ACRA Training & Consulting has the expertise that your organization needs to successfully train all of your IT professionals – support, business analysts, testers, and managers. We have assembled an exceptional group of technical training and consulting experts as part of our exclusive Resource Team who can provide your organization with a wealth of contemporary IT knowledge. Our main goal is to offer your IT professionals with an unparalleled approach to enhancing their IT education through our distinctive IT training programs. By offering a curriculum that combines both theory and hands-on practice, our trainees receive the maximum level of instruction and preparation to excel in their job roles and positively impact their organization’s bottom line.
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Complementary Analysts
Organizations have different needs for their day-to-day business operations. Depending upon the scope of the ongoing projects, each organization should be cognizant of whether it needs one particular role or a team of people to accomplish certain tasks. To make an informed decision, it is important to understand the job role of each team member who can potentially be responsible for directing and/or executing the project at hand. Traditionally, it has been the responsibility of the IT Systems Analyst to provide a connection between business requirements and an IT solution. However, over the last decade, we have seen the role of the Business Analyst (BA) role flourish. The BA mainly documents and gathers business, organization and/or operational requirements to help identify computer software and hardware solutions. The BA investigates, analyzes, and communicates skillfully when dealing with clients as well as stakeholders. Still, many of the specific IT requirements have begun falling under the BA role, making the difference between the two in certain organizations a little nebulous. Nevertheless, both the Systems Analyst and Business Analyst are complementary roles which can provide your organization with the critical support needed for achieving the success of its IT project. In today’s competitive job market, [...]
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The Pros and Cons of Agile Development
As organizations explore different methods for managing IT development, it is important to recognize the advantages as well as the disadvantages of Agile Development. Since this term was officially coined in 2001 during the formulation of the Agile Manifesto, the very notion of agility has stirred much discussion among the software industry. Depending upon the organizational mindset as well as its perspectives, many of the inherent strengths of agile development have come to be interpreted to be flaws, while some of its weaknesses have similarly come to be considered as strong points. Keeping this in mind, we have explored the overall pros and cons of the Agile Development approach. Pros: Adaptability: Agility is the inherent flexibility to switch gears as required to guarantee the right project deliverables. Proven Success: Agile projects are demonstrated to be 3 times more successful than the traditional waterfall approach, thanks to a decreased amount of time and cost overruns. Agile teams have proven to be extremely efficient and deliver critical business value faster. Testing in Components: In an agile environment, prior software testing techniques still apply in a continuous manner. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, just one’s conception of when testing should [...]
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Avoiding Project Failure
A successful organization is defined by the success of its projects. Whether it’s just a few or even quite a lot, an organization’s ultimate success is tied to its projects. So, what is the key to ensuring any project’s success? To uncover the answer to this question, it is best to understand the root causes of project failures. By examining these, an organization will be better prepared to achieve success. The top three causes of project failure are outlined below: 1) Unclear project leader: The key to a project’s success lies with the leader who can clearly articulate the project goals, motivate the team, facilitate project plan development, ensure task compliance and effectively communicate the team’s progress to the rest of the organization. 2) Unclear goals and objectives: Clarifying the goals and objectives leads to the establishment of clear expectations. 3) Difficult communications: It is easy to encounter challenges in communications even under the best of circumstances. When you add a bit of politics and sensitive or easily bruised egos to the mix, it can get quite challenging. So, it is important to communicate using different methods. Similar to a teacher, a team leader must find alternate ways of communicating [...]
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LIT: Lost in Translation
Many of us have embraced this brave new world in which non-verbal communication is increasingly becoming more of the norm. As a result, a staggering 65-75% of today’s communications are conducted in nonverbal ways. Telephone calls of the past have been replaced by e-mails, instant messages, and text messages. Voice inflections that would have previously been captured on the other end of the phone line are now supplanted by one-liners, abbreviations, and emoticons that are meant to swiftly communicate what the ”writer” is trying to convey. Nonetheless, organizations still claim that their biggest problem is workplace communication. In a recent survey of business executives and employees, 86% blamed ineffective communication for workplace failures. One would think that with all of these avenues of communications, we would be doing a better job. In fact, we simply need to communicate properly, not just more frequently. With the advent of electronic sharing of information, it seems that we are merely communicating in short bursts, rather than in an effective steady stream. We are ultimately wasting time. How many of us have received an attachment accompanied with a vague subject line of “FYI”, only to find out later that the sender actually intended for us to [...]
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The Nitty-Gritty on Virtualization and Cloud Computing
Just when you thought you were starting to have it covered in this brave new world of virtual technology, the time has come to set the record straight: cloud computing technology is not virtualization technology. Although each one may have a component of the other, these hyped up terms cannot be used interchangeably. – Virtualization is a systems administrative and data management tool in which a single piece of hardware can perform multiple work tasks Bottom line: One physical computer pretending to be many computing environments – Cloud Computing is internet-based computing in which resources, software, and information are shared and publicly available on demand. Bottom line: Many different computers pretending to be one computing environment As many organizations begin looking for alternative solutions for managing their data, it is important to understand which tool would be more beneficial to their operations. Below are the 7 basic differences in a nutshell to guide you in making the best “virtual” decision to fit your needs: Virtualization Cloud Computing Environment Local Non-local Servers Consolidated, can do more with less hardware Virtual Software Thin layer (“hypervisor”) stacked between the hardware and the operating system Stored on servers housed elsewhere and accessed via [...]
