Forecast is an AI powered Resource & Project Management Platform for companies that care about delivering projects on time, on scope, and on budget.

With Forecast you get better planning across project management and resource scheduling for increased profitability. Execute every project efficiently with your client’s vision in mind.

Manage projects and resources efficiently 

Supervise projects and teams with a visual platform, so you and your team are on the same page. Optimize your day to day work so you can plan more than a month ahead of the project schedule.

Achieve a successful teamwork collaboration 

Enable collaboration throughout different departments and multiple projects. Even when project scope changes you and your team know what to work on and can deliver projects successfully.

Report on project status with real-time data 

Create project progress reports with ease by tracking monthly, weekly, and daily progress. Make strategic decisions based on accurate insights that optimize your business performance.

Client satisfaction on every project

Visualize your next project pitch with an interactive timeline and deliver on the project scope with confidence. Have more time for expanding your project portfolio and developing your client’s business.

The most important decision a company will make about cybersecurity is its priority. Without support from the very top, an organization’s security staff will never get the resources necessary to adequately protect the company. Unfortunately, the board of directors and C-suite have historically been at odds with their own company’s security leaders when it comes to the importance of cybersecurity.

Lack of Top Level Support a Huge Security Impediment

A report published by The Economist Intelligence Unit in 2016 titled “The cyber-chasm: How the disconnect between the C-suite and security endangers the enterprise” highlights the security chasm between top leaders and those tasked with securing the organization. The study asserts that corporate leadership and security executives do not share the same commitment to cybersecurity, finding that cybersecurity ranks as the number one priority for security leaders, but only number nine for the C-suite. Despite years of news reports about destructive data breaches at leading firms, security ranks near the bottom of the C-suite’s priority list. Only 5% of C-suite executives consider it the highest priority corporate initiative—second to last on a list of ten major corporate initiatives. Research by Deloitte also emphasized the lack of support for cybersecurity at the board level, finding that just one in twenty boards (5%) have any cybersecurity experience among their members. The Deloitte study also revealed that board of directors are often aware of cybersecurity problems, but show no evidence that they are tackling them.

The Gap is Closing – Slowly

The good news is that recently, there’s evidence that the gap between security leaders and top-level management regarding security is slowly closing...

​From Bert Rankin

Projects happen no matter what your office infrastructure looks like. Whether you have a PMO or just one or more project managers or even no true defined project managers, projects still happen. And sometimes you aren’t even aware there are projects going on. They’re called tasks, assignments, must-do’s, emergencies, new initiatives, or whatever else someone who identified the need is calling it today. In reality, they’re all projects to some degree. Big and small, long or short, cheap or expensive... they are all projects.
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The question is, do you need a Project Management Office (PMO) wrapped around the process of running these initiatives, projects, engagements or tasks? Does the organization need a more formal process in place to be a central repository for the leadership of those projects? Is that really necessary?...

Even with the research showing advantages of the Agile software development practices and methodology, there is still resistance. Any change brings challenges, costs and extended timelines – not all organizations are ready to take on these challenges and not all user bases are ready to make major changes to their long established way of doing things and performing their jobs. Change is painful for many, not to mention scary, confusing, frustrating and carries the always apparent potential for failure and embarrassment.

IT is responsible for the security of the data in the organization, right? It’s their concern, their problem, their effort. Someone else is taking care of it and, as project managers, we don’t need to worry about it on our individual projects…correct? Ummm…that thinking can get us into big trouble – especially on sensitive projects or big dollar projects or highly visible projects.

As employees of an organization, we generally assume that the data we are working with is being appropriately handled within the IT and security groups and is as secure or non-secure as it actually should be. I can say that during my application developer and tech lead days I didn’t worry much about the data. Well, I did to some degree, mostly because I was working on a government contract with sensitive student financial aid information, but I already had top level government security clearance and I’d already been cleared by the FBI who had contacted just about everyone I knew right up to my grandma. So, naturally, I figured I had done what I needed to do. We have that secure feeling of “I’m an employee and if something happens I’ve been fingerprinted and passed my background check so the liability will be on my company.” At least I felt that way and so did pretty much everyone else on the project.

Now fast forward to today and I’m an independent IT consultant. I help small, medium, and large organizations in just about anyway I can – always innovating and offering new services in order to stay relevant and, of course, financially viable. I’m just one person – I don’t usually bring in my own team to consult. I’ve led groups of outside consultants on projects whom I had never worked with or met before – teams assembled by the client. But by far the more common scenario is for me to go into an organization – again, however big or small that may be – and either work individually or lead a group of their employees on a project, process re-engineering task, software rollout, new initiative, etc.

In these scenarios, the consultant is working with client data and managing the team of company employees handling the data.  Much sensitive data is handled by project team members or company employees working with consultants and often little oversight is given to the data transition and protection. In fact, I’ve been on both sides of the coin and often the concept of accountability and data security is never really touched on – or it’s greatly minimized. You have that grey area of the consultant assuming it’s handled by the organization and the team assuming the consultant is the one that needs to be concerned about it. Who’s right? What should we do? What can the consultant do to ensure they are covered if unscrupulous employees on their team take matters into their own hands and purposefully or accidentally expose sensitive data, thus creating security breaches?

