Resource Library

You’ll be hearing a lot about AWS in Canada in 2017 as Canadian organizations are evaluating their options for moving to the cloud. Now is the time to get up to speed and find out what you and your organization need to know.

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.

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

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.  

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?

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. 

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.

There are many considerations in deciding on whether to provide Software as a Service (SaaS) to others or whether to become a consumer. This white paper will explore what questions and factors you should keep in mind as you seek to implement SaaS. Considerations include deciding how your application will be accessed, implementing disaster recovery, scheduling platform maintenance and upgrades, handling service outages and creating a security plan. This knowledge can be useful whether you are provider of SaaS applications or are planning to be a consumer using software for activities like accounting or project management.

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.

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.

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.

Cloud can be described as the ability for users to provision new environments and/or services in a self-service fashion backed by automation. z Systems use technologies that best allow us to apply the strengths of our platform to cloud methodologies while complying with industry standards and preserving the security and manageability of our platform. This enables us to use the strengths of z Systems scalable multitenant architecture for on-premise cloud deployments. z Systems can also expose valuable enterprise services in a secure manner that feels native to mobile and Web application developers, enabling organizations to use enterprise services on z Systems with a frictionless experience for distributed developers.

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.

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?

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.

There are many questions you should ask before selecting your PaaS provider. Learn what you need to know in order to compare and contrast PaaS with the other offerings like IaaS and SaaS, and what they require in terms of setup and configuration. As with any decision involving IT infrastructure there are many variables that should be considered to ensure you find a solution that will fit your current and future needs, budget and support requirements.

The advantage—and disadvantage—of IaaS cloud computing is complete control. The user is responsible for sizing, installing, and maintaining operating systems and applications, backing up the systems, etc. This enables the user to configure everything in an optimal way for the workloads that need to be accomplished, but it requires time and effort to determine how it should be set up, secured, etc. With the goal of providing a good place for you to start your IaaS implementation and highlighting some areas that you should plan for and design for, Global Knowledge instructor John Hales provides a review of IaaS, as well as insight into what you need to know before implementing IaaS. He also shares a laundry list of things to consider when implementing IaaS, including questions to ask yourself, your company and your potential cloud provider.

Do you want to take your Power System to higher levels of cloud functionality but don't know what's available? Join us for this free webinar, presented by IBM and sponsored by Global Knowledge, to hear senior power cloud consultants Vess Natchev and Kyle Wurgler share an exciting new cloud solution for Power Systems. In this interactive webinar, you'll gain insight on the details and features of the new cloud solution from IBM and VMware.

Learn about the Amazon Web Services platform, products, and services. Gain on-demand access to compute, storage, and database services without upfront costs.

Learn about Cloud Computing with AWS and the benefits AWS provides to hundreds of thousands of customers globally.

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.

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?

The cloud revolution is truly a revolution - the way we work, learn and even play is very different now than it was just 10 or 15 years and will probably be a lot more different in 10 or 15 years. With this in mind, let's look at 10 ways the cloud will (and to a large degree already has) changed the world.

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...

The four-part Cloud TechTalks series shares practical insights and best practices for using the cloud. With exponential growth and unparalleled demand, there are few areas with greater opportunity than storage in the cloud. Join us for this complimentary, hour-long webinar to hear Susan Schreitmueller, IBM distinguished engineer and senior cloud advisor, share IBM's cloud storage solutions. Along with exploring trends and directions around IBM's roadmap for storage in the cloud, Schreitmueller will review Cloud Managed Services and SoftLayer options, as well as software-defined storage and IBM's suite of products.

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.

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.

Cloud computing is a big force in IT today, and it isn't going away. In fact, cloud adoption is going up geometrically, both for end users (think apps on your phone or tablet) as well as for organizations of all sizes. In fact, many smaller organizations may not have any on-premises infrastructure at all, other than networking infrastructure to get connected to the cloud. With this transformation in IT, it behooves all of us in the industry to understand it and adapt or risk being out of a job, like punch card operators.

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.

PowerVC is a cloud tool based on OpenStack technology used to manage your virtualized environment running on your Power System. It automates rapid provisioning/deprovisioning and provides simple ongoing management of LPARs on Power Systems. Join us for this free, interactive webinar to hear senior power cloud consultants Vess Natchev and Kyle Wurgler from IBM System Lab Services.

Microsoft Office 365 has a vast array of features to explore. A rich administration interface, streamlined security, and versatile migration options make this one of the most interesting products when it comes to an SaaS public cloud solution.

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.

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.

AWS is an incredibly rich ecosystem of services and tools, some of which have security aspects baked in (like S3 SSE), and others that provide overarching security capabilities (like IAM and VPC) that apply to many services. With regard to data storage, operating system, and applications, security functions largely the same in the cloud or on-premises software. Customers can and should continue to follow best practices that have served them well in their own data centers.

