Business Skills for IT Professionals

Select a course below for a course description, the upcoming public schedule worldwide, and enrollment information.

• WV101: Introduction to Project Management

  Discover what it takes to ensure project success in this skills-building course by learning the project management framework of initiation, planning, execution, control, and formal closing. You will spend 75% of your time in this course working on a case study project from initiation to close, gaining hands-on experience in project management tools and techniques. By working both individually and in teams, you will write objectives, conduct stakeholder analysis, and develop a work breakdown structure and risk management plan. You will also learn estimating techniques, dependency analysis, and network diagramming.

• WV102: IT Project Management

  In this course, you will learn about the main issues that differentiate the project management of IT initiatives from other kinds of projects, including hardware, software, vendor relationships, communication mechanisms for different audiences, and working with local and remote teams. You will build practical skills in starting an IT project with a clearly defined scope, setting and managing stakeholder expectations, managing changing client requirements, and meeting quality standards. You will also learn how to identify and deal with the typical pitfalls of IT projects and how to overcome them.

• WV105: PMP Exam Prep Boot Camp

  This course provides over 750 practice questions, including a 200-question computerized randomly-generated simulated exam, two PMP Exam prep study guides and exercises throughout to reinforce PMP and CAPM exam concepts. Additionaly, exercises to increase memory recall are provided in this comprehensive preparation for the PMP and CAPM exams.

• WV110: Business Process Analysis

  The course begins by teaching you the roles and responsibilities of the business analyst and the process for analyzing business systems, including how to determine a business system's health. You will learn how to identify business processes that could become more streamlined. Master the process of communicating with stakeholders to understand their process needs as well as their perceptions of the problems. Using seven different modeling techniques, you'll explore different facets of the business process, identify the most effective solution to the process, and clearly define the future process state. Once a new process is defined, you'll learn how to convey those process changes to others, gain organizational support for making the changes, and plan for a successful change project.

• WV111: Business Analysis Essentials

  In this introductory course, you'll delve into the role and responsibilities of the business analyst. Learn techniques for ensuring project success every step of the way-from identifying and analyzing potential projects to making sure that the final project product meets the requirements you identified. Through hands-on exercises, you'll learn to define the scope of work and master requirements-gathering techniques that will work for a variety of projects and audiences. You'll consider the unique needs of customers, stakeholders, and the IT department as you work toward building, documenting, communicating, and managing requirements.

• WV112: Business Skills for IT Professionals

  In this course, you'll learn what experts in the field are saying about communications, leadership, negotiation, delegation, motivation, time management, critical thinking, and decision making. You will discover the fundamentals of effective management including the tools for powerful communications: quickly write reports that are concise and clear, structure letters and memos with purpose in mind, and prepare and deliver high-impact presentations that focus on specific, desired outcomes. Plus, you'll analyze financial statements and become familiar with budgeting, and you'll gain an understanding of critical thinking and how it relates to effective decision making.

• WV115: Requirement Development and Management

  By following the logical methodology for the requirements process presented in this course, you'll learn to develop effective requirements, including business objectives as well as business, end-user, system, and software requirements. By working through the requirements process using walkthroughs, reviews, prototyping, and storyboarding, you'll discover the importance of and types of requirements, examine information-gathering methodologies, and learn to conduct effective interviews, workshops, and surveys.

• WV120: Writing Effective Requirements

  This course teaches the technical writing techniques that apply directly to writing requirements documents and how to apply the five Cs of writing-correct, clear, concise, comprehensive, and cohesive-to writing requirements. You will use lists, tables, and graphs to structure requirements information for clarity. And you will use white space, information chunking, and headings to improve readability. Additionally, you will learn the difference between validation and verification, and you'll survey the various verification and validation techniques. You will learn to select the appropriate technique for each situation and apply it to ensure your requirements' effectiveness.