Businesses have dragged their feet on upgrading from the ten-year-old Windows XP to newer versions of Microsoft’s operating system.
Read the rest of Still on Windows XP? Don’t wait until Windows 8 to upgrade!
For years now, offshore and outsourced IT and customer service has been the rage. Is it time for companies to begin “in-sourcing their IT needs? GE thumbs its nose at outsourcing, builds world-class data center!
Well it’s time to renew my PMP. The good thing is that PMI has redone their CCR. (don’t you just love all those acronyms?) CCR is the Continuing Certification Requirements, which means you need to accrue 60 PDUs (Professional Development Units) during each 3-year cycle to renew your certification.
The strange part to me is that being employed as a Project Manager only gives you 5 PDUs a year, or 15 per cycle. Seems like the actual practice of managing projects should count for more than a quarter of your certification!
There are many ways to acquire PDUs…continuing education, teaching, writing, volunteer work…I guess it helps to make a “well-rounded” person. But I believe that having a job as PM should be the activity that provides the most PDUs. Am I nuts?
A very interesting article to be read by all : The Great Management Consultancy Scam — and How it Could Be Coming for Your Job.
After getting a degree specializing in romantic poetry, he was astonished to be hired by a prestigious management consultancy, given three weeks training, and then dropped into major corporations to tell them how to run their oil rigs, menswear stores, and factories, for tens of thousands of pounds a pop……..It’s like robbing a bank but legal. We could take somebody straight off the street, teach them a few simple tricks in a couple of hours and easily charge them out to our clients for more than £7000 per week.” It consisted, he says, of “lies, lies and even more lies.”
Rebuttals anyone? 
If you are dreaming about growing the next Microsoft or the next Google you need money. Unless you’ve got great credit or lots of credit cards, you look toward the venture capitalists. Unfortunately, they are not in such a giving mood! Venture capital funding plummets 81% in quarter
The saddest thing about the collapse of a young entrepreneur’s empire isn’t hearing that the receivers have arrived or that the Ferrari has been repossessed – it’s hearing that the poor young thing has been forced to move back in with their parents.
Read the entire article at smartcompany.com
Bill Raymond at ProjectNation.net has created a wonderful 20-minute video on the History of Project Management. His site has several other videos on Microsoft Project and SharePoint. Enjoy and learn 
It’s an exciting time to be building a startup.
An interesting commentary on all the hats a startup founder needs to have…15 to be exact 
…the Silicon Valley Insider describes how to combine and reduce them: 15 Roles Every Startup Needs Filled
Plenty of other laid-off workers across the country, burned out by a merciless job market, are building business plans instead of sending out résumés. For these people, recession has become the mother of invention.
NY Times article: Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own
