Thales Blog: Blog Archives

Achieve More in Less Time

Life in 21^st century Britain can be hectic, we all know that. Finding ways to juggle work, family, partner, social life and get enough sleep is a challenge at the best of times. Our frantic pace of life is the cause of most of the stress and health problems that we hear about. At work, the pressures of getting everything done on time can add further strain.

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4 Ways to Evaluate Training and Prove ROI

In these tough economic times there is an ever increasing need to prove that any investment in learning and development is money well spent. Demonstrating a good return on investment (ROI) from bespoke business training is crucial but it can also be quite difficult unless the necessary systems and processes are in place.

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Top tips for effective project management

Ensuring that projects achieve their objectives within budget and on time can be challenging at the best of times. But in today’s uncertain economy, with so many demands being placed on resources, there can be many internal and external factors which can pull projects off track.

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Scheduler or Planner?

In the past, a Project Manager would have had the support of a scheduler/administrator to assist them in the creation and maintenance of the project schedule.  This resource would either be assigned to the team or be part of a Project Support or Project Management Office (PSO/PMO). With an increase in complexity has come a greater responsibility and the role of “scheduler” has expanded to include the maintenance of “The Plan”.  This means that the planner or controller now has responsibility for managing costs, resources, risk registers, reporting including Earned Value Management and even greater responsibility regarding the schedule to include dependencies and critical path analysis.

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Top ways to maximise your training results with Managed Training Services

With tighter budgets and more pressure on training departments to demonstrate good ROI, it is more important than ever to get the best possible outcomes from your training activities. It is no longer acceptable to simply deliver a course with the hope that some of the information contained in it will sink in to the delegates’ minds.

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Management V Leadership – what’s the difference?

This is a common question frequently asked within organisations. It is an important question from a company’s viewpoint because you need both managers and leaders in order to achieve business success. After all, if everyone was a leader there would be no-one to actually get things done and if everyone was a manager there would be no-one to, well, lead!

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What must be included in a blended learning programme

Blended Learning programmes can really give a boost to your training and development activities. Combining several methods of learning, including classroom sessions and e-learning, has a far greater impact than just using one type of training intervention.

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Tomorrow’s World – Blended Learning Solutions, then and now

With 2012 being the year of the Diamond Jubilee, perhaps now is the time to look back over the last 60 years and also at how future technology may impact learning, in particular, blended learning solutions.

So what was new and hot out there in technology terms in 1952?  When you look at what was new in each decade in the IT world, things really started to progress rapidly in the 1970’s onwards.  However, could we have predicted that in 1952?  Probably not if Flash Gordon and Star Trek are anything to go by as we should all be driving round in hover cars and teleporting everywhere by now!

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How to Tweet, Blog and Post to Attract Customers

Social media is about developing relationships with people. It is not about blatant selling. So how then can you attract clients for social media without falling into the sales trap? The key is to provide them with informative, interesting and newsworthy content. Something that they actually want to read and preferably share with others.

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Costain awarded Corporate APM Accreditation

Thales Training & Consultancy would like to congratulate one of our major clients, Costain Group, for being awarded the Corporate APM Accreditation for their Project Management Academy.

With over 140 years of experience, Costain is a leading engineering company with a global reputation for technical excellence. Currently, the firm is working on major projects in several key sectors including energy, environment, infrastructure and process.

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Top Down Budgets in Primavera P6

With budgets, targets and income all being key drivers in projects, it is really important to track costs. But to track costs, you need to know what your initial budgets are in the first place. A lot of people feed all the data into Primavera P6 and then use this as their budget, but is there a step before this?

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Leadership Skills – One-third of employees say leaders are ineffective

Do you think you could be a more effective leader than your boss? You’re not alone. According to research from DDI UK, almost half of us feel this way and one-third of employees say that their leaders are ineffective.*

The report, which compiles responses from employees in non-management roles across ten countries, also asserts that 60% of employees feel that their boss damages their personal self-esteem. Additionally, over a third of those surveyed are only sometimes or never motivated to perform to their best abilities by their leader.

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Kodak Case Study

Kodak’s steady decline as the world’s most ubiquitous camera company has been well documented. However, the most intriguing element of this story is that Kodak pioneered several of the new technologies which led to its downfall. Kodak failed because they ineffectively implemented change to their business model, allowing faster moving rivals to seize the opportunity.

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Social Media – What To Tweet, What Not To

Social media is an amazing marketing tool enabling businesses to interact directly with their target market and existing customers. It provides a platform in which to build relationships, connect with people, gather feedback, keep up to date with industry news and broadcast information.

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Top Tips – The Role of L&D in Supporting Change and Business Transformation Programmes

We would like to extend a big thank you to all the participants on our recent webinar ‘The Role of L&D in Supporting Change and Business Transformation Programmes’. We are very grateful to everyone who attended and contributed to making it such a great success.

