Elearning blog: Learning re-imagined

2012 Mid-Atlantic User Group

By Ann Collins

We’re pleased to bring you a guest post by Ann Collins, a Skillsoft Learning Strategist.

The Skillsoft Mid-Atlantic region recently hosted a user group event at the Pragmatics, Inc., headquarters in Reston, VA.  We were thrilled to have almost 60 existing and potential customers — representing 40 different companies in attendance!

We were equally as thrilled that Jerry Nine, our Chief Operating Officer, was able to attend and kick off the session with an overview of current trends in e-learning and how Skillsoft is optimizing our own investments, such as Skillport® 8.

Two of our customers shared their stories with the group. CACI’s session highlighted how they are leveraging Skillsoft’s services group and a customized Skillsoft® KnowledgeCenter™ Portal to connect formal and informal learning and align learning to core capabilities and leadership competencies. CSC presented their solution for managing large-scale certification programs for PMP® and ITIL®. Through Skillsoft’s certification management services, CSC is able to experience tremendous cost savings while maintaining a “best of breed” program with significantly high pass rates.

Conflict on project teams and how to prevent them

By Christopher Scordo (PMP®, ITIL®) of www.PMPerfect.com 

Christopher Scordo (PMP, ITIL) is a published author and Managing Director of SSI Logic (www.ssilogic.com), owners of the popular PMP training website, PMPerfect. Visit PMPerfect for the latest on PMP exam prep, live online classes, and self-paced PMP courseware. 

When you are working together as a team, conflict will happen. It’s one of the biggest challenges for project executives, directors, and managers; but it does not have to be a bad thing. Thinking of conflict as a route to new ideas and approaches is one of the best ways to combat it. It’s also vital to bring issues between members to the surface; you just need to ensure that it’s managed well.

Studies on team conflict from the British Journal of Educational Technology and Wiley InterScience show that major sources of conflict amongst project teams usually revolve around: disagreement regarding overall project goals, disagreements on project priorities, and conflicts regarding project schedules. This happens because so many companies often run multiple projects at the same time and team members can get lost and confused if their schedules are not managed properly. 

On top of all of these issues, personality clashes and interpersonal issues also lead to conflicts, particularly when it comes to organizations with complex technical responsibilities where cross-functional and self-directed teams with a technical background have to rely on others to get their work done.

 What can we learn from these research studies, then?  It is absolutely vital for cross-functional team members to receive training in communication and interpersonal skills, but it’s equally important for project managers to limit the eruption of conflict when they are avoidable.

As an effective project manager, here are some tips to help prevent unnecessary conflict.

Hold regular, scheduled status meetings

Meet with your team at least weekly to receive formal updates on project statuses; and maintain daily communication with team members to ensure they have an open communication channel to you. Make sure communication channels stay open and communicate clearly and openly about the goals and priorities in order to reduce misperceptions.

Soft train your team in human relations

Those from technical backgrounds often struggle to communicate properly with people who do not come from a technical background.  Explaining basic communications principles to your technical team, and including those team members on customer emails to lead by example, will make a massive difference.  Also try to arrange team-building exercises across channels if at all possible.  This is especially important as technical team members interact with clients who may not have expert knowledge on the effort involved with technical goals.

De-emphasize project hierarchy

Team members in strict project hierarchies with little access to project and organizational leaders will often feel condescended to, resulting in conflict with their peers.  There is no reason why project executives, directors, and managers shouldn’t value the opinions and perspectives of all team members.  Communicating to upper management in one manner, while ignoring or de-prioritizing the needs of team members, is a sure way to develop contempt within an organization.  This type of approach also results in a trickle-down effect, whereby functional leaders within an organization “manage up”, and disregard the needs of the team they manage.  Ultimately, it is very simple to maintain organizational authority while treating others with respect.

Encourage mutual respect

No matter how good you are at managing conflict, it will not work if your team does not respect one other, and if they do not respect the people they are working with. Fostering an environment which nurtures respect will help with the willingness to agree and disagree and to reach compromises without contempt.  

Skillsoft’s new series helps professionals achieve PMI® Agile Certification

The popularity of agile development continues to grow, as organizations look for ways to cut costs, and save time and resources, while reducing overall risk in the software development process.  But how do IT professionals get up-to-speed on all the agile skills required for success? Training and certification are key.  

