Advancing Careers of PM Professionals with Project Management Training Courses

Project management is increasingly popular area of study for young professionals, with several reputable organizations providing project management training courses that are recognized worldwide. By obtaining a project management professional certification, project managers are able to apply their skills in a fast developing field of expertise, where motivated and qualified experts are in high demand. Those interested in a professional career in project management can apply to a project management training institute that issues widely accepted professional certificates, with most of these institutes offering online training courses.

Scholars agree that the Project Management Framework consists of the following five major project management process groups: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing. These project management process groups are closely related to each other and interact in different ways within a complex framework encompassing interdependent processes. Thus, project management professional certification opens the gates to a career within various industries where project management is essential element of an overall business development strategy.

Project management principles and techniques are applied in virtually every field, therefore certified project managers are able to pursues a career in the business sector, or develop their skills working for a government agency or non-government organization. Many self-employed project managers attend training courses to obtain an internationally accepted certificate that allows them to seek customers worldwide, while a good number of enterprises require their project managers to be certified by a project management training institute of good reputation.

Applicants for project management certification are usually required to verify a high school diploma and extensive project management experience of up to 5 years in one of the process groups. Alternatively, the candidates are allowed to verify a bachelor’s degree and some 3 years of experience in the field of project management. Some organizations issuing project management certificates also require candidates to attend or verify completed classes in project management.

Training and certification organizations offer credentials to certified professionals that vary from institute to institute, as well as the overall cost of exams, training courses and qualification certificates issued. For example, the Association for Project Management (APM), based in the United Kingdom, offers five types of qualifications: APM Introductory Certificate, APMP, Practitioner Qualification, Certificated Project Manager, and APM Project Risk Management Certificates. The U.S.-based Project Management Institute (PMI) also offers internationally accepted certificates, with credentials in the following qualifications: CAPM Certified Associate in Project Management, PMP Project Management Professional, PMI-RMP PMI Risk Management Professional, PMI-SP PMI Scheduling Professional, and PgMP Program Management Professional. Other reputable organizations also accept eligible candidates to be certified as project managers, with exam fees ranging from $100 to $600 depending on the certification level.

Attending project management training courses and obtaining an internationally accepted certification is not mandatory for project management professionals but being a certified project manager is considered a major advantage by a growing number of private and government organizations.

Benefits Offered by Deployment of Software for Business Intelligence Data Warehousing

Enterprise data warehousing (DW) is applied in virtually every corporation, with enterprises usually taking advantage of specialized applications to perform business intelligence data warehousing, whereas data warehouses solutions are made of servers, storage space, operating system, and specialized software. Software vendors also provide ready-to-use solutions that can be installed and run on a predefined set of hardware configurations, thus allowing enterprises to apply data warehousing in business intelligence without vast investment in new hardware and software. In addition, some software vendors have developed products that combine or run on various hardware platforms. For example, business intelligence data warehousing in Oracle systems enables managers and business owners to select from a variety of hardware platforms on which the software is able to run.

In fact, data warehousing is a process and procedure that allow managers and corporate executives to get easy access to valuable data and analyze these data for the purpose of market research or analysis of various market processes and trends. Business intelligence tools are an integral part of decent systems for data warehousing, which is often referred to as storing of data, with growing number of experts acknowledging that tools to extract data, and manage and get metadata should also be considered part of data warehousing business intelligence.

Enterprise data warehousing can be applied to support businesses in various elements of their day-to-day activities. Data warehouse applications can be applied successfully in decision support, financial forecasting, trend analysis, financial fraud analysis, etc. In fact, customized data warehousing solutions can be implemented by companies involved in any business, assisting managers in decision making process while storing valuable data for further analysis.

On the other hand, initial entry costs of data warehouse vary from $10,000 to $150,000 per terabyte; therefore, data warehousing is aimed mostly at medium-sized and large businesses that need their business intelligence tools to run smoothly, taking advantage of large volumes of data collected for analysis. Overall, implementation of data warehousing systems offers marked reduction in costs, securing low entry and maintenance costs.

Data warehousing is used in business intelligence applications partly because the performance offered by such solutions is usually better than the performance provided by other products for data storing, data retrieving, and analysis of data. Modern data warehouse platforms are able to secure high-performance using advanced analytics methods that were previously known for their low performance due to software and hardware issues that software developers and vendors were not able to solve in the past.

Scalability is another factor that plays an essential role in cost reduction with many software vendors offering data warehousing systems made of modules, which helps businesses in lowering upfront costs related to over-provisioning. In addition, scalability allows database administrators and IT managers to deploy solutions in line with company needs and requirements, following an analysis of business process and procedures within their respective enterprise.

In general, data warehousing applications provide visible results and cost reductions within months after implementation. Recently, software vendors started to provide solutions that are designed with business intelligence data warehousing in mind, thus enabling corporations to utilize such software products as strategic tools in running their day-to-day business activities.

