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| Fast Track IT Training | ||
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| Seminar Programs and Workshops format |  | |
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Our tag line indicates: "We practice what we teach." That means: we have been there, we have done that. We share real-life project experience with you and your staff to ensure that they learn to take on their next project with new skills and confidence. Our tag line also means: we keep honing our skills to ensure that our expertise remains relevant as new technologies are employed. We regularly update our training materials that are built on by decades of hands-on experience. We understand how each topic fits like a building block to support a full Software Development Life Cycle quality management process. We focus on helping your staff to develop hard to acquire skills of business requirements elicitation, business continuity planning, quality assurance, or even a full SDLC-focused project management program. We train your staff to do the right things and to do things right! You get results only if people share a common understanding before they start new projects. Why are in-house seminars so effective? There is much to consider about seminars. In-house training can be available to all employees: you can provide the best training opportunity with the least impact on how day to day activities are conducted. We travel to your site to minimize any disruption to the work done by your employees. We deliver short seminars and hands-on practice opportunities in easy-to-digest units in successive weeks. We do not overload the learning capacity of your employees with a 4 day tidal-wave of information, as in traditional training courses. Between sessions your employees have time to digest the learned theory and to practice the application of our tools and techniques. This reduces any disruption of your operations and it benefits both the learning experience and the opportunity for improved productivity. We make this training pay for itself. Traditional training does not offer these same benefits so easily and with so little disruption. In-house training minimizes the need for selecting candidates for training. Instead, all candidate employees can be trained at once. Entire departments can adapt to change in unison. You can avoid the perception of bias in selecting individuals to go for public training sessions. You avoid the problem of having a person share the knowledge gained at a seminar. Simply bring the one seminar to all employees that can benefit from such knowledge. The benefits of training are clear, improved productivity and higher quality. This works only if all employees perceive the message that they too were just as valuable to receive training. That implied recognition of value conveyed in the invitation to attend training seminars is a powerful motivator. By bringing seminars in-house you can create a culture shift that is manageable. Employees could be intimidated by the formal setting of a public seminar. Learning amongst peers can be more enjoyable. Even some disruptive aspects of peer comments can be channeled to use fun as a motivating force for learning as well as for team building and development. These incidents establish memory-jogging opportunities. This can enhance the learning process better than any war-stories told by the presenter that your employees may not readily relate to. There is a foundation of common knowledge. There is a mutual drive to see that improved techniques will find their way in how your business is operated. By contrast, if selected employees gain certain knowledge and insight in a public seminar, they can be discouraged by the effort required to get these ideas implemented (unless they have exceptional coaching skills to train their peers). The perception of training as a reward is a common one, regardless of your intentions, and that can be counter productive. In-house training is the easiest way to prevent such a perception. Why consider pm4hire.com for your in-house training needs? |
| Our training sessions are designed specifically for presenting on your premises to make sure that all employees are brought up to the same level of knowledge. Our materials are geared to provide your staff with immediately useful information and tools. Of course it does not hurt to know that we are flexible and that we offer very competitive rates. | |||
Our training sessions are tailored to make efficient use of the time you have available. Based on the principle that people may have a limited attention span for new information our seminar sessions are structured to optimize the learning opportunity. We understand the focus must be on business, so we make sure your employees are able to attend to their business chores as well as learn new things in the same day. A typical seminar session consists of: |
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15 Minutes |
Context |
We establish the overall scope in which the seminar topic is a segment, so that people are more receptive to learn new information and to retain that information. | ||
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60 Minutes |
Theory |
People (on average) have a capacity of 60 minutes for new material to be absorbed in a single session. We put enough information in our session to challenge your staff, but we do not overwhelm people with details. | ||
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30 Minutes |
Demonstration |
To reinforce the new concepts presented earlier we demonstrate/review a sample case that illustrates the material. If possible we will tailor the demonstration to your business situation. | ||
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15 Minutes |
Summary |
The demonstration is summarized to reinforce the theory that was explained earlier. This improves the retention of new concepts in memory. | ||
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60 Minutes |
Hands-on |
(Optional) For many sessions there is an opportunity for hands-on experimenting during which the participants are coached, ideally based on a problem that is relevant to a day-to-day business challenge faced by the participants. | ||
