Middle Class Wars Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

White collar Class Wars - Essay Example The ramifications of destinations of American international strategy is that they have helped American working class individuals comprehend the significant facts about the current world. Those goals have empowered white collar class individuals to acknowledge what they should attempt to achieve when they are abroad. The destinations upgrade and protect the freedom, thriving and security of working class individuals when they travel to remain abroad. The destinations of the American international strategy advance worldwide legislative issues by empowering a universal request which depends on human rights, majority rules system alongside free endeavor. The strategy keeps on expanding the level of thriving and harmony the United States set up at some point back that American white collar class individuals living in Europe and different territories of the world appreciate. At the end of the day, the United States had coordinated what the remainder of the world didn't have into a globalized showcase. Seeking after such an objective isn't simple. Making a universal

Abortion Prolife View (2191 words) Essay Example For Students

Premature birth Prolife View (2191 words) Essay Premature birth Prolife ViewAbortion, the end of pregnancy before the hatchling is fit for autonomous life, can either be unconstrained or prompted. It is known as the knowing demolition of the life of an unborn youngster. (Mass General Laws Chapter 112 Section 12K) When fetus removal happens unexpectedly, it is known as an unnatural birth cycle. Be that as it may, when the passing of an embryo is caused purposefully, it is viewed as an ethical issue. Fetus removal crushes the lives of powerless, honest youngsters and is illicit in numerous nations. A gauge of 1.2 million are played out every year. Everything considered, a gauge 38,010,378 blameless youngsters were prematurely ended since 1973 when the procedure was authorized. Premature birth is a basic and safe method on the off chance that it is finished via prepared clinical laborers during the principal trimester. There are four distinct strategies used during the initial twelve weeks of pregnancy. Attractions yearning, otherwis e called vacuum curettage, is the most well-known careful methods for fetus removal. This is the point at which an incredible attractions tube with a sharp bleeding edge is embedded into the belly through the enlarged cervix. The attractions eviscerates the body of the creating child, tearing the placenta from the mass of the uterus, and sucking blood, amniotic liquids, placental tissue, and fetal parts into a container. Despite the fact that it is one of the more secure strategies, there are as yet visit difficulties, for example, disease and tearing of the uterus, causing discharging. Dilatation and Curettage (DC) is another careful procedure including the inclusion of a circle molded steel blade to cut the babys body into pieces. The placenta is then scratched off the uterine divider. There is a higher danger of contamination with D;C and more noteworthy blood misfortune than with Suction desire. RU 486 and Methotrexate are two comparative kinds of compound premature birth. RU 48 6 is a pill that can be taken orally just during the five to multi week time span. Three outings must be made to the premature birth center. In the principal, the RU 486 pill is directed after a physical assessment. During the second, 36 48 hours after the fact, the lady is given a portion of counterfeit prostaglandins starting uterine compressions. This makes the early stage infant be ousted from the uterus. The third visit, around fourteen days after the fact, can decide if the premature birth has been finished or if further medical procedure is vital. Methotrexate is regulated by intramuscular infusion. It assaults developing cells of the trophoblast, which works as the existence emotionally supportive network for the infant. This infusion causes the prompt crumbling of protecting condition in which the undeveloped organism lives. Without food or liquids, the living, powerless hatchling kicks the bucket. This risky technique is once in a while utilized as a result of its unusual side effects. The subsequent trimester incorporates the thirteenth to twenty-eighth week. Dilatation and Evacuation (D;E), like D;C, utilizes forceps with sharp metal jaws to get a handle on the pieces of the child and tear them away from the body. The babys skull is frequently solidified to bone and should now and then be squashed or packed. The main side influence is bountiful dying, and outlandish cervical slash. The remainder of the methodology should be possible during either the second or third trimester (the twenty-ninth to fortieth week). The principal strategy is Salt Poisoning, also called saline amniocentesis. A needle is embedded into the midsection of the mother. Her amniotic liquid is supplanted with an answer of concentrated salt. After gulping the salt, the infant is in a split second harmed. This can likewise cause difficult consuming of the babys skin and decay. The infant will kick the bucket after about 60 minutes. The mother conveys the dead child after a time o f 33 35 hours. Some normal side influences are seizures, trance like state, and even passing. Prostaglandins are normally created synthetic mixes which regularly help in the birthing procedure. Be that as it may, the infusion of counterfeit prostaglandins at too soon a phase instigate brutal work followed by untimely birth. Frequently, different types of poisons, are embedded to safeguard dead conveyance. Incomplete Birth Abortion, otherwise called Dilation and Extraction (D;E), is utilized to prematurely end ladies who are 20 32 weeks pregnant. The abortionist gets the unborn babys legs with a couple of forceps, pulling the whole child, barring the head, into the birth trench. Scissors are stuck and afterward opened into the babys skull, and the cerebrum is suctioned out with a catheter. The dead child is then expelled from the uterus. Hysterotomy is a strategy by and large utilized when others have fizzled. Cuts are made into the mid-region and uterus, and the child is expelled. I nfants are in some cases brought into the world alive during this strategy. This strategy offers the most noteworthy hazard to the strength of the mother on account of the capability of breaking. Some quick fetus removal dangers incorporate contamination prompting sterility or passing, over the top dying, high fever, a punctured uterus prompting sterility, stun and demise. Fetus removal additionally expands the danger of bosom malignant growth, cervical disease, tubal pregnancy, unsuccessful labor, untimely birth, and sterility. The Catholic Church encourages that all people reserve a privilege to live, from the snapshot of origination until the characteristic appointed snapshot of death. As indicated by these lessons, an individual is living when as youthful as an incipient organism until the last second of life before death. Any of the above expressed types of premature birth are ethically off-base since they murder a baby which is living, moving, and relaxing. With fetus removal, we give ourselves territory over a huge piece of Gods plan. Our predetermination, our destiny, and our whole race are seriously influenced when we assume control over the choice. Playing God by mediating in human life changes us into killers. We don't have the ability to pick critical for an exposed hatchling. Pope John Paul II instructs that life is in every case great, an end got from the handicraft of God in making man in the picture and resemblance of God. (Gen. I;26) Thus the individual a restricted however evident reflection of Gods brilliance, has a wonderful nobility and his life is held to be sacred. At the point when the Commandments were passed on to Moses, they were appointed to be valid by God. One of those focal qualities was thou will not execute. Fetus removal is an immediate infringement of the fifth Commandment. Indeed, even in hard cases, for example, assault and inbreeding, Catholics accept there are better alternatives. Just a single percent of premature births done every year are an aftereffect of automatic sexual events. Each child is needed and cherished by God who has a particular arrangement for their lives. It denies the youngster the option to live and society the benefit of the childs blessing and commitments to the world. God hears the new life in the belly, the heart inside the heart, the anguish cry of prisoner youngster wailing in obscurity. Commonly subsequent to having a premature birth, a lady will turn out to be impulsive. Post-fetus removal disorder depicts the injury of the lady who at long last feels remorseful, comprehends the repercussions of her activities, and second thoughts her past choice. Insights show that 92% feel less in contact with their feelings or want to stifle their feelings. 