Training Services

Achieving Maximum Productivity
in Your Company for Executives

Achieving Maximum Productivity
in Software and Technology
Companies for Executives

Achieving Maximum Productivity
in Your Company

Achieving Maximum Productivity
in your Software and Technology
Company

Building Great Teams That
Deliver Every Time

Teaching Your Organization
How To Learn From Mistakes

Creating a Quality Plan for
Your Organization

Building and Managing
a Budget

Creating Corporate
Communication Plans
That Work

Software Configuration and
Change Management

Implementing Scrum
for Product Development
and Management

How to Influence People
and Decisions Through
Persuasive Speaking
and Presentation

What Is Document Management
and How Do I Implement It?

Creating an Organization Built
Upon World-Class Standards

Preparing for the QAI CSTE Exam

Preparing for the QAI CSQA Exam

How To Hire Good People

Writing Effective Project
Requirements

On and Off-Shore In-Sourcing
and Out-Sourcing

An Introduction to
Agile Software Development

Dealing with Conflict

Effective Email and
VoiceMail Practices

How To Estimate
Successful Projects

How to Manage
Successful Projects

An Introduction to
Extreme Programming

General Systems Thinking

An Introduction to
Information Security

How To Run
Effective Meetings

Introduction to Software
Testing

Test-Driven Development

Writing Effective Software
Requirements

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Achieving Maximum Productivity in Your Company for Executives

Designed for busy Executives, Managing Directors and Leaders of companies who are unable to dedicate time for the longer course, this material is a crash-course in our Achieving Maximum Productivity in Your Company material in a single-day. Show up full of caffeine and a good night's sleep. This course will cover an immense amount of material in a very short period of time.

This course is designed for the construction, manufacturing, technology, general business, governmental, non-governmental, missions and agriculture industries. The course is designed particularly for executive leaders involved in or responsible for running an organization from top to bottom with measurable results.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Achieving Maximum Productivity in Your Software and Technology Company for Executives

Designed for busy Executives, Managing Directors and Leaders of software and technology companies who are unable to dedicate time for the longer course, this material is a crash-course in our Achieving Maximum Productivity in Your Software and Technology Company material in a single-day. Show up full of caffeine and a good night's sleep. This course will cover an immense amount of material in a very short period of time.

This course is designed for technology industry. The intended audience is Executives and Senior Leadership of private, public, government and non-governmental institutions.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Achieving Maximum Productivity in Your Company

Designed for Executives, Managing Directors and Leaders in companies, this training experience is the full-package designed for business leaders who manage organizations, large and small, from defining vision and mission statements to setting and measuring performance against objectives, as well as, prioritizing, sizing, defining and delivering products and services to market. This training experience leads you through what it takes to build an operational structure within your organization that allows you to maximize your throughput, eliminate waste and increase your profits in a short period of time.

This course is designed for the construction, manufacturing, technology, general business, governmental, non-governmental, missions and agriculture industries. The course is designed particularly for anyone involved in or responsible for running an organization from top to bottom with measurable results.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Achieving Maximum Productivity in Your Software and Technology Company

Designed for Executives, Managing Directors and Leaders of software and technology projects, teams and companies, this five-day course covers everything you need to know in order to focus and structure your software and technology organization to deliver predictable, repeatable results on a regular basis. From what organizational structure to use, to methods of managing work and change management, reporting and measurement, development, testing, methods of delivering and evolving a team, products and services, this material covers literally everything necessary to build and evolve a software and technology company. Be prepared to cover a large amount of information in five days.

This course is designed for the software and technology industry. The intended audience includes anyone who is involved in software and technology teams, leadership and executive management.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Building Great Teams That Deliver Every Time

Leadership style defines team productivity and institutional effectiveness. When teams trust their leaders, they help them succeed. The question often comes to be, how do we get people to trust leadership? Can it be forced? Can it be required? Can it be expected as a right associated to the role in question?