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BAA Heathrow aims for full APMP accreditation

One of Britain’s largest businesses has been singing the praises of full accreditation for Project Managers. Julian Foster, Programme Director at BAA Heathrow Airport, announced this week that he wants his entire project management workforce to hold an APMP qualification by the end of 2012.

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Why Outsourcing your L&D is Good for your ROI

In economic uncertainty, organisations do everything in their power to keep hold of their top talent. With that said, it is still important to ensure that the needs of the wider workforce, which may contain the top talent of tomorrow, are engaged.

A skilled and involved workforce is a critical differentiator for organisations in today’s challenging business environment and requires a strong level of commitment from an organisation. Learning & Development (L&D) supports employee engagement by nurturing talent and assisting employees to develop. Outsourcing an organisation’s L&D needs can be a great way to continue that investment and also experience strategic benefits such as economies of scale around brokerage and supplier purchasing power.

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Thales delivers Primavera Training for Costain

Background

Costain is a leading UK engineering and construction company. The Costain Group is made up of many different sectors including Water, Waste, Marine, Education, Highways, Rail, Airports, Nuclear Process, Power and Hydrocarbons and Chemicals. It has a portfolio spanning more than 140 years of technical excellence and a vision to be one of the UK’s top solutions providers.

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Investing in Coaching

“It’s positive to see that organisation are continuing to invest in coaching when L&D budgets are still tight – it is a powerful learning tool that organisations can use to help drive performance.

“Those organisations that aren’t reporting coaching activity need to ask themselves whether they can afford not to invest in coaching when there is a strong possibility that their competitors are. Improving employee skills is a worthwhile investment, enabling employees to carry out their role more effectively and take on additional responsibility. Ultimately, a well-planned and well-executed L&D programme incorporating excellent quality coaching can go a long way towards organisations improving their overall productivity, competitiveness and profitability.

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20 Excel Functions to Know and Use Before you Die… Statistical Functions

Continuing our series of ‘20 Functions to Know and Use before You Die’, this time it’s the turn of a few statistical functions.
If you are into Fisher’s test, chi-square, Pearson’s correlation, Cox proportional hazard regression or t-tests then read no further.
If you are new to Excel, or have problems using functions, or spend your time totalling values and dividing them by the number of cells in your data then this is for you!
Statistical analysis is huge topic in itself and the variety of models and tests is quite bewildering and by and large you will never need to know what these test do let alone know how to make them work (in fact…to be honest I have no idea whatsoever what Cox proportional hazard regression is!). For that reason, I am limiting this article to the following 5 functions;
• AVERAGE
• MIN
• MAX
• MEDIAN
• MODE
AVERAGE:
This is the mathematical mean or average of a data set. In other words it adds up all the values and divides by the number of values e.g. 2,4,5,8 would be 2+4+5+8 divided by 4 to give us an average value of 4.75

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What is Prince 2 and what will it give you. Also MSP

What is PRINCE2®?

PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a structured project management method based on experience drawn from thousands of projects – and from the contributions of countless project sponsors, Project Managers, project teams, academics, trainers and consultants.
PRINCE2 is a non-proprietary method and has emerged worldwide as one of the most widely accepted methods for managing projects. This is largely due to the fact that PRINCE2 is truly generic – it can be applied to any project regardless of project scale, type, organization, geography or culture.

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Is your organisation afraid of formulas?

A few days ago I inadvertently started a debate on Twitter regarding the use of certain formulas. Tom Urtis, an Excel MVP and consultant posted a Tweet on how to generate random numbers between 1 and 50. The function he used was perfectly valid and is in fact a clever use of a standard Excel function. I asked him though why he had not used the RANDBETWEEN function to achieve this, which in my opinion is a far simpler function to apply.

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What is systems architecting? Bill Johnson explains…

A Systems Architecture is a representation of a solution (or solutions) which satisfies a set of requirements (user needs). The architecture should ideally be implementation independent i.e. not imply that any particular building blocks are used in the realisation of it (although it is quite often the case that these are specified and thus form constraints up the eventual solution).

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The reluctant geek – my journey to the dark side

The 1980s….for those of us who were there, despite recession, miners’ strikes, shoulder pads and strange haircuts it was a great decade for a number of things – music (I bet you just started doing the actions to YMCA or Oops upside your head!), the arrival of the first mobile phones, CDs and one event that left me totally non-plussed: the PC.

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What factors can make engineering management hard?

