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Tech for Cancer Kids

8/24/2021

I’m fighting for what I consider a great cause and looking for some people to get behind it and give. I’ve been working on this since mid-June and I’m trying to get this really going in August. Basically it’s my “Tech 4 Cancer Kids” campaign. I looked around – I didn’t see anyone filling this particular niche that I consider important to comfortable kids cancer treatment. If I can get 100 people to stop and donate even just $10 this week to something that is extremely important to me and has affected my family greatly over the past 16+ months it would mean a lot. Some equipment has been donated, but batteries and power cords are needed and other inexpensive tech needs to be purchased.

It’s a great cause and if you were getting a spinal tap for chemo treatment or watching it happen five feet away to your own son (our 10 yr old was diagnosed with Leukemia in March 2020) you would know what I mean. The distraction this tech (iPad, Macbook, tablet, whatever) can give these kids with gaming, education, etc. while receiving painful and nauseating treatment is priceless. My son can get his spinal tap and medication without sedation due to the distraction his Chromebook provides for him – all kids should have it. The screams of some of those little ones in the hospital and clinic are what nightmares are made of. Please help with some donation however big or small - today. My son lost a friend in treatment this past week - tomorrow may be too late. Please give now! Thanks! https://gofund.me/13dc64b9

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How to Ensure Employee Success for Your Business

8/24/2021

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Employee success plays a crucial role in business growth and success. For your business to thrive, your staff should be motivated and happy at the workplace. Employee success also means that your workers attain their goals and enjoy a satisfactory working experience.

It is in your best interests to ensure that your employees do their jobs the best way they can as it drives company growth and boosts retention of top talent. Below are a few tips you can use to ensure employee success for your business.

1. Listen to Employee Needs and Concerns

One of the first steps in supporting your employees at the workplace understands their needs. Doing so allows you to effectively address their concerns and give them the support they require to perform optimally at work. If, for example, your employees are unhappy with some policies, you need to listen to them and find ways of eliminating these roadblocks.
You can access employee needs through surveys that seek to establish employee satisfaction, experience, and engagement at work. The feedback you get can help you create the best environment for your employees to thrive. You also get to understand their motivators. By listening to your employees, you show that you care about their wellbeing and value their input in your business.

2. Maintain Good Communication

Employee failure may occur due to poor communication or unavailability of information, leading to negative employee experience and mismatched expectations. To enable employee success, clearly communicate with your staff using effective channels and on time.

Communication is especially crucial for important information such as changes in company policies, local authority updates, and safety tips in a pandemic. Similarly, clearly outline employee responsibilities and rights, as well as company expectations. Doing so ensures that everyone understands their roles and what they are entitled to and prevents conflicts.

To ensure proper communication at the workplace, working communication channels should be available for both management and employees. Without proper communication, your employees will feel lied to or left out of critical business information, which leads to discouragement and uncertainty.

3. Employee Recognition

Usually, rewards and consequences are necessary for excellent performance. Employees are more likely to do better when they know that their efforts don't go unnoticed. As such, they are more likely to repeat whatever actions or performance gave them praise and reward and avoid those that result in the opposite.

Instead of always focusing on the negatives, also offer praise and recognition when your employees produce commendable results. Avoid punishing your employees for their exceptional performance by loading them with work. Doing is not only unfair but may hurt employee productivity and motivation.

While promoting employee recognition for work well done, you shouldn’t forget constructive criticism when your employees fall short or make mistakes. Always provide regular feedback, both positive and negative. Your employees shouldn’t be surprised by the results of their performance evaluation. However, keep in mind that positive feedback, encouragements, and motivation will bring better results and enable employee success.

4. Facilitate Employee Development and Growth

Employees are happier in working environments that offer opportunities for development and growth. What’s more, the more equipped and skilled your employees are, the better they can perform their duties and drive business success. With this in mind, consider offering employee development and growth opportunities by facilitating employee training programs.

You can facilitate periodic training programs in the office or organize webinars and conferences that your employees can attend to boost their professional development and growth. Once you train your employees, you should also ensure they have time to practice their skills.

