Tag Archives: Training

Agile, Education, Project Management

New 2023 Agile / Product Management Online Courses from Pluralsight

Leave a comment

I’ve completed zero Scrum Education Units (SEUs) and Professional Development Units (PDUs) courses for this cycle, so I need to start ASAP. Here are some relatively new Pluralsight courses in 2023 that looked interesting to me. Some of them are a brief 1 hour, but in the aggregate, they will chip away at your needed continuing education requirements. Some of these courses are for the novice, and some more advanced. Appreciate your feedback if you’ve taken any of these courses.

Pluralsight is a great source of online courses with excellent content beyond product and project management. It covers a wide variety of business and technology courses, and the price is reasonable. At the end of the year, they have a huge discount sale on an annual subscription. You can also try the service for free.

Product Management: Understanding the Business

Released – April 30th 2023; 2h 16m

This course will give you an understanding of business concepts that will help you navigate product strategy, discovery, design, and development while supporting a growing business.

Product Management: Stakeholder Management

Released – March 22nd 2023; 1h 26m

This course will teach you how to identify product stakeholders effectively, arrange them in priority groups, and engage with them in suitable ways.

Change Management: How to Avoid the Most Common Mistakes

Released – Feb 22nd 2023; 38m

This course will teach people leaders how to avoid common mistakes and improve their change leadership skills. Attendees will learn how to recognize and address challenges such as establishing a culture of change and managing the impact of change.

Minimizing, Navigating, and Resolving Conflict During Change

Released – Feb 26th 2023; 1h 6m

This course will teach leaders how to best minimize, navigate, and resolve conflict that comes when leading a team through change.

Influencing without Authority: Becoming an Agent of Change

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 1h 7m

Influencing without authority is the ability to influence others when you do not have direct responsibility for them. This course will teach you relevant skills to help employees assert themselves to influence positive change in their workplace.

Developing Project Schedules and Budgets

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 3h 41m

Effective project leaders bring their initiatives in on time and on budget, but that starts by creating a schedule and budget in the first place. Learn the fundamentals of project budgeting and scheduling and how they relate with one another.

Serving as a Project Leader

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 2h 10m

Organizations increasingly rely on projects to generate value, while emerging methodologies question how project work gets done. This course explores how an adaptive mindset and servant approach help project leaders succeed in any environment.

Education, Jobs, Work

Continuing Certification Requirements for Project Management Professional (PMP)

1 Comment

The years seem to have flown by, and it’s that time again to complete my Continuing Certification Requirements for my PMP cert.

I randomly searched the web for PMP courses, then found myself back at PMI.org “Searching Activities”.  Seems like the easiest way to lookup activities because they define the activities, and the correlated list of Professional Development Units, categorized by:

  • Technical
  • Leadership
  • Strategic & Business

Based on the activities I’ve already completed, my majority of work has been accomplished in the Technical category.  I need to focus on attaining Leadership and Strategic & Business categories.

PMP 2019 Continuing Certification Requirements
PMP 2019 Continuing Certification Requirements

Here are a few activities I thought were interesting, and took each one of these Online or Digital Media courses.  Pluralsight provides an excellent set of courses at a relatively low price.  I highly recommend Pluralsight for your learning needs.  I also took a few of the LinkedIn courses and found it to be an excellent learning platform with a wide array of courses that can be applied as PDU credits.

Customizing Your Team Workflow with the Best of Kanban and Scrum

If you have doubts choosing which methodology to use, this course will give you a comparison of Kanban and Scrum, making your choice easier. By watching this course you will learn how to take the best of both, Scrum and Kanban, and how to make a winning combination for your team and project.

Leadership: 1.25

Crisis Communication and Technology: Communicating with Colleagues

Crisis communication is one of the most challenging communication types an organization or individual can face, bringing together emotional vulnerability, ethical challenges, and high-stakes decisions amplified by informational and persuasive goals. When managed well, this communication can neutralize and calm an evolving crisis. When managed poorly, though, crisis communication makes a situation worse. This course takes viewers through the most important parts of preparing for crisis communication, including understanding crisis types and strategies, preparing foundational documents, and how to create communication in the moment. By the end of the course, viewers will have a concrete understanding of how to manage crisis communication for their own organizations, providing invaluable insight and immediate benefit.

Leadership: 1.50

Scrum Master Fundamentals – Growing Yourself and Your Team

Are you a Scrum Master ready to advance your craft? This course will teach you specific strategies for coaching each member of your team and show you how to build on your experience as a Scrum Master to advance your own career to the next level.

Leadership: 1.25

Product Owner Fundamentals – Foundations of Product Ownership

Did you know that one of the most common reasons Scrum Teams fail is the lack of a skilled Product Owner? If you’ve suddenly found yourself in this role, this course will teach you how you can use the role to help your team deliver a great product.

Technical: 0.75   Strategic & Business: 0.50

PMI-ACP®: Value-driven Delivery and Adaptive Planning (3 of 11)

This course will provide an in-depth understanding of Agile adaptive planning and value-driven delivery practices, requirements definition practices, as well as principles and practices related to stakeholder management. This course is part of the PMI-ACP Agile Project Management series.