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Owning up to your Conflict Style
Not everyone has the same approach to their work or to their relationships in the workplace – and that’s on a typically good day. When you throw in a little word called conflict into the mix, things can get a bit more challenging. The source of conflict can be a simple disagreement with a colleague’s idea on a particular project, or be as complicated as a palpable clash with another colleague’s personality. To top it all off, everyone has an instinctive method for dealing with conflict. While some people may be overly aggressive in their approach, others may simply be overly passive. And then there are others of us that fall somewhere in between. Whether or not our intrinsic methods for dealing with conflict actually work is altogether another matter, but they can definitely mean the difference between achieving what you need to succeed in the workplace rather than letting it pass you by the wayside. In addition, antagonistic conflict styles can be rather destructive in a team environment. That is why it is important to learn how to identify your own style as well as those with whom you work. 1) Avoiding: Evading conflict entirely for a variety of [...]
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Making Agile Work
Even as Agile is continually adopted to eliminate certain technical development problems, an entirely different host of operational challenges crop up during this period. Having embraced the Agile methodology, your company now requires a number of additional teams to keep up with the pace. While these new teams need fresh team members, they do not necessarily need additional leaders. For the existing leaders, this mandate may seem a bit overwhelming. However, by following a few practical tips, it is entirely feasible to lead multiple teams. 1) Consider Personal Characteristics: The lead must be an effective communicator and treat team members as peers, while thoroughly understanding the notion of teamwork. 2) Demand Technical Proficiency: This reduces the need for team members to explain the product features in detail. 3) Manage Similar Teams: Working on teams with similar products will generate economies of scale. 4) Remove Disruptions: The elimination of distractions, such as unrelated products, will allow the leader to have a clearer focus on the multiple tasks at hand without being overwhelmed. 5) Increase Communications: When sharing a leader, teams will need to become more independent. Their overall team collaboration will be enhanced and they will work together more closely to [...]
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Wielding your Personal Influence at Work
We spend most of our waking hours at work — or on our way commuting to and from work. In fact, we usually spend most of our day interacting more with our co-workers than with our friends and families. This means that in order to get certain things done, we need to know how to exert our personal influence on our colleagues. While this does not mean that we need to have a lot of official power per se, we do need to understand the many different personalities that we must contend with on a daily basis. To make our valuable time on the job more effective, it makes economic sense that employers and employees alike try to recognize how they can better connect with one another to make the work day smoother and the work output more efficient. Here are a few qualities that can help you achieve this goal: Professional Objectives: Sharing your aspirations helps others understand where you are coming from and where you are trying to go in your career. You may be surprised to find that a particular sales manager does not intend to continue climbing the corporate ladder to become a regional director, but [...]
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5 Myths about Management Indecision
Have you ever been faced with a tough choice but instead chosen to hold off on making any type of decision whatsoever? As it turns out, the very decision to stall was actually some kind of decision – but it probably failed miserably in giving you a viable solution to your problem. Instead, it prolonged the inevitable because a choice – any kind of choice – still needed to be made. Making decisions, whether in the workplace or in one’s personal life, is admittedly never easy. We like to weigh the pros and the cons, and tend to get lost in the process of sifting through the information at hand. However, the inability to make a decision can end up being a failure. In the IT world in particular, the lack of a decision on a project’s course can lead to unwanted outcomes such as decreased productivity and elevated costs. Decision makers tend to play into their own fear of failure and become paralyzed when it is time to make critical choices in the management of their project. To tackle these fears, it is important to understand the often cited reasons (below) for holding off on making project management decisions. [...]
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Banking on Cloud Technology
Over the past few years, cloud computing has been gaining considerable ground and is becoming more widespread throughout the business world. Cloud computing is the definite wave of the IT future for companies of any size, available in three forms – public, private, or hybrid – to fit their needs. As our professional and personal computing demands have risen with each passing year, there has also been a corresponding increase in energy consumption. With the on-demand model of this latest technology, cloud computing can provide significant advantages to an organization’s bottom line. In a recent study, it was found that migrating applications to the cloud could decrease energy consumption by up to 30% for large companies and over 90% for smaller companies. As more and more companies search for ways to achieve economies of scale, here are 5 reasons to keep in mind: Energy costs: A company’s energy costs can be significantly reduced on an annual basis, providing a net benefit over the long term. This translates to a lower power bill, which greatly impact a company’s operating costs as well. Hardware costs: Organizations can provide computing and storage capacity with less hardware (i.e. servers). A company can consequently [...]
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