While career-related training such as training on new technologies and cybersecurity education are excellent ideas, also consider training on soft skills such as problem solving and teamwork. The skills you equip your employees with will not only be helpful when working, but they can also use them in other aspects of their lives.

5. Promote Teamwork

Working as a team allows employees to accomplish a task faster and more efficiently. It also improves workplace interactions and encourages employees to form valuable connections with colleagues. It is also a great way to foster empathy and assertiveness in your workers and creates healthy competitiveness.

With a great team spirit as part of your company culture, your employees can focus on the bigger picture and company goals instead of worrying about small selfish benefits. You can encourage employee teamwork and collaboration by using software that tracks interdependent or collaborative work. Collaboration tools can also ease the onboarding of new hires, allow better management of team projects, and promote better planning and organization.

While teamwork comes with numerous benefits, you should also encourage employees to own their work and be accountable. The autonomy provides less room for micromanagement as every team member understands their roles and takes responsibility for their actions.
When dealing with employees, ensure that the measures you take do not violate employment and labor laws. To be on the safe side, consider hiring an employment lawyer for consultation purposes, as well as help with legal issues that may jeopardize employee success.

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Characteristics of the Best Project Managers

8/22/2021

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Excellence shines through in many ways in every profession. In order to deliver consistent success in the project management world, our project leaders need to be bringing some skills and characteristics to the table. Success on any given project can be luck. Success on a consistent basis on project engagements is far more than just luck – it’s what the project manager is consistently bringing to each project, project team and project client they are managing.

What I want to consider here are what characteristics make up the top performing project managers. As you read, please be thinking about what you consider the best of the best PMs consistently bring to the table. What sets them apart from the less successful PMs?

Here are my top 5...

An organized thinker and doer. The best project managers are organized doers. Period. Why put off to tomorrow what you can get done today? The top project managers want to progress with each action – move forward, not sideways. They have a plan, and they want to follow it. They want to bring others – like the team – along for the ride so they will be organized thinkers and doers in how they conduct themselves when meeting with others and leading others. All of this is just plain good practice for the project and for the project client you are working with. It’s logical, yes, but many get bogged down with so much work on their plate that at some point in the day they are ready to procrastinate. It’s best to avoid that because the work just keeps building up…and the top project managers don’t want that to happen.

A skillful negotiator. In the project management world, PMs often have to negotiate dates, resources, changes, dollars and other items on projects with anyone from the customer to their own team members to members of their own executive management teams within the organization. Sometimes we’re negotiating and we don’t even realize it. We must be skilled negotiators who are looking to better their position to successfully deliver on the project at every corner. Negotiation is just part of the game. Learn that game and you’ll be more successful as a solution deliverer.

An analytical thinker. From analyzing deliver dates, to analyzing resource usage and needs, to analyzing the financial health of the project at any given time, the project manager must be an analytical thinker. Like the negotiation skills, this analytical way of thinking just needs to kick in when needed. If you’re a new project manager you learn it by doing – stick to best practices and always be keen on analyzing where the project is and where it needs to go and calculating the best way to get there. Through that ongoing thinking process, you will become a good analytical thinking PM. Or you’ll realize you can’t do it and you’ll just move into middle management where you aren’t challenged much…sorry, I got off topic for a moment there.

A connected leader. The best PMs are connected in the organization. I’m not saying you manipulate. Not at all. But you look at your projects and consider what connections are going to serve you, your team, your project, and your project client the best and you work to make those connections happen. For me it’s always someone in accounting to get the best financial information for my project – good connections can make that happen effortlessly on a weekly basis. It’s also good to have good connections on the development leadership team when dealing with technical projects because you want to get the best tech resources available TO YOU whenever possible. Preferential treatment happens to those who work for it. And never forget the old adage…”do unto others as you would have them do to you.” Be kind…be nice…be honest…but be strategic as well. And be selfish for your projects and project clients.

