the willingness to get in shape and regain their corporate vitality, combining and aligning best practice frameworks is a sure way to achieve that goal. Admittedly, it takes work. Combining ITIL® 4 and project management should be high on your list.

After several decades on the market, the Project Management Professional® certification continues to be one of the most in-demand certifications worldwide. Learn how you can increase your salary, project success, and organizational value with this recorded webinar.

As organizations struggle to balance budgets and prioritize training, skills gaps are growing—75% of North American decision-makers report existing skills shortages. And the impacts are potentially disastrous. With so much on the line, initial and ongoing training are instrumental to project and organizational success.

How do you measure the experience and knowledge of an IT professional? One way is through certifications. Earning any certification is a notable achievement, though not all certifications carry the same perceived worth.

For every organization, effective cybersecurity is reliant on a careful deployment of technology, processes and people. The Global Knowledge cybersecurity perspective features a three-tiered organizational matrix, ranging from foundational to expert skills, coupled with eight functional specializations that encompass the features of a successful cybersecurity organization.

Technology trends such as these show no signs of abating, and IT administrators need to be prepared. Having a well-rounded and versatile team of IT practitioners is becoming increasingly necessary. In the following article, we examine five key skills that every IT department should have covered, regardless of the size of the company.

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.

Quality, as we know it today, is an accumulation of several concepts that together create a comprehensive approach to quality. The views of quality, as described in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and tested on the PMP® exam, focus primarily on the work of three major contributors: W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran and Philip B. Crosby.

So you want to be more agile, but is it possible in a waterfall world? The short answer is yes! Waterfall can be combined with principles of agility. The trick is to recognize how agile practices lead to organizational agility. Any organization can become more agile, but there are trade-offs that need to be considered. In this hour-long webinar, instructor and presenter Brian Egan will help you understand how to make agile work within your organization. In it you will learn: Agile best practices Discover how organizations can be more agile Agile vs. Waterfall: Discuss the pros and cons of each Dispense the myth that agile can only be used for software development Watch this webinar today and learn how and why your organization should become more agile! Recommended Agile Project Management courses: Introduction to Agile Agile Project Management Transitioning from Waterfall to Agile PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® Boot Camp

It has been over three years since the last revision of the CompTIA Security+ exam back on May 1, 2014. In fall of 2017, the latest version, SY0-501, was released. This revamped exam retains the same six domains as established in SY0-401, which emphasizes security in three main areas: application, data, and host.

Each year as the data from the Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Survey is put through the analysis process, certain trends become clearer. One of those is the prevalence of IT professionals who pursue certifications across multiple categories.

If you want to stay relevant as an IT professional, you have two choices: evolve your current skills or make a big change.

Whether you are just getting started in business analysis or want to gain a better understanding of certain aspects of business analysis, we have compiled a list of frequently used terms to help you get started.

Modern quality management and project management are complementary. They both emphasize customer satisfaction and the underlying belief that quality leads to customer satisfaction. The main objective in quality management is making sure that the project meets the needs it was originally created to meet—nothing more, nothing less. In other words, to ensure quality, you must meet the needs of the stakeholder.

This webinar focuses on assisting leaders who are determining whether Agile is right for their organization. In one hour, we will take you from the basic concepts of Agile methodology to understanding the process and what your role is as a leader. You will learn the challenges and benefits and how an Agile culture can fuel your teams and provide value for your customers faster.

The question of how a project manager working in a functional or matrix organizational structure gets team members to perform is asked in almost every project management class I have taught.

Agile project management literally turns the world of managing projects upside down. The triple constraint is balanced in an unconventional way, the role of the matrix team coordinator is downplayed, and risk management can be built into the prioritization approach. So, what is left for the PM to do?

Are you prepping for the PMP exam? What should you know about the impending new edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK® Guide before scheduling your examination?

Whether you’re a beginner or intermediate Python developer, you’ll want to keep this guide close to your keyboard and Python editors. In it, you’ll find sample use cases for many of the most common language constructs and tasks that you’ll likely need to perform, such as reading a file or working with a database.

Learn how Docker makes it easy to update, test and debug software with this white paper and gain foundational knowledge about Dockerfile, Docker images and containers.

The recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.1 release offers a range of system-wide improvements. Whether you're new to RHEL or a veteran user, this white paper covers essential new tools and upgrades. Dynamic patching, in-place upgrades, easily configuring new deployments or monitoring entire systems represent some of the more significant changes. This white paper not only explores the significance of these modifications, it also provides useful examples, including diagrams and command lines for executing key tasks. RHEL 7.1 represents the first minor release of RHEL 7, which launched in June 2014 and will be supported for a 10-year life cycle.