82% had more prominent sentiments of dejection or segregation and 86% had expanded inclination toward outrage or anger. 53% expanded or started utilization of medications and additionally liquor. 28% endeavored self destruction. Gl oom, nervousness, a sleeping disorder, and self destruction are on the whole basic side effects a lady will experience after a fetus removal. Post-fetus removal advising is accessible to help any lady who is experiencing the agony of death and good duty. In 1973, the procedure of premature birth was authorized in the United States after the instances of Roe stanzas Wade and Doe sections Bolton. Norma McCorvey lied after swearing to tell the truth, saying that she was assaulted. After her declaration, the jury chose to approve premature births for just the initial three months of pregnancy and permitted fetus removal until birth if an authorized doctor made a decision about it important for the womans wellbeing. In the subsequent case, the United States senate legal executive board of trustees presumed that no hindrances of any sort would be put on a lady who decided to have a premature birth at any phase of her pregnancy. Under United States law, murder is unlawful and the ramificat ions for any such activity would be detainment or, in certain states, the death penalty. This is so in light of the fact that human reserve the options to life, freedom, and the quest for joy as indicated by the Constitution. Most importantly is the option to live. It ought not be any extraordinary with respect to unborn kids. An individual is made at the moment of origination. Thusly, every occurrence of premature birth is murder. Indeed, even master decision activists concur with the logical parts of a babys improvement inside the belly. They accept that albeit all the organs of an individual are available, it's anything but an individual until its introduction to the world. In this way, as they would like to think, the hatchling doesnt have any rights, not even the basic right of presence. By what means can a lady proceed with a fetus removal in the event that she knows the accompanying realities? At 0 days old, the egg and sperm join together. Another life hereditarily unmistaka ble from the moms is made. At 4 days old, the cells start to separate. From 18-21 days, the core of the infant starts to beat. At 6-7 weeks, the nerves and muscles cooperate just because. At 7 weeks, unconstrained development is perceivable. One hundred thousand new nerve cells are made every moment. From 7 two months, the palm and fingerprints structure. At about two months, the entirety of the unborn babys organs are framed, the feet and hands have taken structure, and it has the state of a grown-up mind. At 11 weeks, all the body frameworks are working and hiccups can happen. At 3 months old, there is a particular distinction in conduct. At 4 months old, kicks of the feet can be identified, females have each of the 5 million ova shaped, and the mother will begin to appear. At 5 months old, there is reaction to sound and light. At a half year old, whenever thought about appropriately, the infant can be conceived rashly. So what precisely is the issue? Life starts right now of orig ination, which was set up. In the event that

CP21 Scott Whitney from Actiance Talks about Product Management and Product Marketing

CP21 Scott Whitney from Actiance Talks about Product Management and Product Marketing INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi folks, if you are running a business or you are thinking about starting one, you need to have a really cool product because in the end, this is what the customers are buying. Today we have an expert on the round with Scott from Actiance who will teach us about how to really build a rock solid product and manage the product team. Hi, Scott! Who are you and what do you do?Scott: Hey, Martin. Scott Whitney here, I lead up the product team for Actiance. I have been in various product roles for close to 15 years. Originally started in management consulting for KPMG, so did a bunch of work there. I have an economics background, I focus on matrix and volumes.Just by way of background, I started in product management in a company called Inktomi that was one of the early web search pioneers, then moved over to enterprise search, went into a company called Verity where I ran a product management team there and that was all about search, in particular enterprise search. F rom there I went and joined Symantec, which is a security company and we did a bunch of work there around what’s called email archiving.And so, one of the fun things with enterprise search is that they made it difficult where you have got a search engine but you don’t necessarily own the content. One of the things I was looking for was how do you build products that monetize enterprise content? Ultimately we ended up with email archiving because the email was the big gorilla in the room as far as content and the archive had all that content in place.Then I have done several roles at Symantec and then ultimately went and joined a couple of startups, those startups get acquired, rolled into a large company; in one case here is Iron Mountain and then ultimately ended up at Actiance here where I am doing the same information governance, archiving types of workloads again in product management. I have been in product management, Martin, for close to 15 years now.Martin: Scott, how d o you get from Big4 into product management?Scott: Yes, great question. So, as a low key consultant being shipped around the world globally, Martin, getting on an airplane, going to customers and helping them with their business problems, I took a seat back and I said: Well look, how do I find a job where the customers come to me? What I thought about here was, okay look, I live in San Francisco, there is a lot of interesting things going on in Silicon Valley here, which is really just half an hour down the road. I understand these companies are starting to get a lot of market attention, this is some 20 years ago now. And in the mid 90’s, I take a job there because primarily I wanted customers to come to me and I didn’t necessarily want to be on an airplane all the time. That was really the genesis for me, was really trying to spend more time here with my family and finding a job where I had an opportunity to do that.Then particularly sort of switching out of Big4 consulting, at the end of the day it’s about interfacing with your customers and understanding what they want and what they need, understanding what their challenges are and what their business problems are, turning that into a set of requirements and actually implementing that as a product. And so there is a lot of parallelism between management consulting and product management.BUSINESS IDEA OF ACTIANCEMartin: Could you please elaborate on what Actiance actually does?Scott: Yeah, so Actiance as a company name, stands for active compliance. And what we do, Martin, is, we provide governance tools for regulated industry firms. Think big banks, think big insurance carriers, think health care companies, energy transmission or energy companies whether they are doing