This course focuses on how to build healthy, successful and prosperous organizations based upon building healthy, successful and valued teams through Leadership transparency. What are the primary dysfunctions all teams suffer from, how are they related to leadership opacity or transparency, and what do you do about it.When there is clear, relevant and communicated direction coupled with leadership transparency there will be whole-hearted commitment from the teams to the goals of the leader and the company. Inversely, when teams are unable to relate to leadership, unable to understand how the corporate goals relate to them personaly, or when teams are unable to understand how they matter in the big picture, teams, efforts, projects and institutions will be fragmented and unable to deliver according to leadership direction.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Teaching Your Organization How to Learn from Mistakes

Advancing and evolving your company only happens through purposed learning and change. Great companies take the time to learn what they are doing well, what they are not doing well, and use that information to change their performance. Poorly performing companies believe they are too busy or too smart for such efforts. This material will teach you where in your organization you should be regularly seeking lessons for improved performance, how to run the materials in order to get the information you need, and what to do with the data in order to improve the organization.

This course is designed for the anyone wanting to learn how to improve the performance of their team, project and company.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Creating a Quality Plan for Your Organization

Everyone wants quality. If you ask ten people the definition of quality, you will get ten answers. Quality means different things to different people. As a result, institutions without a corporate level quality plan will suffer from everyone working according to their own personal definition of quality. This course will teach you how to build a top-down enterprise level quality plan that reaches into all sectors, divisions, departments, teams and projects within your organization. With one quality standard expected of the entire organization, there will be one measurable quality-driven performance.

This course is designed for all industries including government, private, public and non-governmental institutions. The intended audience is anyone involved in designing, managing, measuring and evolving quality operations, performance and deliverables in an organization.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Building and Managing a Budget

If you are an organization of any size, you likely have a budget. And if you have a budget you'll need to be competent at managing planned versus actual expenses, discovering and forecasting trends, as well as, understanding the difference between on-going operational costs and one-time capital expenditures. This course will walk you through how to build a professional-level planned versus actual budget structure for your team, project, department or company and show you how to collect data and report it in order to maintain accurate accounting figures.

This course is designed for any industry who spends money and actually has to track it. Fluent knowledge of spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc is required to be successful in this course.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Creating Corporate Communication Plans That Work

When consultants come in to assess your institution, organization or corporation regarding planned versus actual versus forecasted activities and results, there is always a common reason why the health and lack of health exist the way they do...communication. Leadership is required to communicate, re-communicate, communicate again and over-communicate to ensure that the same message is delivered to everyone in the institution no matter their role, rank or geographical location.

Who are the stakeholders? Who is involved? What is to be delivered? What are the goals? These are only a hand-ful of the questions your organization needs included in a master communication strategy to ensure that everyone who must be informed, is informed all of the time, in a timely, useful, comprehensible manner. Whether there are fifty people of one-hundred fifty-thousand people in your organization, knowing what information must be distributed to what stakeholders on what frequency and to what depth is a requirement to facilitate focused, flourishing organizational success every single time.

This course teaches you how to develop a communication plan for your organization, institution or corporation that affirms right communication is distributed correctly and completely on a regularly, iterative basis so that you deliver what you planned to deliver.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Software Configuration and Change Management

This course is under construction and expected to be available for public consumption in October 2011.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Implementing Scrum for Product Development and Management

Scrum is a development, project and product management behavior framework that enables teams, projects and organizations to achieve predictable, repeatable organizational deliverable behaviors within the first thirty days of implementation with measurably improved organizational results within ninety-days. This course will teach you what Scrum is, how to implement it and how to improve organizational deliverable results within ninety days.

This course is designed for anyone expected to deliver products or services to customers who want predictable, repeatable deliverable results in a very short period of time.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] How to Influence People and Decisions Through Persuasive Speaking and Presentation

Speaking in front of others seems to come naturally for some and unnaturally or not at all for others. Whether you're an experienced or inexperienced speaker, how you present yourself and your material will determine the impressions others take away from their time listening to you. Did you deliver the message you intended? Did people walk away thinking about your key points? Will they remember why your message is important? Did your message influence key decisions and people? This course will teach you how to structure an argument, how to present the material and how to leave a lasting, influential impression on others.

This course is designed for anyone who needs to influence other people through speaking and presentation.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] What is Document Management and How Do I Implement it?

Companies generate documentation. As companies grow they generate even more documentation. Employees storing documents on their individual computers is a risk to institutional intellectual property management and putting documentation into a corporate file server no longer works since there are too many documents, files and folders to find anything with any speed at all. Knowing what documents exist, where they exist and what versions of each document are relevant is a challenge all institutions face and the larger the institution, the larger the problem. This course will teach you what is required for an enterprise-level version controlled document management system, how to get it, implement it and manage it such that you aren't left searching for correct documents or correct versions of documents before a meeting.