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At the end of the session each student will receive a complete set of notes and examples, as well as sample application software that was used to demonstrate the principles. This enables them to review the material as often as required and to refer to their notes as they apply these concepts in their business work activities. Our model applications are completely functional and useful to help your employees become more effective. You can run up to 2 full-size sessions or 3 truncated sessions per day, and on successive days, if you want to have the equivalent of a conventional seminar program. | |||
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Our training is unique in that your employees can employ useful tools that keep reinforcing the theory with practical applications until you decide that you can justify the commercial products you want based on the measurable efficiency improvements gained with our tools. We do not have any specific affiliation with vendors of products beyond trying to stay current with what the various vendors have to offer. We can tailor our training to include the use of specific products in order to make the sessions more relevant to your organization, or to customize the programs for a closer fit to your specific needs. Most of our tools are Excel™ based to avoid potential conflicts with restrictions to download and install freeware applications. | ||||
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Applications Software For many course sessions we have developed unique applications that demonstrate principles, but that can also be used to assist people in day-to-day business operations. For example, the image below illustrates the process of managing an RFP/RFQ for Software Procurement that is a course session in our project management series:
Most applications are based on Excel™, to ensure that your staff is familiar with the general tools and the data management that is part of most processes. This enables us to focus on the main subject without getting sidetracked with application basics, and to maximize the benefit of each study session. The benefit of the above example is that your staff will be able to strategize the RFP/RFQ and to use this tool to manage the responses in order to identify the best overall opportunities without the need of any further tools development or acquisition. In all sessions we will use our software to demonstrate the principles of the process, and we offer an option to include an hour of practice at the end of each session to make sure students thoroughly understand the topic. As shown earlier, each course follows the same set pattern to ensure that the session is focused on a clear learning objective. Optionally the session can include a workshop to let people practice with an opportunity for questions and answers to reinforce learning, or people may prefer to use the demo applications at their desk and quietly experiment with using it on an actual project. The basic structure of our course sessions allows us to tailor our training to the time you have available for training, as we understand that you have a business to run and that you may not be in a position to set aside large blocks of time for people to be inaccessible. We can save you time and money by adapting to your in-house training schedule, from 2 hours per day to 6 hours per day, and even evenings, as will be explained on the next page. The short seminar sessions are a part of a complete program, summarized below, and detailed elsewhere on this web site. You can elect to have one session presented per day, or to combine up to 3 sessions in the same day. You can have one day a week set aside for training, or you can continue for several days to finish a complete program (more economical to cut travel costs). Note that there are also options for you to bring the course in-house if you have your own training team. |
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Project Management |
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Project Management BasicsThe ability to run things as a project is becoming an increasingly important skill, even for people who do not specialize in project management. This course is also useful for people who use the plans created by a project manager, and who want to make sure their contributions meet the project expectations. We explain the principles of project planning, the use of scheduling software, and a methodology and a consistent work breakdown structure. These same skills can be applied to I.T. projects as well as a broad range of other types of projects that business organizations undertake from time to time.
The ability to coordinate the needs of many projects concurrently is what makes the difference between an efficient IT organization and one that sees costs spiraling out of control. Learn the difference between tracking dates (although important) and optimizing the IT potential to maximize the benefits to your organization: you never look at project management the same way again. In this set of seminars we look at executive level project management in terms of managing the priority of multiple work programs and individual projects that benefit the organization. We also explore the need to maintain control over the focus of approved initiatives, to make sure the corporate interests are protected, and to be able to respond to new opportunities without compromising work in progress.
Learn the skills that any Project Management Professional must master in order to implement a successful IT project as covered in this series of seminars. Our focus is to go beyond the PMBOK produced by PMI to show the fundamentals behind the different areas of competency rather than to focus on the PMP exam itself. This is an extensive series of courses that show the depth of knowledge implied by the high-level PMBOK summary.
The skills that a Project Management Professional must master in order to manage the people that make up a project team. Good team skills make it possible for the total productivity of the team to exceed the sum of the individual contributions towards quality final deliverables. This is also a high level overview of Project Management for many participants on a project team that can benefit from a better understanding of the collaborative process required for IT projects to succeed.