Above reproach. Finally, always be above reproach. Don’t be Hillary Clinton staring a failed presidential bid in the face because you misused email and can’t get past the lies and deceit. Staying away from felonies is a good piece of advice. Clean out the closet – no skeletons. And do what you say you’re going to do…follow-through builds a great reputation. Be honest and of high integrity. Leaders don’t have the loudest voice…they have the best actions.

Summary / call for feedback

How about our readers? What would you add to this list? What characteristics make the best project managers in your opinion? I know I could add several more to this list but I’m looking forward to input and discussion from the community.

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Tech is Our Future. Kids are Our Future. Cancer is Their Future.

8/22/2021

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It's obvious that our tech makes this a great time to live in. We can do things now that we never imagined 10 years ago. It's the same way for our kids... they can grab an Android device and quickly figure out how to use it and we're still trying to figure out something on our iPad or iPhone.

And some have a tough road ahead. Approximately 1 in 285 children in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer before their 20th birthday. Globally there are more than 300,000 children diagnosed with cancer each year. Every 3 minutes, somewhere in the world a family hears the devastating words that their child has been diagnosed with cancer. I know exactly where I was when I pulled the van over and took our pediatrician's phone call last March with him telling me that our 10 yr old son's blood work says he likely has Leukemia and to get to the hospital ASAP to start treatment. You don't forget these things

But fast forward to today and I can look back on all his clinic visits and hospitalizations so far and know they have gone so much better for him when he is distracted with tech (usually an iPad or his Chromebook - playing Minecraft or creating something with software) while he receives treatment. We have a long road ahead, yes... but it is much better for him with the tech distractions and much easier for the doctors and nurses treating him. That's why I've started "Tech 4 Cancer Kids" - to put more used or inexpensive tech in our clinics and hospitals here and then expand to as far as possible - so the kids can have it in their hands while receiving this painful and nauseating chemo treatment that is killing cancer in their cells but also destroying livers and kidneys and hearts in the process. It's sort of a win-lose situation, but a better solution than just raising the white flag and succumbing to the cancer. Cancer sucks.

Your gift - no matter how big or small - can help make this happen. $10 will help - $100 will help. If the 100 people reading this right now would donate $10 each, I could buy 20 Android fire tablets, or 5 good refurbished iPads, or 30 batteries for old donated Macbooks. Please give to the GoFundMe campaign I've created for this. Please give today. Thanks! https://gofund.me/13dc64b9

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Risk Management Plan - What is It?

8/22/2021

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Presently, there is no greater priority than the prevention of a data breach. One must keep alert for the effectiveness of the security controls so that they don’t change in a split of a second. An ideal way to ensure this is by having a risk management plan so that you can avoid a data breach, which will ruin your IT supply chain up and down.

Risk Management Planning

What is the Risk Management Process?

First, you must identify the risk before you can move to analyze and establish the proper risk mitigation steps. So, most times you can expect to make lots of lists to keep up with the entire process.

To put this into perspective, you will need to follow a set of steps to draw up an adequate risk management plan. You will need to conduct a risk assessment so that you can identify where you will reserve, transmit, and distribute information. Then, examine to see if there could arise any potential risks of accessibility, confidentiality, and integrity to it.

Once you have accomplished that, you will need to make a second list that will help you rate the significance of the data as well as to let you examine if there any chances of data endangerment.

Finally, using the second list, you will have to create a third one which will illustrate whether you choose to transfer, mitigate, refuse, or accept the risk. Keep in mind that you also mustrecord your basis for supporting your decision and the steps you followed through on the decision.

How to Analyze Potential Impact of a Risk Event

Several categories of risk events occur within the information security background. But when well-informed about the probable events and statistics promoting data invasions costs, you can bet you will reflect over the risks and estimate the impact adequately.

• Vendor Data Breach

Such a breach can wreck you. According to a report issued by the Ponemon Institute in 2017, 56% of data invasions originated from third-party vendors. The report also revealed that the standard payout for data invasion was $ 7,350,000 including customer loss, fines, and remediation.