Major Benefits of Outsourcing to Customized Software Development Company

Most enterprises rely on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software for performing day-to-day activities like processing and management of office documentation or electronic communications like email, while preferring to take advantage of tailored solutions commissioned to a customized software development company to meet the specific requirements of in-house business processes. Large multinational corporations often look abroad to outsource expensive processes like software development with a growing number of foreign enterprises outsourcing IT application development to India, due to lower labour costs and advantageous value-to-quality ratio offered by local software developers.

IT outsourcing is among the fastest growing segments within the IT industry with India and the Philippines accounting for about 50 percent of the world’s offshore software development, including time-consuming client server application development. Enterprises headquartered in North America and Europe face growing costs related to software development due to the growing compensations of developers and other IT experts, whereas outsourcing provides a method to reduce expenditures related to software development with the benefit of remote support and maintenance services that can additionally reduce costs.

Large corporations and medium-sized businesses need custom software solutions to perform tailored tasks concerning their daily activities in the sphere of content management, customer and customer relationship management, inventory management, human resource management, and enterprise resource planning. Thus, corporate executives look eastward to find affordable solutions that specialised software developers in countries like India, Philippines, and to some extent China can offer.

A decent licensed office package is usually able to meet corporate needs to create and maintain office documents, spreadsheets, and business presentations; but complex processes like content management and customer relationship management require implementation of sophisticated software that can be very expensive if developed in-house. Customised solutions cover the full range of businesses, not only niche markets, for large corporations often run their business according to a set of specific requirements that are not covered by standard mass software solutions.

Therefore, IT outsourcing proved to be a cheaper alternative to in-house development of tailored software when the matter in hand is to design an application that is custom-made to meet very specific requirements and offer high configurability, in addition to customisation. Major advantages of software development outsourcing are not limited to lower costs and customisation, though.

Enterprises using the services of specialised developers of custom software are able to focus on their core business and more efficiently allocate resources to deal with day-to-day business activities. Corporate executives can more easily predict variable costs related to software development and IT services by outsourcing such activities to a third party company, improving operating leverage that compares fixed costs to variable costs.

Custom software solutions can boost quality of services offered by an enterprise by obtaining access to operational best practices that should otherwise require significant investment to develop internally. In addition, an external software developer can bring product innovation ideas that rarely can be produced by in-house staff that get used to perform routine tasks within their respective departments. A customized software development company can take a different approach to standard business processes and tasks in an enterprise and enhance best practices according to accepted industry standards, thus placing the keystone of a modernisation process of core IT and business procedures.

India IT Market Set to Grow, Software Development Is Gaining Momentum

India is the third largest domestic market for IT services in Asia/Pacific region with local market forecast to reach $15 billion by end-2014, including software development, ranking it amongst the major emerging markets for IT services worldwide. India IT services market posted revenue of $8 billion in 2010 with industry analysts forecasting market growth of 18 percent, year-on-year, to $9.5 billion in 2011. Software development in India is gaining momentum partly due to the competitive costs offered by local software vendors and the country is rapidly transforming into a regional software development center, where numerous software developers compete on a highly fragmented market. In addition, India offers great competitive advantages to companies that want to outsource their services there or hire local software developers.

The domestic market for IT services is driven by high GDP growth in the past decade as well as government-backed infrastructure projects that fuel development of advanced IT services and software applications deployed by manufacturers, while the financial services sector, which traditionally relies on sophisticated technologies, is also booming. Telecommunications is another sector of the local economy that boosts software development market in India, demanding high-quality products and forcing local software vendors and service providers to compete with large multinationals on equal terms.

India offers tremendous growth opportunities both in terms of domestic market and as an outsourcing destination because of the evident trend to lower the cost of IT services. Organisations worldwide seek alternatives to high IT usage costs, looking for ways to reduce costs and outsource services, while a growing number of enterprises realise that developing customised business solutions in software development centers like India can prove to be less expensive in the long run, compared to the purchase of high-priced enterprise software offered by multinational software vendors.

Actually, India software development market currently stands where the Silicon Valley stood in the early 1980s; namely, numerous small and mid-sized software vendors offer highly competitive services while a few of those companies are destined to witness their products and business models become worldwide industry standards. Local software vendors and developers are strategically positioned within the region while modern infrastructure allows service providers to offer competitive prices for outsourced services to enterprises headquartered at all continents. To some extent, fragmentation of local IT services market can be regarded as a competitive advantage, stimulating new market entrants and players to offer more competitive services and high-quality products at a reasonable price.

Software development in India can boast traditions and achievements a few markets in the region have with local software developers working under projects commissioned by leading world software vendors. The country’s strategic position in the region and the fast-paced economic development that earned the country a place in the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India, China) of the fastest developing emerging markets will inevitably result in marked growth of India’s market for IT services in the near future. Furthermore, local software development is maturing and now can offer solutions designed to compete on equal terms with products developed by leading world software vendors.