exploration or whether they are doing transmission. What we provide, Martin, is a place to store all the communication events that happen within the company, so whether it’s a cross email, maybe it’s on Skype that we are using right now, maybe it’s on a share point blog, maybe it’s on Salesforce chatter, all those events are viewed as business records. And with many of these regulated companies, they need to be able to store those records, they need to be able to find them when they need to and be able to give them to other folks whether they are counter parties, whether they are a regulator, maybe they are opposing council. They need to give that data out to prove a point, whether it’s a legal matter, a regulatory, investigation. Having all that data in one place makes it a lot easier to get that work done.Martin: Scott, do you know what, this is the perfect, let’s say link to your tasks back then at the Big4, because basically it’s the same stuff, recording transactions and making them available.Scott: Right. And we effectively are what’s called the corporate memory.So my background was search and indexing and so I had a particular expertise in that area. Also, coming out of a Big4 firm where the y train you on understanding customer requirements, listening well to your customer, listening also to not just your customer but listening to market signals such as a regulator and understanding what those challenges are and what that does as a product manager, it helps you identify and quantify a market opportunity. Because at the end of the day, the product management function is about making trade offs and prioritizing all the different tasks that come into your desk.Martin: Yes. What is your role at Actiance? What are your objectives? How did you structure your team accordingly?Scott: Great. My title is Product Leader, and so I have got several disciplines underneath my oversight here.So the first one is the traditional discipline of product management where there is an understanding of what the customers are asking for, quantifying and qualifying the market opportunity, being able to turn in those requests into a set of user stories. And the user stories are what’s communica ted to engineering and what we tend to get back is what’s called a level of effort. And based on those 2 dimensions, what the user story is, what the level of effort is, and ultimately what’s the business value of the problem you are trying to solve, the product management team will tend to organize a set of priorities for a given release, and we happen to release every 4-6 weeks. And so every 4-6 weeks, we are releasing a new set of content into the product stream, and we have various internal discussions about what is of relative importance of one feature versus the other; that’s product management.I also have responsibility for product marketing. Product marketing is the discipline where all external aspects, the view of the product into the market place where that function is managed. So, everything from Hey, what is our key messages? How is my product different from any alternatives that would be in the market place? Yes sure, there are competitors but an alternative coul d be do nothing or continue to do it manually, we offer a degree of automation. So what is that savings, or what are those benefits and how are those benefits realized by the customer and qualifying that and quantifying that, that’s product marketing.Also from enablement perspective, like going to market, how do I best equip my sellers, my distribution partners on how to just talk about our products and what the value proposition is with the products. What is the packaging of our products? So as we all know, customers buy solutions, they want answers to problems, they don’t tend to buy products, they buy solutions. And so a solution can be in a package of a couple of products, a couple of features maybe some services, and then by the way, maybe there is a partner or two that helped them realize that value. The product marketing manager will set up the product packaging and solution packaging accordingly.And then also finally the product marketing manager will also drive pricing. So, how should we think about pricing? How does it compare to the value that the customer will receive for the product?And then the last bit if I can, Martin, product marketing, also does enablement into the field whether it is an analyst relations from a public relations, or press covered perspective, a product marketing team will also represent that message into those venues as well. If I can just a couple more points…Martin: Sure!Scott: I got technical communications. What is that? That is basically anything that is written down from a technical user guide perspective in the online help, my team is responsible for that.And then finally last but not least, the most exciting part is the user experience. I have got a set of user interface designers here, you can imagine today, all the different forms of communication that are   being used by enterprise employees today in global firms, whether you are healthcare firm, a pharmaceutical firm, a global banking institution, how many d ifferent channels they use. Imagine the analytics and the views of that data if you are trying to run an inquiry, investigate a matter, all the different visualizations of the communication patterns. So we focus a lot on what’s that experience look like, how do people zoom into the data, per custodian or per channel. I am also responsible to encapsulate that user experience and communicate those requirements for engineering as well.Martin: Okay cool. I mean this is totally, I would say typical structure besides this technical documentation thing from the product point of view.Scott: Just quickly on that point, what we tried to do is anything that the customer touches, feels or hears about our product, from a UI, from documentation, from product literature, from our website, our branding, rolls through the folks on my team.Martin: You’re right, I mean this comes I guess from the philosophy of having a service design that we are delivering to the customers.Scott: Yes, absolutely.B EST PRACTICES FOR STRUCTURING LEADING A PRODUCT TEAMMartin: Based on your experiences, what are the best and worst practices in structuring or leading the product team?Scott: I think just from a structure perspective, it’s a philosophy. I think there needs to be a focus on the customer, and a focus on the problem that the customer is trying to solve. I think one of the, sort of the learnings that I’ve had is that sometimes we get too narrow focused on the feature and maybe one customer is driving us down this feature and that may be very important for that one particular customer.The product management team with input from not only the field organization but product marketing, industry analyst plus our own primary research that we might be running, helps product marketing create a more holistic view of their product and value of their product and what are the competitive alternatives to your product that might be emerging around the corner.There needs to be a balance and I woul d say the best practice needs to be that maybe 50% of your time is focused on the next series of releases coming up. But what I have learnt is that 50% of your time needs to be looking around the corner. You tend to get focused on what’s right in front of our nose, and not really what’s around the corner. And that leads to a little short sightedness where we tend to focus on the trees versus the forest. If there is a best practice there, one best practice that I have identified here is to make sure you have got ample time looking around the horizon.Martin: Okay, good. When you look at your teams operations, what metrics do you look at to measure team and product performance? Especially for example, if the business value is very hard to estimate, and why are you looking at those metrics?Scott: Yes, so there is a couple of things that I tend to look at.First off is what I like to call request for enhancement. So we design a product, we release that