Great Website for Business Tools, Theories, and Models

I strongly believe in keeping yourself in a continuous learning mode to make sure your business skills are always sharp and up to date. In this current tough job market, we all need to do everything we can to make ourselves more valuable to our employers (if you are fortunate enough to have a job) or attractive to a new employer (if you are looking for a job.) Therefore, I am bringing you another resource that I highly recommend.

A couple weeks ago, I came across a great website www.valuebasedmanagement.net that provides explanations for hundreds of business tools, business models, and business theories. Another great thing about this is that not only is it a treasure trove of business information, it is totally free, which is a terrific price that everyone can afford in these tough times.

The main business categories are:
• Strategy
• Valuation and Decision Making
• Organization, Change, and Culture
• Communication and Marketing
• Leadership and Management

I have found this webpage to be great for quick introductions to business models that I hear about in seminars/podcasts/white papers, as well as a quick way to find alternative business tools, theories, or models that I was not familiar with. I also use it for presentations where I want a nice, quick way to introduce a tool, theory, or model that I am referring to in my talk.

So whether you want to learn more about your favorite business strategy analysis tool (e.g., Porter’s 5 forces, the Balanced Scorecard), management theory (e.g., the Deming cycle, Management by objectives), or leadership styles, I think you’ll find this website a nice one to bookmark as a quick reference guide.

As always, I welcome you to let me know how you like the site and what other sites you use and recommend.

Free Project Management training webinars

As I said in my previous blog 5 Best Podcasts for Business Managers, I am always on the lookout for useful free management training tools. I just recently came across a nice website with free Project Management training webinars.

PM Centers USA holds free monthly webinars for Project Management topics. Attendees can earn 0.5 Professional Development Units (PDUs) for each webinar that can be used for maintaining your PMP accreditation. You can register for their upcoming webinars at their website.

They also offer free access to many previously recorded webinars. You will need to register your name and contact information with the website, but it is completely free and well worth it. I highly recommend the following 2 Project Management webinars:

Common Scheduling Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Joe Lukas, an outstanding presenter, takes you through his top 10 scheduling mistakes that he's seen people make. He gives some best practice tips including a nice Microsoft Project instruction document that will allow you to better track task float by visualizing early and late start/stops for your activities.

Essential Business Case Skills
Joe Lukas does another masterful job of providing useful training and tips in a short amount of time (about 25 minutes). Joe gives a very good introduction to Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and other business finance calculations that all project managers should be familiar with. The webcast introduces an excel file document that can be freely downloaded from the PM Centers USA website that will automatically calculate NPV, IRR, and other project financial information. It's a very nice tool to play with, whether you're discounting future cash flows on your project or calculating your monthly car payments needed to pay back your loan in 3 years.

So there you go. More free management training tools for you to look at and learn from. As I continue to find others, I'll keep you posted on what I think are the best ones. Please feel free to contact me or comment to this post if you have other sources of good information that you know about.