Resource Library

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.

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

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

Getting a clear understanding of what Amazon Web Services (AWS) is and how it can help your business can be a daunting task. The depth and breadth of AWS is significant, comprising over 100 services in dozens of data centers located in 16 Regions throughout the globe (with five more in the works). They offer computing, storage, networking, deployment, management, and a host of "supporting" services like queues, serverless functions, and e-mail. There's a great chance that AWS has more than a few products to help you work faster, smarter, and more cost effectively. So, where should you start?

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.

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.

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.

The Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report is a window into the inner workings of IT departments, revealing insights and opinions held by professionals around the world. For 10 years, we have surveyed over 120,000 men and women in IT about the state of the industry. With a decade of data at our fingertips, we analyzed 10 years’ worth of reports and noticed four major trending areas: certifications, salaries, cloud computing and cybersecurity. 

The term "life cycle" implies two things: that a process is perpetual and that the sequence of events is obligatory or uni-directional. There is no beginning or end to a life cycle and the sequence of events cannot change. A seed cannot go directly to being a mature plant nor revert back to the blossom stage.

Project procurement activities are often managed by specialists. By this I mean that the procurement department takes over responsibility for purchasing and contract management from the project manager. As a result of this separation of responsibilities, the steps and stages of procurement are often poorly understood by PMs. In this and the next few blog submissions, I will attempt to shed light on procurement activities and relate these activities to the PMI PMBOK.