product and what happens a lot o f times is, there are obviously short cuts made. Time is not infinite, resources are not infinite, and we have got a series of gates within the budget of the program. And so obviously there is prioritizations and short cuts taken. And so what I want to make sure of is that my team is looking at what’s called the request for enhancements. So these could be enhancements that are coming from the sales team, could be enhancements coming from the customer via technical support or could be coming in from any number of people that are interacting with our product. How many of these are we receiving per week, per month, how many of these are you looking at, what is your volume to address those RFE’s. So the RFE’s in understanding the request for enhancements is also important.Number of bugs is another thing I track on a weekly basis. So how are we tracking on our product quality? And so, is the product management team, how many of them are they looking at? I am not saying that the pro duct manager has to go confirm that it is a bug, but they need to look and understanding and create some field on what is the quality and where are people getting stuck in the product? That’s point number 2.And then finally point number 3 for me is the number of customer meetings that my team is having. And so what I want to make sure of is that there is one foot in the product team here internally, but to make sure, we always have a perspective for the market and the customer within that market that they are taking direct customer meetings, and how many customer meetings they are having.So that’s on the product management side, so just to review number of RFE’s, number of customer meetings, number of bugs actually handled and touched by the product management team.On the product marketing side, we tend to look at 2 very important statistics; one is sales qualified leads. If you think about product marketing, right, they are generating content that take customers on a journey to learn about the problems that they have in the market place, but also, what potential solutions are out there to this, of which Actiance might be one of them.As we think about omnichannel, people coming to learn about Actiance, whether it may be from a session that we are having right now or maybe they might be hitting our website, they might be hitting some syndicated content, all of these coming from product marketing. We tend to look at very closely sales qualified leads that are coming in on the week, what content is producing that generated those sales qualified leads. We also look at what’s called marketing qualified leads, and those are raw touches to our content, and so MQL’s and SQL’s are what I evaluate on a weekly basis with the product marketing manager.Martin: Understood. Cool, Scott! If I am looking at this matrix regarding the product management that you named, they seem to be only quantitative, but I don’t see a qualitative aspect in it, meaning that it tr anslates to business value. For example, it’s very easy for me to have 100 or 200 meetings with customers without learning anything, or improving anything on the product.Scott: Yes , so absolutely. These are matrix that we look at on a weekly basis. So I would say this is value in doing what’s called the benefits realization exercise with the customer, comes in the form of case studies, in a way, how many case studies do I have? So we clearly have a goal to produce case studies and success stories where we actually qualify and quantify the business value of the solution. We tend and want to produce at least one of those externally with the customer that’s available with the customer. We have a goal of one of those a quarter that we produce every quarter, and that’s a combination of product management and product marketing, working with the customer to get an agreement to talk about their success in the market. So that’s one goal that I didn’t mention that I certainly in there.The other one is basically our billing goals and our revenue goals for the firm on a quarterly and annual basis. Clearly, if we are not delivering value for the customers We are a subscription company, so that means, every year we are going back in and confirming with that customer that they saw value in our solutions and they are willing to sign up again. And so, I understand what you are saying about qualified measure of value, but ultimately the measure of value is am I able to secure a renewal in 12 months.Martin: Yes, you are looking at the churn rates. Okay, cool.Scott: Absolutely, 100%.Martin: Okay cool, Scott.Scott: And those term rates, just so you know, we observe our churn rates very carefully at the company level. And so the product managers are looking at that as well. And so those are things that are top of mind. But specific to the PM on a weekly basis, what I am looking for are these sort of very focused sort of quantitative data to make sure that they are bein g engaged.PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS AT ACTIANCEMartin: Scott, you talked about the structure of your product team, now I would like to learn a little bit about the typical product development process in depth. How you are redoing it? So that our readers can understand the day to day in product management operations.Scott: Yes, so on a day to day on the product management side, so we follow an agile methodology. We have got a SCRUM leader role in engineering, we have got a product leader, that is the product manager that is involved in daily meetings. So we have daily stand ups where we are going, and these are meetings that, these meetings will last anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour every day on that particular aspect of the product. There is a constant review of where we are stacked in the prioritization of the job jar. We also have that meeting to understand challenges that might be happening in the particular monthly release that’s going on. So that happens every day.Onc e a week we have what we like to call an elaboration session. So whether it happens to be elaborating on this month’s release or the next month’s release, we’ll tend to focus on areas of upcoming features that are intended to be delivered. And that session is an opportunity for the product manager to walk through the user story. We’ll typically have a wire frame that goes along with that, and those elaboration sessions happen on a weekly basis.Second to that is we tend to have a user experience design SCRUM on a weekly basis, where now we are taking the same user story and we are walking both the product manager through with the user experience designer and the UI implementer on what the user flow needs to be and what data needs to be on a report, what’s the orientation of the graph, or what color pallet are we going to use? Are we going to change the color pallet? And those meetings happen every week as well.Martin: Okay, interesting.Scott: And then obviously you guys, yo u know not to get in the full death cycle here, but just to throw it out, there is a plan of record. Obviously the plan of record changes based on challenges, change in priorities. There is an early bill, product management gets a what we would like to call a PM preview, we get those pretty much on the third week of the 5 week sprint for example, we get to see the software, we get to interact with the software and have an opportunity to make changes, we are getting kind of late in the cycle, and the quality and performance will take over from there. And then it gets handed over to our network operations team, and the network operation team, they get another round of quality, and now I am in like the fifth week of the release and then it ultimately gets moved into production.Martin: Scott, are you using a centralized or a decentralized roadmap planning process? What I mean by that is are all the tickets or what you said request for, what was it? Opportunity or so, are these sent to a central point where then it’s prioritized and then distributed again to product managers and then developers? Or is it