First, if the consultant is working with sensitive data, liability insurance is a must. In fact, the independent consultant should have this type of coverage ‘just in case’ anyway because a frustrated client could also come back seeking damages no matter who’s fault that last failed project was.

Second, if sensitive data is being handled on the consulting engagement, then some proper verbiage should be added to the contract to help minimize the consultant’s responsibilities when company employees are handling the data. Sensitive data sometimes leaves with company employees – they can be bigger threats than hackers…especially if someone gets fired holding the data. As an IT consultant, it’s just best to do what you can to get it in the contract before you even start the work…assume the worst and hope for the best.

Finally, ask for and ensure that the proper security clearances – if necessary – are already in place for the company employees who will be handling the data. Of course, it then becomes at least partially your responsibility to ensure that other individuals without clearance aren’t also handling the sensitive data. But that’s just a responsible and value-added move anyway.

Summary

The bottom line here is all data is at risk. All data, any time, on every project. We must calculate it as a risk on every project we manage. Some projects involve very sensitive data where it really matters. Some involve important processes, but data that is only important to the organization so the risk is fairly minimal. The definite answer is yes, we should be concerned about data safety on our projects, but we need to weigh it with the value and risk of the data as well so we don’t put too much effort into protecting it if it really isn’t necessary. That’s up to the project manager, team and customer. But the bottom line is that it is all at risk. Period.

As organizations examine the need to stay waterfall or go agile, they can’t help but also examine the current skill set of their developers and really look hard at what costs may be involved to make the jump to agile development. Can the current development staff make that move? What training will be involved? What percentage of the core staff will not be able to make that move or will strongly resist? What will the cost of new hires be? Every CTO and CFO will be asking themselves these or similar questions if their company is seriously considering this type of organizational change.

That said, what are the key skills or characteristics needed for agile developers? What will the CTO or development manager be looking for in existing staff and new staff hires when the change is in progress? In general, the following eleven skills are important ones to consider when staffing or evaluating current staff for a move to an agile development and project culture….

​Keeping the system in a running state. Finding errors is actually the developer’s single biggest time waster. When several changes happen and then something goes wrong, it’s hard to determine what changes caused the occurring errors. By making incremental changes to detect errors immediately, this saves a lot of wasted time searching for the causes of errors.

The inherant ability to minimze complexity and rework. This is actually more an attitude than a specific skill set. It provides an alternative to the common extremes of hacking – which can end up causing significant rework – and over-design – causing potentially much more complexity than needed and thus inviting risk and increased costs.

Programming by intention. This old programming technique made popular in eXtreme programming is easy and provides for cohesion, encapsulation and clarity.

Commonality and variability analysis. A straightforward technique to identify the concepts in the problem domain. This provides a model to further the proper use of object-oriented modeling.

Separating use from construction. This process eliminates the situation in which integrating new code into established systems exceeds the cost of writing the code in the first place. It actually forces abstraction and encapsulation on the developer. It provides discipline for hiding the specific implementation being used.

Encapsulating. We are often guilty of making choices that turn out bad and require costly rework or we overbuild resulting in unnecessary complexity. If we encapsulate our code and designs we can more efficiently make changes when we understand what is really needed.

Defining tests up front. The ability and forethought to define tests up front increases understanding and can help prevent many errors that otherwise may find their way into the code.

When and how to use inheritance. Inheritance has a long heritage of improper use. Knowing how and when to use it is a key skill in the agile development world.

Refactoring to the open-closed. Refactoring can mean fixing code. It can also be used to improve designs that were good when they were written but decayed because of new requirements that came up. This technique improves the design of quality code as more knowledge about the system’s needs become available.

Determining needs vs. capabilities in interfaces. Interfaces require a different method of design. Instead of designing from the perspective of what we have, we need to be designing from the perspective of what is needed.

Continuously integrating. Finally, continuous integration is a low cost method of detecting errors quickly. And, it is essential if you’re writing tests up front as described above.

Summary

I’m sure this list could go on and on – this one hits on just eleven key skills. Readers, please feel free to add to the list and discuss what other important considerations there are as an organization considers a move to an agile development model, both from a personnel perspective and from an organizational perspective.​

By Janet Attard

Competitive analysis is as important for a small business as it is for big businesses, and it’s easy to do. You can keep tabs on your competitors by using these 15 tactics to gather and analyze information about them.

Have you ever wished you knew what your competitors were up to? That you could legally spy on the leading businesses in your field or area to find out how they are getting customers, why they are outselling you, or what their plans are? Well, the good news is, that you can, and gathering the intelligence to analyze your competitors is easier than you think.

Here are 15 ways to gather competitive intelligence...

1. Identify Your Competitors

You probably know some of your competitors. But you may not be aware of them all. To identify them, go to Google, Bing, Facebook, and YouTube and search for your type of business. Make a list of the top five companies that show up and copy down their domain names...

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