Projects are a social endeavor. Traditional project management approaches have shied away from the social advantages a more agile project environment brings. By nature, we are storytelling, pattern seeking and social people. We need colocation to shine truly in a project environment.

You are estimating the total project cost using three points for cost estimates with a 95 percent confidence level. What is the cost estimate range if the estimated project cost is $120,000 and the standard deviation is $2,500?

Managing users' access to an organization's resources via portals is convenient with IBM's WebSphere Portal Scripting Interface. Compare tools available to the portal administrator and identify some use cases where IBM's Portal Scripting Interface may be the ideal choice. Review basic commands and find out how to create custom scripts.

A major challenge of problem determination is dealing with unanticipated problems. It is much like detective work: finding clues, making educated guesses, verifying suspicions, and other considerations. An ideal strategy for problem prevention is to monitor the system regularly. Use the strategies outlined in this paper to minimize downtime and detective work so you can maximize performance.

Red Hat Taste of Training - JB248

Red Hat Taste of Training - JB348

In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge course director Brian Egler will examine key new features of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 that demonstrate how it provides automatic end-to-end security, seamless generation of business analytics and elastic integration of data in the cloud.

With Microsoft SQL Server 2016, you can distribute your data to the cloud using the Stretch Database feature to improve local access while allowing cloud access to large amounts of historical data. You can also provide transparent end-to-end security using Always Encrypted technology and track changes automatically through temporal data. Download this white paper to learn why these features and more make SQL Server 2016 Microsoft's most important release to date.

You are the project manager on a construction project where you are deliberating between renting, leasing or purchasing a large piece of equipment. Equipment pricing: Rent at a cost of $2,500 per day; Lease for a 60 day period at $2,500 per day, with a 10% discount; Purchase at a price of $100,000. By looking at your project schedule, you have estimated that you will use the equipment about 50 to 60 days. Based only on price, which decision would you recommend?

Introducing new talent to an established organization can be difficult for many reasons. Seasoned employees may view the incoming new hires as "too green" or as not having the required skills to contribute in a meaningful way. They may worry about having to "waste time" teaching the newbies things that they should already know or get aggravated when the new employees are not familiar with "the way we do things around here." Additionally, it is difficult to know if the right new hires are being put into the right positions for their interests, abilities and talents. After all, a resume and an interview can only tell a hiring manager so much about the person they are bringing on board, and often talented employees are simply being put into a role that is not a good fit.

We often discuss how to manage projects, but we overlook an essential step: proving project value. Proving project value ensures that organizational strategies are aligned with project objectives.

Your organization and a seller have just agreed to a contract with a total cost of $150,000, an estimated profit of $10,000, buyer/seller sharing of 70/30 and a ceiling price of $170,000. What is the PTA (point of total assumption)? A. $170,000 B. $160,000 C. $164,2...

Change is the order of the day, and if anything, the pace of business and technology change is accelerating. The business and customers are looking to IT service providers to be more responsive, delivering more frequent service changes with higher quality-resulting in services that deliver more value to the business. In order to continue to be relevant and of high value, ITIL must continue to benefit from other complementary best-practices for IT. DevOps, an approach that encourages improved communication, collaboration, and teamwork across development and operations, can have a positive influence in improving ITIL processes across the service life-cycle.

Use cases are an effective and widely used technique for eliciting software requirements. In this hour-long webinar, software development and process improvement expert Karl E. Wiegers will introduce you to a practical and straightforward use cases approach to requirements elicitation. You will learn how to focus on the goals that users have with a system, rather than emphasize system functionality.

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.

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!

Interested in SharePoint 2013 developer training?  Learn from SharePoint instructor Tracy Wallace, if you're ready and which SharePoint 2013 developer class you should take.

Change managers and project managers come at the same goal of maximizing ROI for their organizations, but from different perspectives and approaches and with different skill sets. While project managers are responsible for achieving specific objectives on time and on budget, the change manager's role is broader. Change managers apply a structured approach to helping individuals, teams and organizations negotiate relentless change. A project manager turns ideas into reality. Increasingly, project managers are required to take on the role of change manager as well. Business today can't afford to carry out tasks without considering the larger picture. Today, integration is unavoidable - and expected. In this hour-long interactive session, we'll discuss the similarities and differences between project management and change management. We'll also identify the occasions when both a project manager and a change manager might be needed.

Nowadays, you can read weekly articles about security attacks and stolen data. Even leading companies and organizations are victims of cybercrime. Attacks can include breaches at three levels: the physical level, which includes social engineering, system and network and applications (e.g., web and mobile). In this complimentary webinar, you will discover the benefits of using automated solutions to detect application vulnerabilities, provide steps to remediate them and avoid costly compliance violation.

