Resource Library

Structuring techniques are the foundation of decision making. They are to decision making what blueprints are to construction. There are a number of techniques that will quickly and easily improve the analysis of virtually any problem. This paper introduces some of the simplest and most effective structuring techniques including sorting, sequencing, placement, decision trees, and ranking.  

Shortly after being awarded an ITIL® Foundation certification, a recipient’s natural inclination is to ask: “Now what? How do I take the best practices I’ve learned and apply them to my organization?”

When a decision matters, there are certain steps you will want to follow. In this white paper, we provide guidelines for approaching decisions. The steps in this white paper are a series of interconnected techniques used in problem analysis and decision making.

Leadership is evolving beyond traditional leadership skills, and it has never been so important. In an era of constant change, digital disruption, increased employee expectations and rising business complexity, today’s leaders require more than the fundamentals.  In years past, leadership development focused on helping leaders set performance expectations, communicate effectively, provide feedback, coach and motivate their employees. While these skills remain important, they are no longer sufficient to meet the business requirements of the 21st century. Leaders now require skills and competencies to ensure that they also build highly productive teams, accelerate organizational results and transform customer experiences in a fast-paced, highly competitive and global working environment. In this hour-long webinar, leadership consultant Kim Caughlin will reveal and discuss the new high-demand skills and competencies required to lead effectively in the 21st century. 

Discover the most common barriers you will face when implementing knowledge management and how to overcome them, so that your organization changes, over time, into a culture where knowledge sharing and reuse becomes second nature and part of the normal course of activity.

The Toronto Chapter of the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP), in partnership with Global Knowledge, welcomes Kelly Norgate to share information about her success in leading change with powerful change communication strategies. In this hour-long webinar, Norgate will examine the link between creative change communication solutions and great corporate culture. You will learn practical change communications strategies and tactics that generate the energy and commitment required to get employees on board with transformational change. Take your next change communication plan from good – to great.

IT organizations are increasingly being held accountable to bring digital value to the business and participate as a strategic partner. To this end, IT organizations must ensure they have the right skills at the right time to support the strategic direction of the business and contribute overall ROI. Deploying an IT skills framework provides an opportunity for IT organizations to determine their level of readiness by identifying where skill gaps exist.

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.

If you're responsible for creating marketing content and the demand for fresh content is stressing you out, help has arrived. In this hour-long webinar, award-winning content creator Gail Mercer-MacKay will show you how to easily create new content that will attract prospects even if you're short on time and budget. You will learn how basic building blocks, such as blogs, social media and newsletters, support each other and can be reused multiple times. By producing fresh content, leveraging the content of others and broadcasting through various mechanisms to drive awareness, followers, likes and leads, you can obtain your desired results by investing only seven to 10 hours a month.

Measurements and metrics provide a view into every aspect of an organization. From resource availability to necessary improvements, measurements are the key to successfully understanding how your organization is performing. This paper will give you guidance on why measuring is important, how to get started, what types of metrics are available, what should be measured, and how to go about initiating improvements.

Often we let personal biases and other intuitive mental forces push us towards quick decisions. In contrast, good decision makers make the effort to really analyze issues. Instead learn how to become a critical thinker by separating facts from assumptions to make consistent, high-quality decisions.

Businesses today are more dependent on technology than ever. And, more than ever, they're looking to IT for ways to improve employee productivity, customer service and innovation. The challenge is that in order to achieve results with technology, IT and the business have to work collaboratively. IT needs to be able to develop the right relationships and communicate with different stakeholders from a business perspective - not a technical one. As a result, the transformation of the IT department has become a top-level priority for many leading organizations. At the same time, business leaders need to strengthen their business technology IQ and play a more significant role in the governance of IT.

Every business needs to have a consultative approach that increases organizational buy-in, enhances client relationships and improves customer service. Applying consulting skills can mean greater success for individuals and organizations alike. In this one-hour webinar, Michelle Moore will provide an overview of the Consulting Skills Lifecycle and present practical ideas from our McMaster Certified Consulting Skills Program. You'll learn how to engage your clients, gather and analyze information, present findings and recommendations, plan and implement recommendations and conclude the engagement and evaluate results.

A strong event management process that is able to detect changes of state throughout an organization’s IT environment is a key aspect of a complete suite of service management processes. Event management ultimately helps an organization maintain control through an understanding of the state of things, and how the state of those things changes in an IT environment.

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 world of volatility and complexity, it seems that the only certainty is the unstoppable advancement of technology. As people and organizations look to improve productivity, innovate their business models and processes, and differentiate their client and employee experiences, they need to be prepared to work in new and different ways. The challenge is that recent data reveals that Canada is falling behind the rest of the world in innovation, especially regarding new and disruptive technologies that promise to significantly impact every industry and organizations of all types and sizes. In this 60-minute webinar, we will explore the concept of digital disruption and provide information about how to future-proof yourself and your organization to succeed in this new world.

