"A good financial plan is a road map that shows us exactly how the choices we make today will affect our future." Alexa Von Tobel For any long term investment it is necessary to model the potential returns. Having a model that is easy-to-understand, accurate and comprehensive, and will show the expected return from an investment using some basic inputs is invaluable.

8 Project Management Tips

The start of a new year is always a good time to take a fresh look at whether you could work more efficiently and make time for longer holidays. Because most of us spend so much time using Microsoft Outlook, some small improvements in the way we use it can add up to significant time-savings. We’ll consider 10 suggestions for making better use of Outlook. 1. A guilt-free inboxDo you lie awake at night worrying that there’s an important email lurking, unanswered, somewhere in the depths of your inbox? Even if you don’t, it’s important to be sure that, whenever you leave your inbox, there’s nothing left in it that you haven’t either dealt with or marked in some way to make sure you remember to deal with it in the future. Many people achieve this by always emptying their inbox: dealing with all emails and then storing them in long-term storage folders. Alternatively, you can choose to deal with all emails that only require a quick response or action, and flag emails that need to be dealt with sometime, but not immediately, so there is no chance of forgetting them. Either way should ensure that there is nothing left buried in your inbox to disturb your sleep.2. Use the BCC fieldMost of us will have received emails where our address is one of dozens, or even hundreds, in the To or CC field. Including multiple addresses in these fields exposes all of the addresses to all of the other addressees. This can increase the likelihood of Spam and makes many people very angry. If you need to send an email to lots of people who don’t know each other’s email addresses, use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field instead of To or CC.3. Use ‘Reply All’ with careAlthough Reply All can be useful where a group of people need to be kept informed of the contents of an email conversation, indiscriminate use of Reply All can inflict unnecessary emails on dozens of people, wasting their time and cluttering up their inboxes. The more people you include in your emails, the more chance there will be that you will also suffer from responses sent to you unnecessarily. Take a few seconds to consider who really needs to see your reply and save yourself, and the rest of the world, from hundreds of emails a year.4. Only use email when it’s appropriateEmail can be a very convenient way to communicate but often it’s much more efficient to talk to someone over the phone or face to face, rather than sending dozens of emails backwards and forwards. There are also occasions when using email really isn’t appropriate as several large companies have discovered when making their staff redundant via email.5. Turn off email notificationsOutlook will happily inflict a range of email notification methods on you. Your best bet might be to turn them all off. 

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are a cornerstone of the learning and development (L&D) industry. As L&D professionals, it is the central communication portal of your team’s output to the rest of your business but time and again, managers express continued dissatisfaction with these expensive systems. We explore some of the reasons why and ways in which you and your team can overcome these in this post.

Most businesspeople don't write well enough.

My observation is there seems to be two consistent sources of conflict in a project.  They are resource acquisition and project schedule.  Sure there are as many sources of conflict as there are people on a project.  However, you can be sure to face conflict around resource acquisition and project schedule at some point with each project you manage.  As a new project manager it is always nice to learn from the experience of others so you don’t have suffer the same painful experiences of project managers that came before you.

Recently, I’ve been doing some work with a client to help them better manage multiple, related technology initiatives.  They have a full set of tools available - project scheduling software, analysis and design tools, and SharePoint.  However, as I reviewed their SharePoint setup, I realized they weren’t taking advantage of key features that would help them better consolidate, manage, and search content. A bit of SharePoint training was in need as they'd haphazardly dumped hundreds of documents directly into the library or into different folders with no naming standards, structure, and very little information to understand its purpose or use.  As a result, finding content was very difficult, and identifying the most current, up-to-date draft or approved versions was nearly impossible.  I had to open and scan documents to understand their purpose, and with that volume, the effort was daunting at best.

After a successful year at Learning Technologies in 2014, we thought we’d return, but even bigger this year round. The Filtered team have been getting ready ahead of #LT15uk this year, preparing to educate the learning and development community about our unique Filter, designed to save users time, money and resources.