• Malicious Attacks

According to the Verizon Data Breach Insights 2018’s report, 73% of cyber-attacks emanated from nefarious organized groups, nation-state or nation-state related malicious actors. Out of 53,308 security incidents, 2,216 comprised of data breaches, of which 21, 409 of the events cropped up due to hacking attacks.

• Insider Issues

The same report by Verizon gave insights on the effects of internally evoked risk events. In it were a startling number of internal breach activities emanating from system administrators and end-users. Out of the 277 insider issues reported, 134 incidents arose from these two categories. Concurrently, social engineering accounted for 1,450 incidents, of which 381 affirmed to data disclosure.

Why You Need A Risk Assessment Matrix

The greatness of qualitative risk reviews is that they give you estimates. They let you determine responses adequately not just to identify the probability of an incident’s occurrence but also to help you understand the impact it might have. At times, the event may be unlikely to occur, though its impact could strain your financial stance. Thus, distorting your math plans.

But when you have a risk assessment matrix, you will easily track data security risks across the field, permitting you to concentrate on the essential and impactful risks first before moving on to attend to other probable events suitably.

How To Apply A Project Management Approach To A Cybersecurity Risk Management Plan

Project management and taking a security-first approach to cybersecurity tasks go together. With that in mind, you ought to start by laying out the risks and formulating projects that permit you to test, develop, and operate your data guards.
WBS- Work Breakdown Structure use offers an excellent example of how to design a cybersecurity risk management plan while employing a project management approach. As a project manager, it will be your duty to ensure that both internal and external stakeholders are in unity so that everyone can understand what they ought to do to meet goals. Likewise, the chief information officer (CIO) needs to mobilize the c-suite and department managers initiating various tasks integrated into cybersecurity monitoring and vendor management.

The WBS is responsible for providing internal stakeholders with information on the tasks and subtasks they need to do. Furthermore, as part of information security compliance, you need to analyze standards and regulations for their unit and subparts.

Using Project Management to Create Cyber Security Risk Mitigation Strategies

The risk mitigations will always remain the same, whether you choose to bring a new Software-as-a-Service vendor or want to become compliant with a new regulation or standard to scale the business.

While active hardware and software development strives to ensure continuous monitoring of the product through its life cycle, cybersecurity risk management helps you to track hazards to the data environment to secure controls effectiveness.

Having risk management plans guarantees your data safety. Without it, it will be easy for a malicious actor to sight a vulnerable spot to exploit leading to a data breach. So, be vigilant and secure your business the right way.

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I’m Available to Discuss My Real PM Book or Concepts at Your Conference, Webinar, Podcast or Q & A Article

8/22/2021

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Need Your Great Project Management, Business Strategy or Technology Article Published - Contact Me

8/22/2021

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Do you have a great article or even a good article that you want the world to see? If it is anywhere close to these topics: project management, business strategy, new or current technology, SEO, cybersecurity, agile, scrum, devops, digital transformation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, IoT, the cloud, mobile technology, PMP certification, etc. - I'll look at it and probably run it on my blog for you. And I will promote it to a MILLION+ potential readers DAILY. Your new article will get 300 to 500 views daily (and climbing). Contact me through the contact form on this site or just email me - either way works great.

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Tech 4 Cancer Kids - Give $10 Today

8/21/2021

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I started this Tech 4 Cancer Kids campaign 3 months ago and it's been slow going. Some donations and some old tech equipment - but if I could get 100 people to donate just $10 (any amount helps) I could get 30 replacement batteries for the used laptops or MacBooks or I could get 30 charger cables for the same items - the older used ones often need one or both. Or I could get 5 refurbished iPads. I've set up a GoFundMe for quick and easy donating - please consider donating today...

https://gofund.me/d3beed8e

This tech equipment that I'm giving to the cancer clinics and the hospitals for kids to use during treatments is a God-send. My son who was diagnosed with Leukemia in 2020 has his Chromebook with him at every chemo treatment and he gets through it so much easier. I hear screams of other kids in the clinic and it's horrible... please consider donating something today. Thank you!