This course is designed for any organization that generates piles of documentation and can't keep track of which version should be used at what meeting, which documents are available to the public versus private consumption only, or where you put that special document last week and no one can seem to find it. If you lose or misplace documentation, have multiple versions of the same document, have no versions or simply don't know how to organize and manage your giant pile of documentation, this course is for you.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Creating an Organization Built Upon World-Class Standards

Many industries require compliance to standards. However, not every institution requires standards of themselves as we can see in the marketplace through poorly performing organizations and their associated products and services. When an organization designs and implements standards managing the daily operations and performance of their company, then the company is more readily equipped to identify when something is not acceptable and requires attention. This course will review what it takes to build a standards system for your organization, how to implement it, manage it and evolve it such that your organization is operating within acceptable deviation from the baseline expectation as a general norm.

This course is designed for all industries. The intended audience is for anyone involved in setting and measuring performance of an organization, project, teams and individuals.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Preparing for the QAI CSTE Exam

This course is designed to help you study, prepare for and take the Certified Software Test Engineer exam offered through the Quality Assurance International organization in Orlando, Florida USA.

You must have already registered for the exam and purchased the required body of knowledge book from QAI prior to signing up for this course.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Preparing for the QAI CSQA Exam

This course is designed to help you study, prepare for and take the Certified Software Quality Analyst exam offered through the Quality Assurance International organization in Orlando, Florida USA.

You must have already registered for the exam and purchased the required body of knowledge book from QAI prior to signing up for this course.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] How to Hire Good People

Hiring people is easy. Hiring good people that are productive team-mates, good corporate citizens and effective employees is far more difficult. In fact, hiring someone you wish would work on your team forever is unexpectedly difficult. In this course we discuss how to explore who a person is, how to discover their work history and work ethic, how to perform real-time practical tests to discover aptitude and attitude, as well as, how to facilitate an interview which helps you discover whether this candidate is a fit for your team.

This course is designed for anyone responsible for hiring good people onto your team.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Writing Effective Project Requirements

Building and running a project based upon a scope that includes a set of project requirements is often more challenging than it sounds. What is it we're delivering? To whom is it being delivered? How do we know when we're done? Writing requirements that make sense, are measurable and have a clear definition of done is often limited by the customer's ability to define what they want, the listener's ability to hear, ask clarifying questions and document, and the interpretation of the requirements by those actually delivering the product or service at the end of the journey. This course will teach you how to write plain language requirements that make sense to the customer, to the requirement elicitor and the teams delivering the product or service.

This course is designed for anyone involved in defining and delivering products and services through a project. The intended audience is particularly for anyone wanting to learn how to write requirements that make sense to both the customer and the person responsible for delivering according to customer expectations.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] On and Off-Shore In-Sourcing and Out-Sourcing

Managing any project is challenging. The larger the set of objectives, budget and staff, the more complexity comes along challenging you to finish the work. And all the more difficult it may become when your teams are geographically distributed, in different timezones and all responsible for delivering the same end-state project deliverables on the same timeline and budget. Knowing how to design, manage and successfully complete projects with this complexity has everything to do with your ability to understand how to manage multiple teams whether they are in-sourced, out-sourced, on- or off-shore.

If you're company is under-staffed and over-capacity, do you know how to craft a well-defined business arrangement with a third-party service provider in order to supplement your capacity shortfall? If you are going to out-source, there are contract, team construct, management behavior and operational infrastructure elements you must have in place in order to make this voyage worth your money. And what if you consider out-sourcing some of your work need to a vendor outside of country or even off-shore? Are you prepared to provide the type of escalated leadership responsiveness necessary to manage multi-country, multi-country teams?

Are you considering contracting these services? Are you considering offering these services? Whether the work is taken outside your company, country or continent or you bring the work from foreign companies into your own country and company, running a multi-country, multi-continent, multi-timezone project team requires more of you, your staff and your operation than initially appears. What you will save in out-sourced labor costs will easily be consumed with a poorly structured contract and mis-managed engagement.