In this blog series, we'll get you up to speed on using the key tools listed in the PMBOK® Guide, including Decision Tree Diagrams.

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.

In this blog series, we'll get you up to speed on using the key tools listed in the PMBOK® Guide. First up, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

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.

Complexity has always been a part of projects. But today, globalization, new technologies and changing markets have combined to add to the complexity. Today's projects have more stakeholders, more ambiguity and more politics than ever, and project managers need new tools and approaches to succeed. Join Alexander Stanisic and Michelle Moore of Global Knowledge for an information-packed hour on how to manage the complexity of the 21st-century project.

In many organizations, the Program/Project Management Office (PMO) is viewed as purely a cost center, so it becomes marginalized by additional layers of bureaucracy, oversight and cost. But the essence of the PMO and portfolio management in general is to add value to the organization. So how do organizations reconcile the cost of the PMO versus the value it adds? The short answer is to flip the conversation on its head and talk about the PMO as a revenue driver rather than a cost center. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge PMP-certified senior product manager Daniel Stober will explain how, by focusing on efficiencies gained and reduced waste, you can shift the conversation from the PMO being a necessary evil to the PMO being critical for organizational success.

Young adults unable to find work, employers unable to fill jobs, a recent GAO study that reported substantial declines in telecommunication expertise — there has been a lot of news about the pervasiveness of skills gaps, their causes, the actual impacts and what to do about them. It’s rather confusing, because the term “skills gaps” has been hijacked to politicize an extremely wide range of issues.

Like it or not, Internet of Things (IoT) is upon us. There are a number of factors that will impact its adoption rate, and the inevitable privacy (or lack of) discussions will likely happen sooner than later. This is going to change the world as we know it, in many cases for the better. But we will need to keep an eye on the extent to which it invades our personal lives if it is going to be the positive force it has the potential to be.

In this series, we are looking at six things that can trip up project managers. We’ve covered the hazards of overcommitting, how to provide feedback, the importance of taking responsibility, staying focused, and what leading from the front can actually look like. Finally, we’ll take a look at handling team input.

In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor and PMP-certified project management expert Daniel Stober will look beyond the triple constraint model and focus on the true essence of project success: stakeholder satisfaction. Many project managers (PMs) fall into the familiar habit of managing based on the constraints of time, cost and scope. While all of these are important, managing them effectively doesn't guarantee project success if the PM fails to conduct proper stakeholder management. To manage stakeholders effectively, the PM has to set expectations. Once expectations are set, the PM must influence the perception of project performance with the stakeholder. Tune in as Dan explores methods you can use to accomplish that goal.

If you're running SharePoint 2010, learn how SharePoint 2013 is different and what you'll need to learn to deploy it effectively.

This power session is an introduction to Managing Stakeholder relations. It offers new ways of managing and dealing with projects, which focus more on communications, understanding stakeholders' needs and managing their expectations, as well as learning about organizational politics and culture, and performing value-add activities. It provides a practical approach to managing issues that matter most for project success - communication, stakeholder expectations, risk, change and quality; so that the scope, schedule and cost end up on target, achieving the desired outcomes for the organization.

With Forrester Research declaring "Waterfall processes have become obstacles to speed, quality and predictability," and more than 85% of CIO's surveyed by CIO Magazine using or planning to pursue Agile practices in 2014, this one-hour webinar will explore the basics of Agile and why so many organizations are adopting Agile methods.

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.

Cloud computing enables development teams to get applications into production faster. IT Service Management (ITSM) leaders must adopt new strategies and change existing processes or risk becoming a barrier to success. Cloud computing requires DevOps-the blending of development and operations with the goal of accelerating time-to-market and reducing time-to-value. The good news is that ITIL® is uniquely positioned to accelerate DevOps, but it requires changes to existing ITSM processes.

Samuel Brown, project management instructor and consultant, has taught Global Knowledge courses for more than fifteen years. In this video clip, Samuel discusses Global Knowledge's unique and effective approach to helping students prepare for PMP certification.

Kirsten Lora, Global Knowledge Senior Product Director, discusses the benefits of our IT Project Management course.

Global Knowledge Course Director Samuel Brown introduces the Work Breakdown Structure and why it matters to project management.

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.

Join Microsoft SQL Server expert Brian Egler for an hour-long webinar covering the key features and updates in the upcoming release of Microsoft SQL Server 2014! You will get a thorough review, along with demonstrations, of how SQL Server 2014 provides substantial improvements in performance, manageability, and availability that will make your job easier.