For a programmer reliable documentation is always a must. The presence of documentation helps keep track of all aspects of an application and it improves on the quality of a software product. Its main focuses are development, maintenance and knowledge transfer to other developers. Successful documentation will make information easily accessible, provide a limited number of user entry points, help new users learn quickly, simplify the product and help cut support costs. Documentation is usually focused on the following components that make up an application: server environments, business rules, databases/files, troubleshooting, application installation and code deployment.

Working with business professionals from a number of different types of organisations, I’m often asked about what’s more important for business success:  numerate skills or presentation skills? If you take a look at this, you can broadly classify the types of skills needed in different business areas:

When determining the need for training what better way to find out which members of staff require training than doing a survey right? Wrong.

Microsoft SharePoint has often been defined as the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of collaboration software suits. With over 100 million users worldwide and an average of 20,000 new users each day, SharePoint is used by over 78% of Fortune 500 companies. Businesses globally use Microsoft SharePoint to increase productivity, efficiency and general organisation. But are they utilising all of its features? Below are five features that we’ve highlighted from SharePoint that you should be using.

Time is money. In the learning domain, the longer it takes for employees to become proficient vis a vis competent is a relevant cost incurred by the organisation. It's more than just a cost in terms of training time and total cost of training. It also means longer time to value: the benefit and opportunity added to the business by the employee improving their performance. Training interventions have long been linked to improving performance at the organisational, group and individual levels. It's a given that the vast majority of training an employee will undertake is based on training needs identified somewhere in order to improve their performance and meet their assigned objectives or more effectively complete their work (the improvement of such set as an objective). When looking at the general assignation of training to improve performance, what is trying to be achieved? In short we are looking for employees to gain or improve competencies in a particular domain. However when L&D professionals or a manager are looking at a particular employee, are they looking at whether the employee has completed the training or whether the employees’ competence gap has been addressed? For the L&D person it's generally the former and for the manager and employee, it is the latter. After all, for the employee and manager the training is the means to an end: capability. Now you may be wondering why, for many of you, I'm bringing this up at all. For a decent proportion of L&D professionals linking up objectives, performance improvement and training intervention is standard practice and enables you to actually measure the impact of the intervention more precisely. Well here's the thing. If an employee needs to improve a subset of competences from those covered in an intervention, is having to complete the entire intervention the best way to go about it? What about once they're back on the job and need to apply their new capability in order to meet their performance objectives? It would certainly be a more effective proposition to give them access to training that allowed them to acquire the competencies they need without having to waste time having to engage with competencies they do not need or are already proficient. Furthermore it would probably be extremely beneficial to the employee to be able to access content that they can use to support embedding of their newly acquired competencies as they apply it to their job to meet performance objectives. The benefits to this sort of approach are: 1. Employees are developing the precise competencies they need rather than doing a whole course or a very broad capability 2. Employees can access support directly focused on improving competencies while on the job 3. They are back on the job faster, applying what they've learnt, with confidence that there is effective support material to rely on 4. The experience is focused on value and reducing the time to achieve it both for the organisation and the employee None of the above is hot news. Charles Jennings has been actively promoting the 70:20:10 model. In case you're not sure what this is, it posits that the majority of learning takes place on the job via challenging work (70), a proportion through social interaction with managers and colleagues (20) and a smaller proportion through specific training events (10). The ratios are notional and will vary to a degree but the unmissable fact is that the pursuit of improved competence is a constant activity for the majority of employees. Any training intervention needs to recognise and support this reality if it is to have genuine impact.

Project management is central to the work of all organisations. In order to create value, develop and generally succeed, organisations need to launch, manage and evaluate projects of all descriptions.

"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.

 

That combination of blank screen and tight deadline can be terrifying. So how can you create the best environment for your business writing? Simple. Work out if you are a monk or a rockstar. What does the monk want? Complete silence as he lifts his fountain pen from the oak desk. Absolutely no interruptions. Shhhh!

You know those automatic Office updates that Microsoft does when your computer is having a snooze . . .  ? Well, on 10 December 2014, Microsoft issued Security Bulletin MS14-082 -  Vulnerability in Microsoft Office Could Allow Remote Code Execution (3017349).

  Having recently attended the Learning Technologies 2015 exhibition, I thought it would be topical to write about one of the learning trends that was prevalent at the event. After spending some time sitting in on seminars from a host of providers and competitors, the topic which struck me the most was the 70:20:10 model for staff development.

Online training still has its sceptics. However, there is no doubt that e-learning has been a growing industry worth $55.2 billion with the type of learning technologies available doubling in the last five years, demonstrating human behaviours shift towards how we choose to learn in recent times.

Admittedly, making a spelling or formatting mistake in Word is unlikely to have the catastrophic consequences that an error in a Microsoft Excel formula can result in. However, there's still a very big difference between being able to use Word, and being able to use Word well. Given how much time individuals and organisations spend creating letters and documents, not knowing how to get the best out of Word can cost you a great deal of time and organisations a lot of money.

How many roads does a man walk down? The short answer is 4.715 x 10^284, if he’s a student of our Excel course. A more useful answer is: eLearning user journeys can be non-linear. This is usually a good thing - students can access training in a pattern that suits them, personalising not just the pace of training but also its emphasis and direction in a way that would be unaffordable with conventional, face-to-face training. But the degrees of freedom available to a student make it difficult to control or even understand the user experience.

If you wish to learn Excel inside-out, I'd recommend to go over some key principles that will let you understand first and foremost whether a spreadsheet is the most appropriate tool for your job, and then how to turn it into a dynamic, shared piece of work. When it comes to the latter, I'd encourage you to work collaboratively, share ownership and suggest review to maximize results and turn your Excel spreadsheets into powerful, recyclable tools, as opposed to one-off, isolated pieces of information. Especially if it takes so much effort to create or analyse a spreadsheet, why do it all over again next time? After nearly two years at Filtered, and being involved with spreadsheets every day, this is possibly the best advice I can give to anyone looking to improve their Microsoft Excel knowledge.