This course will discuss and teach you the fundamental constructs necessary to out-source, off-shore, in-source and on-shore work to and from other vendors, countries and continents. The economic savings by out-sourcing is unarguable. Doing it wrong without proper education, preparation, frameworks and expertise is inevitable. At the end of this course you'll understand not only your economic savings, but the operational methods you must change in order to walk this road of growth and prosperity

[an error occurred while processing this directive] An Introduction to Agile Software Development

There are many development and delivery behaviors that compose the Agile body of knowledge. This course will walk you through the many flavors of Agile software development practices in today's marketplace, help you navigate which ideas apply in what contexts and why these practices critically matter if you, your team, project or company are interested in building projects and teams that work well together while delivering working, tested, software predictably and repeatably.

This course is designed for anyone in the technology industry interested in delivering immediately usable, tested software. The intended audience is for anyone involved in technology efforts, whether software, hardware, network, team leads, management or executive leadership.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Dealing with Conflict

People are involved in every single situation we'll encounter in any institution on any effort. And as we all know, each person has a unique view on life that sometimes rubs or conflicts with our own. Conflict between people, whether overt or covert, hinders, confuses or stops progress. And while conflict is a fact of life between people, cordially, professionally and diplomatically resolving conflict is the healthiest solution for people, teams, projects and institutions of all sizes. This course will teach you tips and tricks to identifying conflict before it happens, managing it when it does and how to resolve conflict so that progress may be achieved.

This course is designed for anyone who works with people.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Effective Email and VoiceMail Practices

The best form of communication available to people is face-to-face, verbal communication. However, many organizations, due to size, geographical distribution or ease of use, rely upon email and voice mail to communicate messages best delivered in person. Resultantly, we often fall victim to delivering and receiving email and voicemail where we are unable to determine tone, intent, context or to adequately understand what each person's role and action must be after receiving or delivering such messages. Quick, inefficient or uncareful messages delivered create social distortion which then requires its own effort thereafter. When we poorly communicate, we make things harder than necessary. This course will talk about the very simple, very important behaviors necessary to communicating effectively, professionaly and completely in the form of email and voicemail.

This course is designed for anyone who has ever received a poor email or voicemail message, misunderstood the intent of communication or been a poor communicator themselves.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] How to Estimate Successful Projects

Why are projects late? No matter which industry, project and effort estimations are designed to tell us when we will deliver what is requested. However, as we all know, it simply doesn't happen like that on a regular basis. What form of estimation to use is often a philosophical or religious debate and because people cannot agree on how to estimate or whether a particular estimate is good or bad, projects are built upon faulty logic from the beginning. This course will teach you the various industry methods of estimating, which ones work and which ones don't, and what estimation behavior makes the most sense in the best interest of managing money and delivering according to our planned scope.

This course is designed for anyone involved in defining a project and the associated work within, as well as, estimating time and cost associated with delivering according to expectation.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] How to Manage Successful Projects

This training course teaches the fundamentals of defining, building, managing and measuring a project from beginning to end using the most current project management techniques available. By reviewing Prince2, Project Management Institute and Critical Chain Project Management you will come to understand what every project management body of knowledge is trying to solve, how they are solving it and when one approach makes more sense than another. You will learn the fundamentals of a project structure, how to manage stakeholders, vendors and members of project teams, as well as, how to manage the change that inevitably happens during the life of a project. More importantly, you will learn how to deliver a project on-schedule, on-budget and meeting or exceeding quality standards.

This course is designed for both public and private forms of construction, manufacturing, technology, general business, government, NGOs, missions and agriculture industries. The intended audience is for anyone involved in projects including people new to projects up through the most experienced project manager and executive looking for keys to improving project deliverable success.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Effective Email and VoiceMail Practices

The best form of communication available to people is face-to-face, verbal communication. However, many organizations, due to size, geographical distribution or ease of use, rely upon email and voice mail to communicate messages best delivered in person. Resultantly, we often fall victim to delivering and receiving email and voicemail where we are unable to determine tone, intent, context or to adequately understand what each person's role and action must be after receiving or delivering such messages. Quick, inefficient or uncareful messages delivered create social distortion which then requires its own effort thereafter. When we poorly communicate, we make things harder than necessary. This course will talk about the very simple, very important behaviors necessary to communicating effectively, professionaly and completely in the form of email and voicemail.

