Posts Tagged ‘skills’

IT Manager Training Workshop Now Available For You!

Monday, January 17th, 2011
An IT Manager Training Workshop Is Not Available

An IT Manager Training Workshop Is Not Available

Blue Elephant Consulting is pleased to announce a new training partnership with OakTree Software. The two firms have teamed up to offer a two-day workshop for IT managers. For the first time, management training that was previously only available to Fortune 100 companies will now be made available to any manager or supervisor who needs it.

OakTree Software is a full-service Information Technology Company providing staffing, training, consulting, and network services to clients around the United States since 1995. OakTree is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA.

For the first time, an IT manager workshop called “Secrets Of Becoming An IT Leader Who Can Deliver Real Results” will be offered to the general public. Dr. Jim Anderson will be the instructor and the course will be presented at OakTree’s training facilities in Tulsa on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 1-2, 2011.

To register for this course, click here!

Here’s a description of the course:

Are you a new IT supervisor? Maybe you are a seasoned IT leader. While anyone can be a manager, it takes special skills to become a true IT Leader. Making the transition from an individual technical contributor to managing a team of technical professionals is never easy, and in today’s mixed up global economy it’s become even harder.

OakTree Software has teamed with the industry’s premier IT management skills consultant Dr. Jim Anderson, ”The Business Side of IT Expert,” to present a leadership workshop that has been tailored to meet the unique needs of IT managers and supervisors. Unlike any other management workshop, this is the one that will provide you with the real-world skills that you’re going to need to be successful in 2011 and beyond.

Building on the technical skills that you already have, this two-day workshop will provide you with both the foundational skills and the advanced techniques that you are going to need in order to be successful in an ever-changing world. Forget dry classroom lectures and get ready for the core knowledge, real world examples, and hands on role playing that will bring the skills that you need alive and make it easy to remember everything that is covered.

In order to ensure that you’ll get the opportunity to closely interact with Dr. Anderson and get all of your questions answered, we’re deliberately limiting the number of students that we’ll accept into this class. You can sign up for either one day (Fundamentals Skills) or at a discounted price two days (fundamental skills and Maximum Management Skills).

To register for this course, click here!

Day 1 — Fundamental Skills That Every Technical Manager Needs

    1. Setting Goals That Your Team Will Be Motivated To Achieve
    2. How To Hire The Best Employees (And How To Avoid Making Mistakes)
    3. Keeping The Team That You Have By Making The Grass Greener Here
    4. You Can’t Do It All — Delegate With Confidence
    5. 120 Hours Is Never Enough: How To Manage Your Time In Order To Be Successful
    6. It Takes A Team To Make You Successful
    7. How A Manager Becomes A Coach
    8. Problem Employees: What To Do With Your Bad Apples

Day 2 — Maximum Management: Skills That Produce Superior Managers and Teams

    1. Will You Be Ready When A Crises Hits?
    2. Move Your Career Forward By Moving Your Team Member’s Careers Forward
    3. The Difference Between Management & Leadership
    4. What You Need To Know About Setting & Executing A Strategy
    5. Budgeting: Follow The Numbers
    6. What Your Company’s Financial Statements Are Trying To Tell You
    7. Accounting 101: Using Net Present Value And Internal Rate Of Return To Make Decisions
    8. Follow The Money: How to Use The Breakeven Analysis And Operating Leverage Planning Tools

This is a great investment to make sure 2011 is your best year ever!

Course Prices: Discounted price for Day 1 & Day 2 – $1,450, Day 1 only – $800

To register for this course, click here!

Time’s Running Out For You To…

Sunday, August 8th, 2010
Time Is Running Out To Sign Up For The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

Time Is Running Out To Sign Up For The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

I’ve been telling you about The Accidental Successful CIO newsletter for awhile now, have you signed up? If you have, then good news — you’ll get the first edition on Tuesday.

If not, then what’s holding you back? The dang thing is free so it sure can’t be a cost issue. Look, there are 50 different skills that you need to have if you want to have any chance of becoming (or staying) CIO some day. The newsletter is where we’ll talk about each of these skills and how you can master them.

Unless you are the luckiest person in the world and are currently enrolled in a CIO training class as you read these words, then you’d better do something if you want becoming CIO to be more than just a pipe dream.

You are reading these words now — click on the link below and sign up for the newsletter…!

Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills


Just For You: The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

It is with a great deal of pride that I am finally able to announce that free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available!

Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter now: Click Here!

Why A Newsletter? Why Now?

You might be asking why I felt the need to create a newsletter – isn’t this blog enough? Well in all honesty, I thought that it was; however, a bunch of the 400+ folks who read the blog didn’t and they let me know about it.

For the past year or so I’ve been getting a steady stream of emails asking all sorts of questions about just exactly what steps you need to take if you want to develop the leadership skills that every successful CIO must have. Some were simple like “do I need an MBA?” (no), to the more difficult “what should a CIO’s career goal be?” (it depends). It’s pretty clear that most of us know what we want to achieve; however, we’re just not quite sure how to get there. Ultimately everyone seems to be looking for some solid career guidance – mentoring if you will.

That’s the purpose that motivated me to create the newsletter. In the blog we cover a wide range of topics – nothing’s off limits. The newsletter will have a laser-like focus on you and your plan to become a CIO. We’ll talk about the skills and tools that you’ll need in order to be successful, how best to manage your time in order to get the most important things done, etc. This is the kind of information that you desperately need to get your hands on, and now you can.

Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter now: Click Here!

Do I Really Have Time To Read This?

Careful – if you never become the CIO, you’ll have plenty of time to read it. Think about how much training you’ve received this year so far – I’m betting not much. Your career is your responsibility, nobody else’s. No matter if you are a party of one or if you are supporting a family of 5, you need to keep improving your skills so that you be ready to step into the CIO spot when your time comes.

Take just a moment and click on the “Subscribe Now!” link. All I need is a name and an email address and you’ll be ready to get the first issue of The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter. Because it’s the right thing for you to do…

Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter now: Click Here!

Practical IT Clouds: What To Do AFTER The Hype

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Cloud Computing Will Require A Whole Different Set Of IT Skills

Cloud Computing Will Require A Whole Different Set Of IT Skills

Talk about your latest buzz word overkill! Just when the “Web 2.0″ madness had just about hit its peak, along came “Cloud Computing” and took its crown. It’s looking like cloud computing is here to stay, so what’s an IT department to do once they get done studying the whole thing?

Your IT department will eventually use cloud computing. There, I’ve said it. If you don’t believe me, then go back and read those words to yourself out-loud several times until you do. It’s coming and there’s nothing that you can do to stop it. Just like outsourcing, it makes good economic sense and so all other objections will be worked out over time.

The idea that organizations can increase their computing power without having to buy, install, maintain, power, and cool more and more boxes is just too attractive to the bean counters to ignore. This puts IT in a tricky spot: our world is getting ready to be turned upside down – are you ready?

Here’s the problem: a lot of the support jobs that IT does today will go away along with “the boxes”. What nobody seems to realize is that they will be replaced by new IT jobs. If you’re running an IT shop, you’d better be ready!

Here are the new Cloud Computing tasks that are coming your way that you’re going to have to find ways to staff:

  • Extend: you’re going to have to come up with ways to create bridges between your existing network environment and the cloud. Oh, and then you’re going to have staff to maintain those bridges.
  • Pick: you’re going to have to pick a couple of cloud service providers. Once you’re in bed with them, you are going to have to have staff to monitor how they are performing and to provide the human interface to fix the issues that always show up.
  • Monitor: forget outages, what about day-to-day issues? You are going to need staff to monitor and mange the apps that you have running “in the cloud”.
  • Identify: who on your staff is allowed to do what? Since the old rules about getting access to boxes no longer apply, you’re going to need new rules and new staff to enforce and update them.
  • Encrypt: since you are now going to be storing data off site and “out there”, encryption becomes more than a nice-to-have, now it’s a necessity. Somebody on your staff is going to have to be double checking everything all the time to make sure that it REALLY IS encrypted.
  • Plan: for the worst. Data link outages are going to be a much bigger deal then they ever used to be. How will you handle being disconnected from your cloud for an hour, a day, a week? Somebody had better be put in charge of solving this problem and keeping this solution updated.
  • Mange: your bandwidth. Now that the link between you and your cloud has become critical to how the business runs, you had better have someone on it at all times.

We’re looking at a brave new future. Do you have the right staff with the right set of skills in order to make the most of it?

Is your IT shop currently using cloud computing or just thinking about it? How does the rest of the business feel about this? Do you have any plans on retraining your staff to work in a cloud computing world? How do they feel about this? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.