Event management, although theoretically different, is fundamentally what most IT organizations refer to as “monitoring.” Monitoring an organization’s environment to determine whether important assets are in the state they should be, and knowing when that state changes, is a very important activity that many organizations spend significant portions of their budget doing.

This paper provides an overview of how to judge the rigor of one's decision making. It describes how anyone can make better (higher quality) decisions, in any situation.

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.

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.

In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor and ITIL Expert Michael Scarborough will share his knowledge and expertise on various aspects of incident management and problem management processes. He will help you understand the difference between incidents and problems and between incident and problem management, providing examples from his own experience to drive the concepts home. Michael will also provide an overview of who performs various incident and problem management activities in an organization.

Learn the ITIL® concepts of accountability, boundaries, and consistency (the ABCs) and discover how ITIL helps establish, manage, and maintain the ABCs.

Change is no longer an isolated event. In the digital world, professional and personal change is constant. It is the new normal. Today's leaders and teams are asked to handle relentless upheavals, while still being expected to deliver on their short-term goals. To succeed, they must toggle between the often-conflicting priorities of today's profits and tomorrow's growth. Organizational change management has been documented and many approaches exist; the same can be said for personal change. But rarely have organizations holistically thought about how these two drivers of positive change can collectively enable ongoing success. Join Jocelyn Bérard, Global Knowledge Vice President, International Leadership and Business Solutions, and Phil Buckley, Managing Director at Change with Confidence, for this informative hour-long webinar to learn a powerful and practical framework to help you manage organizational and personal change.

Technology in the digital age is disrupting everything in our lives and our workplace -- and it's impacting all aspects of the "People, Process and Technology" paradigm. Changes for IT professionals, project managers and business analysts are profound and are happening at lightning speed - faster than we've ever seen before. Individuals and organizations must keep pace or get left behind. Never fear. Along with the danger of quickly finding yourself on the sidelines are opportunities for tremendous career growth. Join us for this one-hour session on career management in the digital age. You will learn about the forces that are impacting business, how skills are evolving, which new skills will emerge and what you can do to adapt and succeed in the digital age.

You will learn how many organizations approach change management as compared to how best practices dictate that change management should work. Global Knowledge instructor and ITIL Expert Michael Scarborough will fill you in on the purpose of change management and the difference between change management and change tickets. He will provide a high-level guide for establishing a change management process that uses real-world examples as its basis.

Communication in our work and personal life has been dramatically transformed, not only by technology, but also by new practices and habits. At the same time, numerous studies show that communication is one of the top critical skills required to be successful. In fact, because of the way organizations and jobs are evolving, the importance of communication keeps increasing for professionals and leaders. This hour-long complimentary webinar is not about how to maximize your LinkedIn contacts or attract more Twitter followers. Jocelyn Bérard is a psychologist specializing in human performance and will share innovative ways to influence others through communication. He will also help you raise your knowledge and awareness about your personality traits and personal characteristics, how they impact communication and how to use them effectively.The digital age is here and you can't control it. But you can certainly improve and better use the human side of your communication.

Today's organizations must integrate and align people, processes, structures, culture and strategy to successfully transition individuals and/or groups from a current state to a future state to achieve their desired business outcomes and objectives. It is how we define change management today, which directly affects everyone from the entry-level employee to senior management. Everyone must learn how to make organizational changes, where managers are charged with the additional responsibility of making these changes happen in and through the different levels of strategic execution. This one-hour webinar focuses on change management in the areas of organizational development and human resource management combined with standardized portfolio, program, and project management practices (i.e., A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge-Fifth Edition (PMBOK® Guide)).

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.

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.

In this hour-long webinar by Global Knowledge instructor and ITIL Expert Michael Scarborough, you will learn how to study for and succeed in passing ITIL Intermediate Exams. You will learn how to approach an ITIL Intermediate exam, the true/false approach and why it works and how to study for the ITIL Intermediate exams.

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.

Problem Solving - Root Cause Analysis using Kepner Tregoe

With the onset of the Digital Age, IT professionals today are hit with a tsunami of changes! "By 2018, adoption of mobile, social, cloud, analytics will redefine 90% of IT roles" according to IDC 2014 Predictions: CIO Agenda. Large organizations are eliminating silos. Small and medium organizations are outsourcing technology services. Digital natives have entered the workforce. New roles will emerge as new ways of doing business are introduced and as old technology fades away. Today's IT professionals must adapt, and a new set of skills is in order. Join Pranav Shah, Manager of Information Technology and Security at Sony Canada, and Pam Maguire, Business Development Manager, Global Knowledge, for a 60 minute webinar on how to future-proof your IT career in the Digital Age. You will learn about how IT roles are changing, what organizations are looking for, and what you can do now to be ready.

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.

Nasser El-Batal will walk you through the most useful, recognized, and mandated ITSM best practices in the industry: TOGAF, COBIT and ITIL®. He will highlight the benefits of integrating them into a single implementation program to avoid project disaster. Discussions are focused on "Getting Your House in Order" and how to establish your own organization-specific business transformation program, while increasing your organization maturity.

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.

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.