that you are giving some kind of topics where the team is managing their roadmap totally and independent of you for example?Scott: Right, we use a centralized approach, so we have a product, we use the Atlassian product set, internally here. So Atlassian has a ticketing mechanism, there is also a collaboration system. So the ticketing mechanism is JIRA and that’s what also used by our customer support team. So as things come in, those need to be ticketed, they are ticketed in Salesforce first but if they need to be escalated into engineering, that’s when they use the JIRA system. My team gets access to the tickets, they see what’s going on and they see what’s being handed over in the engineering, and our sustaining engineering team will look at those and work on those. Parallel to that is the Confluence aspect of the Atlassian set. Are you familiar with A tlassian?Martin: Yes, I know JIRA and I know Confluence.Scott: And in that case on the Confluence side, is that’s where we tend to post our user stories, our product management artefacts, that’s the venue by which we drive these weekly elaboration sessions, and all of that is centralized.Martin: Okay, understood. I was asking because since some companies are also starting to decentralize that because of pushing down ownership down to the team.Scott: Well, so what we did talk through really is that Actiance has essentially 3 products, and they all have different aspects, not to get too deep here instead of the Actiance use cases. ut we have one Bproduct that does the blocking data loss prevention, is it appropriate for you and I to have a Skype session today, yes or no. Maybe you are a financial analyst and I am a broker and I am not allowed to talk to you. That’s one product or a set of products over there. What I tend to do is I have PM’s that are organized at the product l evel and I also have product managers that look across (again, that forest through the trees thing) a more foundational data structure level and working with our technology office to drive standards across the products.Martin: Understood.ADVICE FROM SCOTT WHITNEY TO PEOPLE INTERESTED IN PRODUCT MANAGEMENTMartin: Imagine, you are young again Scott and interested in building digital products, customers really love. What would you like to share with people interested in the product management career?Scott: I think one of the things that I have learnt being in the industry plus 20 years now, it’s the certain notion of keeping it simple. One of the things that, as we all look at sort of modern consumer products, and some of the user interfaces and the capabilities, they focus on the 5 things that really matter for the end user. And if I think I go back to some of the early days and enterprise software, we tended to throw everything in on the very first release, and expose everything on the user interface because we were so proud if its capabilities and wanted to show case it. And I was worried about this particular competitor coming in with all that. But ultimately I think it’s far harder to design simple, elegant, just the right feature for the customer to get their job done and expose those first 5 features, than it is to just throw everything in.And so it’s that sort of twist in that pivot that, as we are designing, and I think a lot of your designers right now are sort of picking that up now just because I can do 100 things doesn’t mean I have to have 100 things on the UI. There is different places for that functionality.And I think less is more.Martin: Totally agree. So thank you very much for your time Scott, and for sharing your knowledge on the product management.Scott: Thank you, Martin. I appreciate the opportunity.THANKS FOR LISTENING! Welcome to the 21st episode of our podcast with Scott Whitney from Actiance!You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Click here to subscribe in iTunes. INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi folks, if you are running a business or you are thinking about starting one, you need to have a really cool product because in the end, this is what the customers are buying. Today we have an expert on the round with Scott from Actiance who will teach us about how to really build a rock solid product and manage the product team. Hi, Scott! Who are you and what do you do?Scott: Hey, Martin. Scott Whitney here, I lead up the product team for Actiance. I have been in various product roles for close to 15 years. Originally started in management consulting for KPMG, so did a bunch of work there. I have an economics background, I focus on matrix and volumes.Just by way of background, I started in product management in a company called Inktomi that was one of the early web search pioneers, then moved over to enterprise search, went into a company called Verity where I ran a product management team there and that was all about search, in particular enterprise search. F rom there I went and joined Symantec, which is a security company and we did a bunch of work there around what’s called email archiving.And so, one of the fun things with enterprise search is that they made it difficult where you have got a search engine but you don’t necessarily own the content. One of the things I was looking for was how do you build products that monetize enterprise content? Ultimately we ended up with email archiving because the email was the big gorilla in the room as far as content and the archive had all that content in place.Then I have done several roles at Symantec and then ultimately went and joined a couple of startups, those startups get acquired, rolled into a large company; in one case here is Iron Mountain and then ultimately ended up at Actiance here where I am doing the same information governance, archiving types of workloads again in product management. I have been in product management, Martin, for close to 15 years now.Martin: Scott, how d o you get from Big4 into product management?Scott: Yes, great question. So, as a low key consultant being shipped around the world globally, Martin, getting on an airplane, going to customers and helping them with their business problems, I took a seat back and I said: Well look, how do I find a job where the customers come to me? What I thought about here was, okay look, I live in San Francisco, there is a lot of interesting things going on in Silicon Valley here, which is really just half an hour down the road. I understand these companies are starting to get a lot of market attention, this is some 20 years ago now. And in the mid 90’s, I take a job there because primarily I wanted customers to come to me and I didn’t necessarily want to be on an airplane all the time. That was really the genesis for me, was really trying to spend more time here with my family and finding a job where I had an opportunity to do that.Then particularly sort of switching out of Big4 consulting, at the end of the day it’s about interfacing with your customers and understanding what they want and what they need, understanding what their challenges are and what their business problems are, turning that into a set of requirements and actually implementing that as a product. And so there is a lot of parallelism between management consulting and product management.BUSINESS IDEA OF ACTIANCEMartin: Could you please elaborate on what Actiance actually does?Scott: Yeah, so Actiance as a company name, stands for active compliance. And what we do, Martin, is, we provide governance tools for regulated industry firms. Think big banks, think big insurance carriers, think health care companies, energy transmission or energy companies whether they are doing exploration or whether they are doing transmission. What we provide, Martin, is a place to store all the communication events that happen within the company, so whether it’s a cross email, maybe it’s on Skype that we are using right now, maybe it’s on a share point blog, maybe it’s on Salesforce chatter, all those events are viewed as business records. And with many of these regulated companies, they need to be able to store those records, they need to be able