This course is designed for anyone who has ever received a poor email or voicemail message, misunderstood the intent of communication or been a poor communicator themselves.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] General Systems Thinking

General systems thinking is the continual process of viewing, studying or otherwise observing a system with the intent of understanding the purpose of the system, current versus designed result of the system's existence, elements within the system that influence one another within the whole and the whole itself, as well as and when necessary, external elements that influence internal elements and the system subsequently, both directly and indirectly. It may be likened to attempting to understand how well the forest provides shade, protects from the wind, provides haven for wildlife, contributes to a positive atmosphere or evolves itself by understanding the inter-relationship of elements within the forest to themselves and to each other, while understanding the role of the forest to its surrounding area and how external elements evoke internal and external change. Seeing the forest as a healthy or unhealthy system is more important than simply understanding a healthy or unhealthy component therein. Seeing the unhealthy component will more likely lead us to a system understanding than otherwise. Rather than observing a problem part of a system and reacting to it in isolation, general systems thinking seeks to understand why the part exists as it does, how its current behavior influences other parts around it and the system itself.

This course will teach you what general system thinking is all about, how it applies in life and particularly in your company, institution or organization. At the end of this course you'll be equipped to view your team, project, corporation or any system, large or small, in a new light which will directly impact your corporate, project and team strategies, your methods of measurement and how you will stimulate organizational/institutional change when needed.

When you understand general systems thinking, you're ability to lead will change as well.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Information Security

This course is under construction and expected to be available for public consumption in late 2011.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] How to Run Effective Meetings

Let's face it, we've all been in poorly run meetings. Meetings that were not scheduled, meetings that take too long and accomplish too little, as well as, meetings where we don't know who is in charge, what problem we're trying to solve or how this meeting ever happened in the first place. Bad meetings waste time, money and patience while ruining the credibility of the meeting organizer or owner. This course will teach you how to design and run good meetings, how to help bad meetings turn good and how to minimize and eliminate the need for unnecessary meetings.

This course is designed for anyone who attends bad meetings and wishes there was a way to have better ones.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Introduction to Software Testing

If you already have a software testing team or want to build one, your testers actually need to know how to test if the software testing effort is going to add value to your software development journey. If you are already a professional employed software tester or want to be one, there is more to software testing than putting someone in front of a keyboard and hoping magic happens. Understanding the differences between black, gray and white box testing, what is boundary value versus exploratory versus domain testing and when to use risk-based versus specification-based versus path-based activities are all questions that need to be asked and answered. Are they the same? Different? When do I use what method or approach?

This course will cover a ridciulous amount of information in just three days. How to build a test plan, where to store defects, how to work as a team with technologists and stakeholders, how to find defects that matter the most and how to decompose, assess, prioritize and execute an ad-hoc test strategy with little to no preparation on a system you've never seen until fifteen minutes ago. People often believe that software testing requires little education or experience and this is true if you're only interested in superficial defect findings like mis-spelled words and text-box alignments. This course will teach you how to build a test strategy and add new tools to your software tester toolbox enabling you to test the things that matter to customers, technologists and stakeholders alike.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Test-Driven Development

Knowing how to deliver software that works every time and into the distant future is a challenging problem to solve for every company, organization, project and team delivering software. Since finding defects during requirements elicitation and development activities is far cheaper for a company than finding them in production, every organization building and delivering software must work intelligently to deliver working, tested software every single time. This course will teach you how to build tests that prove your personal, team, project and corporate software works every day, all day, repetitively no matter how many programmers, no matter how much code.

These courses will not mix languages and will therefore only cover one language per course instance. For example, TDD for C# will not be mixed with TDD for Java and so on. If you'd like TDD taught for a particular language, ask.

This course is designed for programmers. The intended audience is any programmer working to develop and deliver code that works every single day of their career.

This course will leverage software engineering and test-driven development experts from the US or UK. As a result, fully paid course fees will be due thirty days prior to class begin in order to cover expenses. This is a great course to have on-site at your business location. Contact us for details regarding what will be required at your site in order to host this class.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Writing Effective Software Requirements

Customers never know what they want until they see what they don't want. Fact. Even after we've written specifications, gained customer sign-off and delivered accordingly we still have rework. Fact. Why is it that a requirement never seems to get delivered in the software the way we anticipated? This course will teach you how to write clearly, well-communicated and measurable specifications upon which entire software systems will be built, delivered and evolved using plain language accessible to everyone, technical or not.

This course is designed for the technology industry. The intended audience is anyone involved in defining software and technology specifications, managing them, delivering them, testing against them or waiting to receive the product resultant from them.