When you’re copied in on an e-mail make sure to reply all if you want to keep all recipients involved in the evolving e-mail thread. If you reply directly to one person and not the other you will inevitably keep somebody out of the loop and therefore overall accountability to the issue will be affected.

Email’s are not novellas for you to practice your prose on. Emails were designed to be short and too the point with a unique subject for every, well, subject. How are you supposed to sort your emails with subjects that look like ‘important, re: re: re: re: re:’ ? Change your subject when you reply to keep the email’s topic fresh and relevant to its contents.

Think of emails as a way to solve things quickly, with identifiable and relevant subjects and short actionable content.

Business Analyst Role

Bridging the gap between the technical and the business side of a solution. Be able to describe and communicate the value of a project by defining both benefits and costs in terms used by the business that will effectively obtain leadership understanding, approval, support and usage of a project.

The Business Analyst is a highly specialized position with ranging challenges and responsibilities. The primary focus of the position is ensuring operational efficacy of an organization. The business analyst designs and documents work flow, manages and provides solutions to new business unit ideas, trends and concepts accordingly using current technology paths. The analyst has a deep understanding of business requirements and process management and then translates them into a particular technology solution.

Duties and Responsibilities

Quickly understands the business issues and data challenges of an organization and industry.

Perform analysis of business areas of responsibility to produce overall definitions of work-flow and discern needs currently filled using in-place or proposed solutions.

Collecting and analyzing the project’s business requirements and transferring the same knowledge to development team.

Evaluating the data collected through task analysis, business process & surveys.

Providing direct guidance to technical teams during different stages of product development to meet project needs.

Preparing accurate and detailed requirement specifications documents, user interface guides, and specification documents.

Communicating clearly with external users and internal teams to deliver essential product functions such as user experience and GUI interfaces.

Documenting analysis results and work flows.
Design and execution of test scripts and usage scenarios to identify gaps in product development.

Coordinating with the groups of business unit who test, validate, evaluate new applications and functions, and determine issues in services and software.

Managing change requests related to the working project and creates solutions to meet agreed benchmarks and deadlines.

Skills Sets

Advanced skills in office productivity software, cloud applications and hardware systems.

Advanced understanding of software types and functionality.

Solid and effective project management skills.

Advanced understanding of software, hardware development and implementation.

Identify & close gaps in the business process as it relates to information technologies.

Ability to make effective decisions under pressure.
Analytical thinking and excellent problem solving.

chris kraft so elequently played by Stephen Root in the hbo mini-series “from the earth to the moon” had a great monologue where he was presenting the challenge of getting to the nasa department who will be responsible for developing the systems that would carry men to the lunar surface and back. i am paraphrasing but it went something like this “you wanna have some fun? come to my house and stand in the backyard with a basketball and i’ll stand in the front with a tennis ball, well both throw them at the same time and try to have them meet as they sail over the roof”. i love challenges like this which are tough, unprecedented and chart new territory. a product managers dream. craft concluded by laying down the mission statement “we have to get so good at these maneuvers that we wont blink or hesitate about sending our men up and that we get them back….EVERY TIME”

this is how i like to operate. you design, manage and market projects by constantly thinking in terms of exploring all the possibilities in order to identify every point of failure. strip the processes to the core in order to streamline and develop ones that prove themselves to be consistently reliable.

maybe its a hobby of yours to have the hottest rod on the block? you spend countless hours and dollars adorning your rod with improvements and decorations. i mean if thats what floats your boat and gives your foot print purpose then you allocate enough resources to constantly put you in a position of having the biggest and prettiest hot rod on the planet.

from experience, something i know to be true is that every artificial system put in place still isn’t intuitive to the needs of their human counterparts needs. sure you can give it rules and the power to base some decisions on the result of a mathematical formula. barring unique situations aside most of the IT universe requires constant intervention and meticulous care on an enterprise as well as granular level. the constant massaging aids in revolution as well as evolution which over time ingrains itself into a culture revolving around growing profitability and stability for the greater good of the unit.

the trick is to integrate an enterprise level concept into a format that can be easily understood and utilized by the majority. the enterprise concept is simple, this is the information you want to put in and then create a common method for pulling the information out and slicing it for display in beautiful flash charts that move and spin in pretty bright colors. the user level can be more complex with the more inexperienced and lazy users being the firewall rule holding up development traffic and sending version release times into gray space. the secret to the magic trick? there isn’t a magic trick. success in the world of software development pours down from a need into marshaling yard where your gap man can organize the chaos of ideas and formulate a tetris strategy to position all the pieces. with a direction firmed up the gap guy begins sending instructions to his teams to build and move all the necessary blocks into position. with a firm set of guidelines and the spirit of the projects vision clearly in place the blocks are secured and connected to bridge a mash up of technologies together resulting in the core product. at this point the solution can be examined, utilized to be scrutinized to produce the point of this article, the constant evolution of improvements to the core functions while not interrupting the solutions usefulness.