Successful engineering management involves a multitude of skills. Some of the challenges involved are:

1. Balancing the needs of all the stakeholders

These may include:
- The Customer – who wants what he put in the Contract, when he wanted it (or earlier) and for the price he agreed to pay
- The End user – who you may not have even met before signing the contract – and may have a very different view of what is required!
- The Project manager – who wants it yesterday, at lower cost, and with no risks!
- The Business – who want additional requirements in terms of a routemap for the product / solution which leads to a cash-cow
- The Product Manager – who will want a routemap of varying products / solutions that he can sell to different customers / markets

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Investing in leadership

An interesting article recently featured in the leadership section of HR Magazine highlights the difficulties businesses face nurturing great leaders. Leadership is becoming increasingly challenging to define for many organisations and therefore difficult to develop.

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New online courses!

At Thales Training and Consultancy we’ve been looking at how we can make our training solutions more flexible for our customers as well as making them fit for the digital age we live in.

Though in class training is still an important part of our business we are finding that more of our customers are looking for alternatives, especially when time and cost is at the forefront of their minds. Our customers are also asking us what we can offer that is “different” or “innovative” and though those terms are very subjective, it got us thinking.

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Word? It’s just a typewriter on a computer

Well, actually it’s not, nothing could be further from the truth and those who treat this best selling application in such a manner are likely to be the ones who are always complaining. You know the kind of things they say, it’s got a mind of it’s own!

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42% of IT professionals are actively seeking work

As reported by Computing Magazine the latest IT Job Board’s survey revealed that approximately 42 per cent of IT professionals are actively seeking work.

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20 Excel Functions to Know and Use Before you Die – The VLOOKUP Function

Continuing our series of ‘20 Functions to Know and Use before You Die’, this time it’s the turn of the VLOOKUP function.

This is a must have in your functions arsenal. Like the IF statement this is one of the most commonly used ‘advanced’ functions and one of the more practical ones.
The basic structure of the VLOOKUP function is;

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“But you said it would take this long!” – Getting Project Timelines Right

For many, estimating the length of project is like answering the question ‘how long is a piece of string?’. On the one hand you don’t want to over-estimate for fear of putting off the customer and on the other, you don’t want to under-estimate as that could put you at high risk in terms of costs and penalties.

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CIPD survey reveals that older workers are often neglected when it comes to performance management and training

The controversial Pensions Bill has bought closer the reality that we are going to be working for longer, before we retire. The recent CIPD survey has found that older workers training and development needs are often neglected . In light of the planned legislation changes, this is an issue which should be addressed by many employers.

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20 Excel Functions to Know and Use Before you Die – The IF Function

Continuing our series of “20 Functions to Know and Use before You Die”, this time it is the turn of the IF function.

Chances are, that in virtually any half decent spreadsheet you open there will be an IF statement. They can vary from a basic test returning a TRUE or FALSE outcome, multiple nested statements through to highly complex array formulas.

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Will employers continue to offer benefits to staff over the next year?

As reported by Personnel Today the XpertHR 2011 benefits and allowances survey has shown that employers will continue to attract & retain employees over the next year using benefits and allowances. Some are even planning to increase the use of benefits.

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End of Season Squad Changes

So another football season comes to close.  How did your team do? Mine struggled all season, changed managers half-way through and were relegated! So talk now is of cutting the wage bill to cope with the much-reduced revenue but still trying to keep a set of players with the collective ability to get us promoted next season.  It could be time to bring the less experienced players through and to give them the responsibility and the chance to show their potential…

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20 Excel Functions to Know and Use Before you Die

Within Excel there is quite a remarkable collection of functions…some you know, some you don’t and some you’ll still have no idea what they do even when you read what they do! Apparently there are 333 of them (I didn’t count them…I might like Excel but I’m not that sad!)

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Don’t be fooled by KPI

On the backdrop of the comedy panel quiz 8 Out of 10 Cats there is a statistic that goes along the lines of “53% of surveys are made up”. Although this is there for comedic effect, it actually says quite a lot about statistics or KPI in general. People presenting data make sure that you only see what they want you to see and in the best possible light.

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Excellence in Management

The old adage that what gets measured gets done may well be true and often when it comes to development leaders are looking at developing the weaknesses of individuals until they reach an ‘acceptable level’. Now just stop and think about that for a moment. Spend your valuable resources and time developing someone in area so that they will become ‘acceptable’. Surely that doesn’t make sense.

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Signs of Spring

“Delayed Gratification” aka “Working with a Vision”

Last Saturday, the sky was bright and the Daffodils in my garden started to open. These splashes of yellow lit up the once dull corners of the flowerbeds that had been made even darker by the winter months. I was pleased.

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How to convey culture?

Well, we think we all know what culture is, yet do we recognise our own? What attracts us to a particular culture?