Technical:  0.75  Strategic & Business: 1.75

Design Thinking: Lead Change in your Organization

Design thinking is a user-centered way of solving problems. It involves extensive collaboration, using strategies such as mapping customer journeys, concept creation, and prototyping. This course teaches leaders how to help their teams adopt a design thinking mindset, and provides examples from author Turi McKinley’s work at frog, a global design and strategy firm that transforms businesses at scale by creating systems of brand, product, and service.

Leadership: 2.00

Organizational Change Management for the ITIL® Practitioner

Organizational change management is as essential skill for all leaders. This course will teach you how to successfully navigate the people side of change.

Leadership: 1.50

Business, Development, Economy, Education, Mobility, Science, Sports, Technology

How Microsoft Gets Back into Mainstream Popularity

Leave a comment

The HoloLens may propel Microsoft back to the ‘Cool’ kid on the block.    The HoloLens has the potential to “fly off the shelves” in tandem to Windows 10.

Ever since I saw the movie Blue Thunder, I wanted my own Heads-up display (HUD).   Here are a few suggestions for implementation:

Must Have’s

  • ‘Priced to sell’:   Even if the cost of the hardware is reduced to a thin the margin, that may or may not be enough.   From day one, these “Windows into Windows” must be viewed as essential to the ‘enhanced’ OS package, like ‘Windows 10 Home Media’.
  • Microsoft, Enable Channel Sales (DELL, HP) to offer Microsoft Windows 10 and HoloLens ‘Media’ package deals, together both the OS and the HoloLens are offered at a reduced price.
  • The HoloLens and Windows 10 User Interface (UI) significantly enhances how the consumer interacts with Operating Systems.
  • [Channel] Sales may offer bundled HoloLens / Windows 10 applications, e.g. Minecraft;
  • Analyze / prioritize top 10 (N)  opportunities for application development, and produce internally, and/or with partners.
    • Partners may range from software vendors to accredited training programs, e.g. flight school XYZ
  • Intuitive  and feature rich developer APIs:
    • Provide the HoloLens developer a software ‘Simulator’
    • Products with source code examples
    • Quick path from development to market: Lean application vetting process; including the vetting of app developers.
  • Education levels 6 to 12 and beyond can benefit, segmented by: the sciences (e.g. Chemistry, Microbiology, Physics);  Trade Schools such as Automotive and HVAC;
    • Colleges and Universities may be early adopters, and expand their Massive open online courses to including remote participation, e.g. medicine
  • Applying for an ‘operator license’?  HoloLens, accompanied with a licensed operator,  allows users to wear the HoloLens, and follow a step by step, interactive tutorial within the vehicle, e.g. Car, Boat, Helicopter, Truck, Airplane, etc.

Click here:  comprehensive list of Augmented Reality (AR) apps.

Interesting articles on Microsoft’s Hololens:

Microsoft dives deeper into HoloLens details: ‘Holographic processor’ role revealed

Microsoft leaps into 3D computing with Windows Holographic and HoloLens

Hands-on with Microsoft’s HoloLens: The 3D augmented reality future is now

 

Microsoft HoloLens

 

Business, Education, Technology

Legos, and Improved Team Communication

Leave a comment

Awesome Lego Builds

The article, although off topic,  sparked an excellent experience in interactive connunications, requiring people to build to a specification using a phone and the use of Legos.  I performed a similar exercise in two executive classes.  We needed to describe how to build a small set of lego instructions by describing each step only.  Showings the instruction picture was not an option.   It was a test in how people are able to best describe and follow instructions,  an exercise in communications for both sides.  In these exercises,  they were both native English speakers, and almost all adhoc teams were not able to complete the objects as the final project specified.

This communications tool can be used as an icebreaker, with established teams to see how well they work together as well as adhoc teams.  Of course,  the exercise has condensed time requirements,  and may be performed in either same or mixed language teams.

In today’s world of 3D model printing specifics, the human interactions seem to be less important.  We are removing the human factor of communications which may result in the diminished ability for cross culture interactions and problem solving resolutions,  sociologically speaking.  Ultimately, this will break down our ability to interact, and we as a species, may become more xenophobic.  Drastic, maybe.  Is may be an opportunity for governmentk leaders, and world peace.  Maybe at the next United Nations summit?  🙂

This may also be an opportunity for AI learning language engines for inductive predictive communications and a project to enhanceme Google Glass language translation as per previous posts

Business, Entertainment, Sports, Technology

Pavlov’s Perfect Pitching (PPPt) Trainer

Leave a comment

Apply a basic material structure set to fit your pitching arm, add WiFi, or NFC which may communicate with your smartphone, and you get the perfect pitch.

Wear the PPPt, an erector set like brace, over your throwing arm. Get a coach to slowly walk you through the throw from stance to release.

The PPPt should record the movements,  and save to your smartphone and you should uniquely name each throw, e.g. pitch one.  The PPPt will playback the motions in whatever speed you choose, n x baseline at the initial slow movements.  Then when ready to throw, you can have the PPPt optionally shock you to remind you when to release the ball, a light electric shock.  Add pitches, like curves, or slider balls, or whatever.

The brace on playback keeps the arm in formation, and trains your brain to move your muscles in a reactionary format and consistent throw movements. Can be massed produced and sold for under 100 USD.