the information age is constantly evolving and unlike other historical ages, i don’t believe will outlive its reason to exist (barring a giant extinction level meteor). the development curve for technology is off the charts and we have only brushed away the outer layer of what, how and how much and at what speed can we share this information.

the moral of this story is that having your information systems on autopilot is okay on those long trans continental or oceanic flights but your sure as heck fire want a real pilot watching vigilantly over the controls, instruments and alerts you just can’t wrap your head around. many times the owner of the jet would rather say i want to go to milwaukee today than hop in the left seat and grab the throttles. he counts on the pilot to combine experience with calculated risk to get him to his destinations in a reasonable time. which of course leads to the reason your arrival can be delayed. weather is a great analogy for IT, sometimes the weather doesn’t affect your progress at all. however many times even moderate weather on the horizon can affect how efficiently you can travel. often times the weather patterns can be unpredictable and clearly outside your control. so you develop work arounds and contingency to exist but often are not straight point to point solutions. this is exactly the point you don’t rely on your autopilot rather empower the seasoned and experienced pilot to find the most efficient route through the weather. and give him the time and tools to do it.

Define key phrases for each site and target key phrases that are actually reachable with the resources you have. This could be 3 terms or 20 terms, depending on the nature of your site. This usually is around 5-10 primary phrases. If your site already has search engine traffic, focus on the phrases that you are already being ranked for to improve SERP.

Use keyphrases regularly in content, page titles and the url especially anchor text for back links. Keep it natural, though. Don’t SPAM your key phrase everywhere, and make sure to include lots of other natural content and words that are contextually related.

Publish new content regularly.

Optimize your url’s. Get rid of dynamic id’s and sessions, and include page titles and keyphrases in url’s.

Obtain relevant, natural back links from authoritative sites. This means finding links on relevant Web sites with good PR, traffic, age, popularity, etc. Let me stress relevancy again. Relevant links are important to SERP’s, so if you’re optimizing a ring tones web site you probably shouldn’t seek out links on say, knitting forums. Links from a content-rich section of a site are better than areas saturated with links, like a list of links in the footer of a site. site wide links increase link popularity but need to be complemented with homepage/single-page links. A good mixture of both is best.

Deep-link URLs. Obtain back links that link to individual pages in addition to links pointing directly to the home page.

Be consistent with URL usage. Don’t link to ‘http://www.site.com/’ on one page and ‘http://www.site.com/index.php’ on another. Pick one and stick with it.

Reduce link clutter. More outgoing links on your page will not reduce your own PR directly, but it will reduce the PR a link can pass which translates to less PR passed back to your own site indirectly. Also remove any unnecessary internal links, with the exception of having 2-3 links for top-level pages (such as in the header, menu, and footer).

Use free SEO tools available on the internet and pick the ones that meet your website’s specific needs. Regularly analyze and improve your own strategy, and monitor results in SERP.

Click on Places -> Home Folder. Hit Control+H on your keyboard to view all the hidden files. Browse to the folder called .gnome2, and then to the folder called keyrings. Inside it is a file called default.keyring. Delete it and the next time you enter a site or mount with a password, it’ll ask for a keyring password, and then you can set a new one.

If your looking for a clean looking wordpress theme for your mobile or smart phone then I would check out the mobile plug-in from pluginbuddy.com. With this plug-in you can easily create a special Smart Phone or IPhone version of your wordpress site. It has a custom header up-loader which creates a mobile version of your theme’s header, a built in style manager to match your brand colors and 3 starter mobile themes. The fact is if you run a blog, a good website strategy would be to provide your users with the ability to follow you on their mobile devices and plug-ins like this can give your website an edge over your competitions.

Learn more about PluginBuddy Mobile

If you have been grinding in the internet marketing mines for a while I would guess that your website marketing has evolved to include some type of social media strategy.  You might have had an epiphany that you are missing out on some serious opportunities if you do not have a Facebook presence.  Facebook has shown growth even with all the recent privacy concerns.  Everyday more and more and more sites continue to integrate into the Facebook fabric.  What this should mean to you is Facebook is becoming more integrated into people’s online activity.  This in itself should raise the eyebrow of the savvy internet marketer and now Facebook is now offering new tools to better understand the data around user engagement with their brands allowing you to capture some returns on your internet marketing investment and monetize your Facebook presence.