I am no marketing or advertising guru yet I am a consumer that distinctly buys into particular ‘brands’ and ‘cultures’ that I believe fit with my belief about who I am and what I stand for (OK, I did say belief!). The marketing aim is always to create an image and portray the values in the hope of attracting the ‘right’ customers. If we’re honest, we welcome all customers, yet it is true, we tend to attract particular types of customers. This is obvious of course, our product offering will, by its very nature, attract a specific set of clientele, but I wonder what it is we actually stand for? In my client facing role, I know what I want to convey – shock horror (cue music), it’s also what I want to buy:

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Measuring Emotional Intelligence with MSCEIT

I’ve just finished a really interesting MSCEIT feedback session. The MSCEIT measures Emotional Intelligence ability and is based on the original theory by Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey. Clients take an online test then meet with me for personalised feedback. The client was initially sceptical, admitting that he was doubtful about how worthwhile it would be. He said that he didn’t usually pay much attention to emotions.

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Autosum – King of Functions?

Autosum?? I hear you all gasp. What about IF, VLOOKUP or ATANH? Well, perhaps not the last one, although I am sure there is somebody somewhere who uses and loves it on a regular basis.

Giving Autosum the status of “King of Functions” may be like awarding the Nobel Prize for science to Oxygen. We all know it’s there and take it as a given, but without it we’d be lost. Granted…a lack of oxygen has more serious consequences, but where would be without faithful Autosum?

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A word from Rachel Kay

Learning and Skills was a real success for Thales who had two slots to present on the role of training in Business Implementation projects at one of the ‘taster sessions’ held over the two days in the exhibition halls. The presentation highlighted the importance of engaging your training supplier (team) early on in the project, communicating clearly to the business objectives for the transformation project, documenting materials and remaining in touch with the core project team once the ‘roll-out’ has finished. Many customers in the audience voiced their frustrations over not being involved earlier enough, which can lead to the training not meeting both time and content objectives. A successful event for Thales Training and Consultancy- see our website for some live coverage from the event….

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Learning technologies conference – Work it!

I remember the first and only time I went speed dating, it was the upstairs of a bar in Clapham in the early summer and I turned up a few minutes late but was greeted in reception by a smiling lady who gave me the low down on the evening which finished with the advice…… “Be yourself, relax and work it!”

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Innovation – Put the kettle on!

When I was growing up I was often told Tea tastes better when you make it in a pot!

Well this seemed like a nonsense idea to me…. Take one teabag, one cup, add water and let nature take its course, quite simple and refreshing really!

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Invest in Bespoke Training

Investing in a bespoke training programme enables you to learn exactly what you need! We can work with you or your company to design a solution that fits exactly with your needs as well as your company culture and values.

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Feedback – Enjoying the piste!

Its that time of year when people are digging out their luminous one piece jump suits and jamming their feet into ski boots that cut of the circulation until released in a bar for some après ski drinking and dancing.

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Objectives – A Recipe for Success

If you have stuffed yourself with turkey and Christmas cake over the last few weeks you may now be embarking on a New Year diet to get yourself back in shape.

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Ian Presland Appointed PDD for INCOSE UK

This week, Ian Presland was formally appointed as Professional Development Director (PDD) for INCOSE UK. In this role Ian will be responsible for overseeing all INCOSE UK Systems Engineering Professionalism initiatives, including discussions with the Engineering Council on the designation of “Chartered Systems Engineer” status, accreditation of Systems Engineers through INCOSE Internationals existing CSEP, ESEP programme and more general Systems Engineering CPD. His role will also include an element of outreach (e.g. contacts with universities, schools and colleges) and liaison with the wider INCOSE organisation and other professional bodies (e.g. IET. InstMC). For more details about INCOSE UK click here www.incoseonline.org.uk

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Are you looking for a Learning & Development Supplier?

Looking for an outsourced supplier for L&D – here is a list of key questions you may wish to ask yourself and the supplier…..

•Ability to work against a SLA – can the supplier demonstrate their ability to deliver service measured by KPI’s?

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What is the role of outsourcing L&D in the current climate?

I chaired Thales Training & Consultancy’s first roundtable debate last week, exploring the role of outsourcing Learning and Development (L&D) in the current climate. A number of interesting discussion points were raised around outsourcing L&D as well as best practice for outsourcing in general. The panel provided some great insight on the benefits, opportunities and key considerations when outsourcing L&D and the value it adds to organisations across a variety of different sizes and sectors.

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Building Positive Relationships

We need to work at building positive relationships; it’s not always easy. The following top tips will help you to improve difficult relationships and ensure effective ones continue to be successful.

1.Behaviour is only what we see and hear on the surface. Many things such as our beliefs, feelings and experiences drive our behaviour. If one person seems to be behaving “badly” consider what might be causing them to behave in that way. What is affecting your behaviour?

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Tips on Dealing with Difficult Individuals

No matter what industry or business you work in, no matter what department or function you work for, the chances of you working with or managing a difficult individual at some point in your career are high.

Here are 5 great tips to help you deal with difficult characters.

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