to find them when they need to and be able to give them to other folks whether they are counter parties, whether they are a regulator, maybe they are opposing council. They need to give that data out to prove a point, whether it’s a legal matter, a regulatory, investigation. Having all that data in one place makes it a lot easier to get that work done.Martin: Scott, do you know what, this is the perfect, let’s say link to your tasks back then at the Big4, because basically it’s the same stuff, recording transactions and making them available.Scott: Right. And we effectively are what’s called the corporate memory.So my background was search and indexing and so I had a particular expertise in that area. Also, coming out of a Big4 firm where the y train you on understanding customer requirements, listening well to your customer, listening also to not just your customer but listening to market signals such as a regulator and understanding what those challenges are and what that does as a product manager, it helps you identify and quantify a market opportunity. Because at the end of the day, the product management function is about making trade offs and prioritizing all the different tasks that come into your desk.Martin: Yes. What is your role at Actiance? What are your objectives? How did you structure your team accordingly?Scott: Great. My title is Product Leader, and so I have got several disciplines underneath my oversight here.So the first one is the traditional discipline of product management where there is an understanding of what the customers are asking for, quantifying and qualifying the market opportunity, being able to turn in those requests into a set of user stories. And the user stories are what’s communica ted to engineering and what we tend to get back is what’s called a level of effort. And based on those 2 dimensions, what the user story is, what the level of effort is, and ultimately what’s the business value of the problem you are trying to solve, the product management team will tend to organize a set of priorities for a given release, and we happen to release every 4-6 weeks. And so every 4-6 weeks, we are releasing a new set of content into the product stream, and we have various internal discussions about what is of relative importance of one feature versus the other; that’s product management.I also have responsibility for product marketing. Product marketing is the discipline where all external aspects, the view of the product into the market place where that function is managed. So, everything from Hey, what is our key messages? How is my product different from any alternatives that would be in the market place? Yes sure, there are competitors but an alternative coul d be do nothing or continue to do it manually, we offer a degree of automation. So what is that savings, or what are those benefits and how are those benefits realized by the customer and qualifying that and quantifying that, that’s product marketing.Also from enablement perspective, like going to market, how do I best equip my sellers, my distribution partners on how to just talk about our products and what the value proposition is with the products. What is the packaging of our products? So as we all know, customers buy solutions, they want answers to problems, they don’t tend to buy products, they buy solutions. And so a solution can be in a package of a couple of products, a couple of features maybe some services, and then by the way, maybe there is a partner or two that helped them realize that value. The product marketing manager will set up the product packaging and solution packaging accordingly.And then also finally the product marketing manager will also drive pricing. So, how should we think about pricing? How does it compare to the value that the customer will receive for the product?And then the last bit if I can, Martin, product marketing, also does enablement into the field whether it is an analyst relations from a public relations, or press covered perspective, a product marketing team will also represent that message into those venues as well. If I can just a couple more points…Martin: Sure!Scott: I got technical communications. What is that? That is basically anything that is written down from a technical user guide perspective in the online help, my team is responsible for that.And then finally last but not least, the most exciting part is the user experience. I have got a set of user interface designers here, you can imagine today, all the different forms of communication that are   being used by enterprise employees today in global firms, whether you are healthcare firm, a pharmaceutical firm, a global banking institution, how many d ifferent channels they use. Imagine the analytics and the views of that data if you are trying to run an inquiry, investigate a matter, all the different visualizations of the communication patterns. So we focus a lot on what’s that experience look like, how do people zoom into the data, per custodian or per channel. I am also responsible to encapsulate that user experience and communicate those requirements for engineering as well.Martin: Okay cool. I mean this is totally, I would say typical structure besides this technical documentation thing from the product point of view.Scott: Just quickly on that point, what we tried to do is anything that the customer touches, feels or hears about our product, from a UI, from documentation, from product literature, from our website, our branding, rolls through the folks on my team.Martin: You’re right, I mean this comes I guess from the philosophy of having a service design that we are delivering to the customers.Scott: Yes, absolutely.B EST PRACTICES FOR STRUCTURING LEADING A PRODUCT TEAMMartin: Based on your experiences, what are the best and worst practices in structuring or leading the product team?Scott: I think just from a structure perspective, it’s a philosophy. I think there needs to be a focus on the customer, and a focus on the problem that the customer is trying to solve. I think one of the, sort of the learnings that I’ve had is that sometimes we get too narrow focused on the feature and maybe one customer is driving us down this feature and that may be very important for that one particular customer.The product management team with input from not only the field organization but product marketing, industry analyst plus our own primary research that we might be running, helps product marketing create a more holistic view of their product and value of their product and what are the competitive alternatives to your product that might be emerging around the corner.There needs to be a balance and I woul d say the best practice needs to be that maybe 50% of your time is focused on the next series of releases coming up. But what I have learnt is that 50% of your time needs to be looking around the corner. You tend to get focused on what’s right in front of our nose, and not really what’s around the corner. And that leads to a little short sightedness where we tend to focus on the trees versus the forest. If there is a best practice there, one best practice that I have identified here is to make sure you have got ample time looking around the horizon.Martin: Okay, good. When you look at your teams operations, what metrics do you look at to measure team and product performance? Especially for example, if the business value is very hard to estimate, and why are you looking at those metrics?Scott: Yes, so there is a couple of things that I tend to look at.First off is what I like to call request for enhancement. So we design a product, we release that product and what happens a lot o f times is, there are obviously short cuts made. Time is not infinite, resources are not infinite, and we have got a series of gates within the budget of the program. And so obviously there is prioritizations and short cuts taken. And so what I want to make sure of is that my team is looking at what’s called the request for enhancements. So these could be enhancements that are coming from the sales team, could be enhancements