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August 21st, 2021

8/21/2021

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I started this Tech 4 Cancer Kids campaign 3 months ago and it's been slow going. Some donations and some old tech equipment - but if I could get 100 people to donate just $10 (any amount helps) I could get 30 replacement batteries for the used laptops or MacBooks or I could get 30 charger cables for the same items - the older used ones often need one or both. Or I could get 5 refurbished iPads. I've set up a GoFundMe for quick and easy donating - please consider donating today.

https://gofund.me/d3beed8e

This tech equipment that I'm giving to the cancer clinics and the hospitals for kids to use during treatments is a God-send. My son who was diagnosed with Leukemia in 2020 has his Chromebook with him at every chemo treatment and he gets through it so much easier. I hear screams of other kids in the clinic and it's horrible... please consider donating something today. Thank you!

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Tech 4 Cancer Kids - 3 Ways to Help!!

8/21/2021

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I've been a self-employed IT consultant and author for a long time - more than a dozen years to be exact. But 2020 came along and changed things a bit. The COVID-19 pandemic changed how many of us work, where many of us work, and 2020 also changed my family's life significantly as cancer entered our family in March 2020 in the form of our 11 yr old son's Leukemia diagnosis.

There's nothing like learning your own child has cancer - after two weeks of strange pains and illnesses I remember exactly where I was when the blood tests came back and the doctor called my phone. Just like when I heard about 9/11, John Lennon being shot, and the Vegas mass shooting nightmare killing 58 concert goers (and my 20 yr old daughter was not at home!)... you remember where you were when... but it's 1000x times worse when it's your kid+cancer.

Fast forward to May 2021 and I've informally started "Macs 4 Cancer Kids." The ultimate goal - get Mac equipment (MacBooks, MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, and iPads) in the hands of kids receiving cancer treatments - starting with the great institutions giving them daily, weekly and monthly treatments. I've watched my son go through his treatments sitting one foot away from me through chemo, infusions, transfusions and lumbar punctures and these drugs that help also hurt in the form of nausea, dizziness, vomiting and pounding various organs in your body into submission and dropping your immune systems to ZERO. Chemo may be keeping cancer in check or in remission or headed toward remission, but a cold next week may kill them or land them in the hospital for months. It's a rollercoaster.

The Need

This tech helps distract them while they receive treatment. It helps them do homework or schoolwork or even online teaching/learning lessons when they are getting treatment or have to stay somewhat isolated from the rest of the world because they have no immune system and therefore no way to fend off what others could pass along to them.

What Can You Do?

Here's how you can help. Do you have new or used (and basically working) Mac equipment laying around? Send it to me for this program - I will get it into the right hands. Still want to help but don't have any equipment? Money will be needed to support this - batteries will need to be purchased, power cords, RAM, other fixes, delivery costs and operating costs as this process grows. Everything will help. So, if you feel led, there are 3 main ways to help... 4 actually...

Prayer
Equipment
Funds
Passing this info to others who can help

More info soon - but for now... thank you!!! And donate and/or pass this to more and more colleagues... Email me or contact me through the contact form on my site and I will get you the information on how/where and what to send. But please consider helping! Today.... not next week or next month... you can make a huge difference in someone's life and make a doctor or nurse's job easier as they are treating a distracted and not screaming child! I've heard the screams - every trip to the cancer clinic and hospital has them... it's the things nightmares are made of and you can help make that better. Make lives better! SPREAD THE WORD! Thanks!

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Tech for Cancer Kids

How to Ensure Employee Success for Your Business

Characteristics of the Best Project Managers

Tech is Our Future. Kids are Our Future. Cancer is Their Future.

Risk Management Plan - What is It?

I’m Available to Discuss My Real PM Book or Concepts at Your Conference, Webinar, Podcast or Q & A Article

Need Your Great Project Management, Business Strategy or Technology Article Published - Contact Me

Tech 4 Cancer Kids - Give $10 Today

August 21st, 2021

Tech 4 Cancer Kids - 3 Ways to Help!!

Author:

Brad Egeland

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