Accessing cloud-based resources, whether they be IaaS/PaaS/SaaS-based, is very convenient. With a browser and Internet connection, you are up and running. No driving to your work office, no need to log into the corporate network. Just open up your web browser and go. This convenience, however, comes with a security risk. All of your business work is conducted over an insecure communication network. Unlike your office network, where the network link between you and the data center is under corporate control and is physically secure, the cloud access link is over the Internet.

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.

Discover how the enhanced performance and reliability of Amazon Aurora will help AWS customers reduce performance bottlenecks in their applications. The relatively low cost of Aurora will tempt many customers to migrate workloads to this implementation of RDS.

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.

Kirsten Lora, our senior product director, discusses how Global Knowledge's Business Transformation Services prepare your employees to support your organizational 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.

Amazon Redshift opens up enterprise data warehouse (EDW) capabilities to even the smallest of businesses, yet its costs, security, and flexibility also make it appealing to the largest of enterprises. It allows companies to easily and conveniently scale their EDW needs both up and down, and as a managed service, it allows your team to offload all of the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of building and maintaining an EDW. Its raw storage costs are about one-fifth to one-tenth of traditional in-house EDW, and AWS has taken great care to ensure its performance is still competitive with those in-house solutions. Before deciding to use Amazon Redshift, however, it's important to understand what it is and is not.

This white paper explores the native AWS storage solutions, enabling you to deliver applications in the cloud in the most efficient, cost-effective, and secure manner. In terms of storage, it's important to understand the characteristics of each AWS storage option so that you can implement one or more AWS storage services to meet your needs. Often, you'll find that utilizing multiple storage options together will give you the best outcomes.

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.

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.

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)).

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

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created a cloud definition that has been well-accepted across the IT industry. NIST was mandated to assist government agencies to adopt cloud computing for their IT operations. As part of their mandate, NIST created multiple working groups to define cloud computing, its architecture, and requirements. In this paper we explore the center core of NIST's cloud definition.

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.

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.

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.

After a review of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and its close cousin Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), this white paper addresses three main deployment scenarios: SDN without deploying cloud computing, cloud computing without deploying SDN, and deploying cloud computing in conjunction with SDN. We'll look at use cases, when the approach makes sense, and any applicable limitations.

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.

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.

Today, every project comes with limited resources and an impossible timeline. You have to prioritize, but how do you determine what's most important? The answer is to do more than just prioritize. You have to fully understand your company's strategic direction and make every action align with that strategy. In this hour-long webinar, project management expert Yvan Bastien will show you how to reach that full understanding and make the kinds of informed decisions that lead to success.

Amazon Web Services: An OverviewThere's a really good chance that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has more than a few products to help you work faster, smarter, and more cost effectively. After all, the depth and breadth of AWS is significant, comprising more than 30 services in dozens of data centers located in nine regions across the globe. They offer computing, storage, networking, deployment, management, and a host of supporting services, such as queues and email services. Getting a clear understanding of what AWS is and how it can help your business can be challenging. Never fear. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor and cloud and big data analyst Rich Morrow will help. He'll give an overview of AWS and its many benefits.

In this seminar, discover how OpenStack can simplify your cloud infrastructure management. Experts from Red Hat, the leading contributor to the OpenStack project, will fill you in on how organizations have solved problems and increased business value with open-source cloud technology. They will also give you a peek into the future of Red Hat OpenStack and reveal how Red Hat training and certification can ensure the success of your cloud deployment.

In this video, Practice Leader Craig Brown discusses the new Microsoft Cloud Computing platforms and how to keep your organization's data secure and functioning properly while operating either partially or entirely on the cloud.

AWS has introduced Auto Scaling so that you can take advantage of cloud computing without having to incur the costs of adding more personnel or building your own software. You can use Auto Scaling to scale for high availability, to meet increasing system demand, or to control costs by eliminating unneeded capacity. You can also use Auto Scaling to quickly deploy software for massive systems, using testable, scriptable processes to minimize risk and cost of deployment.

A shift is occurring in the way we view leadership today. If you want to get things done, you need influence, not authority. This means that IT Professionals, Project Managers, Business Analysts, business-line Managers and individual contributors must focus on demonstrating personal leadership. Getting results through others by building relationships and using influence skills rather than relying on positional power is key.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers increased agility, developer productivity, pay-as-you-go pricing and overall cost savings. But you might wonder where to start, what pitfalls exist and how can you avoid them? How can you best save time and money? Learn what you need to know and where to start before launching an AWS-hosted service.

Global Knowledge Senior Business Skills instructor Samuel Brown covers tips for preparing and practicing for the PMP exam.