coming from the customer via technical support or could be coming in from any number of people that are interacting with our product. How many of these are we receiving per week, per month, how many of these are you looking at, what is your volume to address those RFE’s. So the RFE’s in understanding the request for enhancements is also important.Number of bugs is another thing I track on a weekly basis. So how are we tracking on our product quality? And so, is the product management team, how many of them are they looking at? I am not saying that the pro duct manager has to go confirm that it is a bug, but they need to look and understanding and create some field on what is the quality and where are people getting stuck in the product? That’s point number 2.And then finally point number 3 for me is the number of customer meetings that my team is having. And so what I want to make sure of is that there is one foot in the product team here internally, but to make sure, we always have a perspective for the market and the customer within that market that they are taking direct customer meetings, and how many customer meetings they are having.So that’s on the product management side, so just to review number of RFE’s, number of customer meetings, number of bugs actually handled and touched by the product management team.On the product marketing side, we tend to look at 2 very important statistics; one is sales qualified leads. If you think about product marketing, right, they are generating content that take customers on a journey to learn about the problems that they have in the market place, but also, what potential solutions are out there to this, of which Actiance might be one of them.As we think about omnichannel, people coming to learn about Actiance, whether it may be from a session that we are having right now or maybe they might be hitting our website, they might be hitting some syndicated content, all of these coming from product marketing. We tend to look at very closely sales qualified leads that are coming in on the week, what content is producing that generated those sales qualified leads. We also look at what’s called marketing qualified leads, and those are raw touches to our content, and so MQL’s and SQL’s are what I evaluate on a weekly basis with the product marketing manager.Martin: Understood. Cool, Scott! If I am looking at this matrix regarding the product management that you named, they seem to be only quantitative, but I don’t see a qualitative aspect in it, meaning that it tr anslates to business value. For example, it’s very easy for me to have 100 or 200 meetings with customers without learning anything, or improving anything on the product.Scott: Yes , so absolutely. These are matrix that we look at on a weekly basis. So I would say this is value in doing what’s called the benefits realization exercise with the customer, comes in the form of case studies, in a way, how many case studies do I have? So we clearly have a goal to produce case studies and success stories where we actually qualify and quantify the business value of the solution. We tend and want to produce at least one of those externally with the customer that’s available with the customer. We have a goal of one of those a quarter that we produce every quarter, and that’s a combination of product management and product marketing, working with the customer to get an agreement to talk about their success in the market. So that’s one goal that I didn’t mention that I certainly in there.The other one is basically our billing goals and our revenue goals for the firm on a quarterly and annual basis. Clearly, if we are not delivering value for the customers We are a subscription company, so that means, every year we are going back in and confirming with that customer that they saw value in our solutions and they are willing to sign up again. And so, I understand what you are saying about qualified measure of value, but ultimately the measure of value is am I able to secure a renewal in 12 months.Martin: Yes, you are looking at the churn rates. Okay, cool.Scott: Absolutely, 100%.Martin: Okay cool, Scott.Scott: And those term rates, just so you know, we observe our churn rates very carefully at the company level. And so the product managers are looking at that as well. And so those are things that are top of mind. But specific to the PM on a weekly basis, what I am looking for are these sort of very focused sort of quantitative data to make sure that they are bein g engaged.PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS AT ACTIANCEMartin: Scott, you talked about the structure of your product team, now I would like to learn a little bit about the typical product development process in depth. How you are redoing it? So that our readers can understand the day to day in product management operations.Scott: Yes, so on a day to day on the product management side, so we follow an agile methodology. We have got a SCRUM leader role in engineering, we have got a product leader, that is the product manager that is involved in daily meetings. So we have daily stand ups where we are going, and these are meetings that, these meetings will last anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour every day on that particular aspect of the product. There is a constant review of where we are stacked in the prioritization of the job jar. We also have that meeting to understand challenges that might be happening in the particular monthly release that’s going on. So that happens every day.Onc e a week we have what we like to call an elaboration session. So whether it happens to be elaborating on this month’s release or the next month’s release, we’ll tend to focus on areas of upcoming features that are intended to be delivered. And that session is an opportunity for the product manager to walk through the user story. We’ll typically have a wire frame that goes along with that, and those elaboration sessions happen on a weekly basis.Second to that is we tend to have a user experience design SCRUM on a weekly basis, where now we are taking the same user story and we are walking both the product manager through with the user experience designer and the UI implementer on what the user flow needs to be and what data needs to be on a report, what’s the orientation of the graph, or what color pallet are we going to use? Are we going to change the color pallet? And those meetings happen every week as well.Martin: Okay, interesting.Scott: And then obviously you guys, yo u know not to get in the full death cycle here, but just to throw it out, there is a plan of record. Obviously the plan of record changes based on challenges, change in priorities. There is an early bill, product management gets a what we would like to call a PM preview, we get those pretty much on the third week of the 5 week sprint for example, we get to see the software, we get to interact with the software and have an opportunity to make changes, we are getting kind of late in the cycle, and the quality and performance will take over from there. And then it gets handed over to our network operations team, and the network operation team, they get another round of quality, and now I am in like the fifth week of the release and then it ultimately gets moved into production.Martin: Scott, are you using a centralized or a decentralized roadmap planning process? What I mean by that is are all the tickets or what you said request for, what was it? Opportunity or so, are these sent to a central point where then it’s prioritized and then distributed again to product managers and then developers? Or is it that you are giving some kind of topics where the team is managing their roadmap totally and independent of you for example?Scott: Right, we use a centralized approach, so we have a product, we use the Atlassian product set, internally here. So Atlassian has a ticketing mechanism, there is also a collaboration system. So the ticketing mechanism is JIRA and that’s what also used by our customer support team. So as things come in, those need to be ticketed, they