PMI, the world’s leading project management member association launched a certification named the PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP ^sm), which validates an individual’s ability to understand agile principles and concepts. To help professionals prepare for the PMI Agile Certification exam, Skillsoft today announced a solution based on the exam that establishes a baseline of understanding regarding agile philosophy, concepts, and general practices for project managers.

The “model” project manager

We’re pleased to bring you a guest post from Susan Tuttle, a professional consultant with over 20 years experience in project and change management and author of Illustrating PRINCE2®- Project Management in Real Terms.

By Susan Tuttle

Project Management - it’s not rocket science. We all know the basics. It’s a good idea to define what you want to do, then plan before you do it, next, do what it says on the plan and then review how it all went. Repeat, as necessary.

But life! Politics! Fires, usually not real ones, just the issues that arise that trigger you into ‘fire fighting mode,' seem to cause ‘common sense’ to go out the window.

How to stay on top of it all? I’m not sure there is one solution, but in my (humble) opinion, the answer lies with a bit of modelling.

By modelling I mean finding a role model. A good role model would be a person who is good at managing projects who also manages to lead a balanced life, play ethical politics and responds rather than reacts to issues. This person can be inside or outside your organisation, but needs to already be good at the things that you want to be good at. Sometimes this person can be your professional mentor, other times a friend or co-worker who happens to be good at project management.

The purpose of modelling is to learn by examining, imitating and practising another’s behaviours, beliefs and personal strategies for managing projects successfully. It is a way to bypass your own arduous life lessons or potential failures and go straight to someone who is already good at it. Then just do everything that they do!  This usually requires spending some amount of time with and around your chosen role model. The idea is to pay close attention to what they do and try to copy it. If their approach, which already works for them, also works for you, fantastic! Keep doing it. If it doesn’t, try modifying it a bit until it feels right.

Even better than just copying or modelling the behaviours of your chosen role model, ask them loads of questions, especially about why they do certain things and what thoughts they are thinking (or internal dialogue are they having) as they do them. This gives in better insight into their thought processes and motivations, which can also be imitated. If they work, keep them. If they don’t modify and personalise until they fit.

The Secrets to Project Scheduling Success

One of the keys to successfully managing a project is scheduling. It’s also the one area that most intimidates project managers and most often goes array. Scheduling is an inexact process but one that is essential to any project – it’s the roadmap a project follows and often it’s like predicting the future.

To help certified PMPs, anyone interested in becoming certified or those responsible for project management training within their organizations with the task of scheduling projects, SkillSoft will be hosting a complimentary webinar, “Discover the secret to project scheduling success: Critical Path Demystified.” The webinar, scheduled for Jan. 31 at 11 a.m. ET, will be hosted by Emily Berry, PMP, a veteran technical and project management training instructor.

In the webinar, Emily Berry will discuss how to use the critical path method, an often overlooked technique for modeling a project schedule, to manage deadlines. When done correctly, the critical path method illuminates the earliest and latest times an activity can start without delaying the due date. A project manager who is armed with these dates is empowered to make the right decisions for project success.

For more information and to register for the webinar, please click here.

Tips to Drive Learning Program Adoption Rates

By Margot Cook, Learning Strategist, SkillSoft

Recently, I had a relatively new client express concern that their learning program usage wasn’t where they expected it to be. They were just a few weeks into the program launch, and, had hoped to see more activity. I’d had other clients express the same concern, wondering where their usage should be in their learning program.

Once your program is launched, here are a few tips to drive program adoption rates:

Alphabet Soup of Technology

I recently attended a meeting of the local Kansas City “LIG” of the itSMF-USA.  itSMF-USA is a membership-based, IT Service Management professional forum with over 40 Local Interest Groups (“LIG”s) in the US, and affiliated groups globally.  The practice of IT Service Management has grown to cover an “alphabet soup” of interrelated technology and business frameworks, standards, and methodologies including ITIL®, COBIT, PRINCE2, Six Sigma, PMP/Project Management and many others.   This meeting was held at Sprint’s beautiful corporate campus in Overland Park, KS, and once again I was pleased to see IT professionals recognize the key role that training plays in rolling out any technology initiative.   From overall organizational awareness of ITIL, to preparing candidates for various professional certifications, providing training resources to employees is integral to technology success.  We had the opportunity to present the KC crowd the various e-learning solutions SkillSoft offers to support these various initiatives, including SkillChoice IT and the Books24x7 ITPro and ITIL collections.

By: Pam Boiros