These are steps required to purchase software rather than to develop the software internally. This includes off-the-shelf software as well as outsourced development. In each case challenges can be significant to make sure the right product is selected for the right reasons. Our methodology is based on a proprietary Value Analysis approach that is embedded in a procurement model. It is aimed at making procurement options easier to score in relative terms so that there is always an objective selection of the best overall product or service to be purchased. It is possible to be precise and to pursue the selection based on a large number of inputs, without overloading your capacity to manage the final selection of a winning product or service. |
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Quality Assurance |
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Quality Assurance Analysis We must understand the role of QA in preventive participation in projects to facilitate the production of quality final deliverables. Prevention yields low-cost problem solutions that are much easier to implement before errors are allowed to propagate throughout the development deliverables. In our seminars we stress that every opportunity must be pursued to catch bugs as early in the process as possible, to minimize the cost of development. Not only are we concerned about a single software product, we need strategies to cope with the combination of products that must coexist in different computers. We need to keep track of changes that may affect already installed software, or that may make existing products obsolete. That means it is necessary to consider the QA role well beyond the scope of software development (or procurement), and it means that IT QA practitioners must be well trained and versatile.
You must understand the role of QA in corrective participation in projects to facilitate the production of reliable software by finding the bugs hidden in the code. We explore detection techniques used to identify weaknesses that should be addressed, while priority-based correction effort can be used to minimize the cost impact of emergency fixes that may be deferred to be included in a later release of the product. Problem tracking and change controls are critical components of managing the costs of quality assurance execution. In this series of seminars we focus on tools and techniques you can use to bring the testing challenge down to size. In our approach we explore both manual testing and the tools available to automate the testing, and we explain why both approaches should coexist. With a little planning the job of testing complex applications can be fun so long as you are focused on a common objective of customer satisfaction.
Understand the System Development Life Cycle methodology to make sure that all projects follow the proven steps that most likely result in producing quality deliverables. Governance is the control process that is needed to get people to adhere to the chosen methodology. Its responsibility is both proactive, to explain the benefits of the SDLC methodology, and corrective, to review and approve the work performed as substantially in accordance with the methodology. Governance is also about keeping a process in check, without stopping the natural progression of process improvements. Methodology is based on learning from past practices and it is intended to use best practices to be repeated and honed, not to stifle growth. A central element of QA Governance is to provide guidance with respect to interpreting the SDLC methodology in projects that deal with radically different applications so that the code can be maintained by the same technical support staff.
Understand the larger picture of quality that has evolved into a total quality culture. There are several contributing measures of quality that you can use to assess your QA effectiveness beyond developing or buying the best IT applications you can afford. A quality culture has to be established in all areas of an organization to open peoples' eyes to where or how opportunities for improvement can be identified. IT should be one of the tools for enabling quality initiatives with a profound impact on your organization. The challenge of Six Sigma is to achieve zero defects in order to minimize the cost of software development. It is but the latest of a series of quality improvement initiatives, some of which will be explored in this set of seminars. What these techniques have in common is the indoctrination of staff to focus on total quality, and to look for opportunities for improvement in all aspects of the work that is performed in different departments. This series explains internal process improvements as well as improved customer focus objectives. |
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Business Continuity Planning |
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Business Continuity Planning As seen with the '9/11' disaster, companies can be wiped out in an instant, while others manage to recover from devastating losses. The great power failure of 2003 signaled an era of uncertain operating continuity may have started. Learn what you can do to increase the chance of your company recovering from any number of potential disaster scenarios, some of which may be easier to predict than others. This course series is based on our proprietary BIRP methodology for addressing Corporate BCP instead of focusing on Information Technology. You never know if some bulldozer operator mistakenly knocks over a hydro tower in your industrial park: learn to be the first company back in operation when the power comes back on. |
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Business Systems Analysis |
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Business Systems Analysis This is the most critical aspect of any project, to make sure that the development or procurement effort addresses the critical needs of the business organization. Remarkably, many initiatives are started without a detailed assessment of what the true business needs are, and this has a greater impact on the effectiveness of IT projects than any other steps, simply because everything is dependent on this understanding.
Knowing what you want done for a business must be evaluated in terms of how to implement solutions so that all areas of the business are well served by a new application. We use a proven, down-to-earth methodology for the evaluation of business requirements to elicit the departmental use-case needs. We do not use the graphical representation popularized in recent tools because we are concerned that this may compromise the analysis by putting too much of the effort on the presentation of what is being identified. Besides, we want to focus on general principles rather than on specific proprietary approaches. The skills covered in this series of seminars are the most critical to the success of a future development project, yet in many ways they are poorly understood and, as a result, often ignored as critical stepping stones towards a successful project.
Whether you make or buy, you need to define in detail what exact functionality must be implemented across all requirements in order to get the correct implementation for your company. Unless requirements are written down in an unmistakable format you will always run the risk that people interpret your needs differently from what you expected. Requirements are the key to successful development and to subsequent testing of that development effort. |
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