are ticketed in Salesforce first but if they need to be escalated into engineering, that’s when they use the JIRA system. My team gets access to the tickets, they see what’s going on and they see what’s being handed over in the engineering, and our sustaining engineering team will look at those and work on those. Parallel to that is the Confluence aspect of the Atlassian set. Are you familiar with A tlassian?Martin: Yes, I know JIRA and I know Confluence.Scott: And in that case on the Confluence side, is that’s where we tend to post our user stories, our product management artefacts, that’s the venue by which we drive these weekly elaboration sessions, and all of that is centralized.Martin: Okay, understood. I was asking because since some companies are also starting to decentralize that because of pushing down ownership down to the team.Scott: Well, so what we did talk through really is that Actiance has essentially 3 products, and they all have different aspects, not to get too deep here instead of the Actiance use cases. ut we have one Bproduct that does the blocking data loss prevention, is it appropriate for you and I to have a Skype session today, yes or no. Maybe you are a financial analyst and I am a broker and I am not allowed to talk to you. That’s one product or a set of products over there. What I tend to do is I have PM’s that are organized at the product l evel and I also have product managers that look across (again, that forest through the trees thing) a more foundational data structure level and working with our technology office to drive standards across the products.Martin: Understood.ADVICE FROM SCOTT WHITNEY TO PEOPLE INTERESTED IN PRODUCT MANAGEMENTMartin: Imagine, you are young again Scott and interested in building digital products, customers really love. What would you like to share with people interested in the product management career?Scott: I think one of the things that I have learnt being in the industry plus 20 years now, it’s the certain notion of keeping it simple. One of the things that, as we all look at sort of modern consumer products, and some of the user interfaces and the capabilities, they focus on the 5 things that really matter for the end user. And if I think I go back to some of the early days and enterprise software, we tended to throw everything in on the very first release, and expose everything on the user interface because we were so proud if its capabilities and wanted to show case it. And I was worried about this particular competitor coming in with all that. But ultimately I think it’s far harder to design simple, elegant, just the right feature for the customer to get their job done and expose those first 5 features, than it is to just throw everything in.And so it’s that sort of twist in that pivot that, as we are designing, and I think a lot of your designers right now are sort of picking that up now just because I can do 100 things doesn’t mean I have to have 100 things on the UI. There is different places for that functionality.And I think less is more.Martin: Totally agree. So thank you very much for your time Scott, and for sharing your knowledge on the product management.Scott: Thank you, Martin. I appreciate the opportunity.THANKS FOR LISTENING!Thanks so much for joining our 21st podcast episode!Have some feedback you’d like to share?  Leave  a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please  share  it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post.Also,  please leave an honest review for The Cleverism Podcast on iTunes or on SoundCloud. Ratings and reviews  are  extremely  helpful  and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.Special thanks  to Scott for joining me this week. Until  next time!

Personal Statement Personal Health Plan Essay - 1871 Words

1 Running Head: Personal Health Plan Running head: PERSONAL HEALTH PLAN Personal Health Plan Melissa Harcrow 9/12/2016 Self Evaluation -Feel like I don?t meet rubric requirement here Isn?t health and wellness something everybody strives to have? In my research for this paper I found a beautiful definition for wellness. ?Wellness, is the search for enhanced quality of life, personal growth, and potential through positive lifestyle behaviors and attitudes? (humankinetics.com, 2016). Wellness and good health will be the focus of my time for the next 8 weeks, as I put implement a plan to improve my overall health. My health has been on the decline for the last seven years, I would not be considered healthy today. Seven years ago, I was diagnosed with a muscle and skin autoimmune disease called Dermatomyositis. This diagnosis was complicated by the fact I was pregnant with our sixth child. Once the baby was delivered, and medication was continued, the disease was considered in remission. 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Trade Policy and the European Union Free Essay Example, 5250 words

In Commission v UK the UK government banned the import of certain poultry products for the reason that such imports endangered public health and therefore was against public policy. The ECJ held that the UK should have explored the several other less restrictive options available to it. According to the principle of mutual recognition, any product that was manufactured and sold as per the extant EU Regulations and Standards in that Member State cannot be rejected. Meat is sold from vans in the French countryside. France made it mandatory for such mobile van meat sellers to have permanent establishments in France, in order to permit regular public health inspections. Since Maxwell's shop is located in Germany he cannot sell meat from his mobile shop in France. In the Factortame case, the Spanish company Factortame was prohibited from conducting its commercial activities in British waters because it was using Spanish vessels registered as British vessels. After a long and tortuous pas sage through the various UK courts, the ECJ set aside the UK legislation and held that this company could continue its commercial activities in UK waters. We will write a custom essay sample on Trade Policy and the European Union or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/page Therefore, the insistence of the French authorities that every mobile van seller of meat in France should have a permanent establishment within the country violates Article 28 of the EC Treaty as it would not be justifiable in terms of consumer protection.

Ridoran Manufactoring Free Essays

Riordan Manufacturing Compensation Plan Team B- Diana Barris, Nicole Bell, Jacqueline Chaney, Shawnda Davis, Hadeel Raouf, Kelly Tyler HRM/324 Annette Clark-Davis February 11, 2013 Riordan Manufacturing Compensation Plan Riordan Manufacturing is a worldwide plastics manufacturer that is headquartered in San Jose, California. Their organization has over 500 employees and prides themselves on providing their customers with high quality merchandise to satisfy their plastics needs. They hold an ISO 9000 certification which is an organization that establishes and measures quality control. We will write a custom essay sample on Ridoran Manufactoring or any similar topic only for you Order Now In order to meet or exceed the level of quality required under ISO standards, Riordan Manufacturing will need to have knowledgeable and skilled employees within their organization. To attract premier candidates for their company, the compensation plan that is designed will need to be fair, rewarding, and competitive. This paper will outline the compensation plan for Riordan Manufacturing and include an evaluation of current trends and predict future trends, internal and external equity, a wage management process and retirement plan, financial influence on the plan’s options, and discuss the methods in which the plan will be communicated to members of the organization. Key Objectives According to Martocchio (2009), â€Å"Compensation professionals promote effective compensation systems by meeting three important goals: internal consistency, market competitiveness, and recognition of individual contributions† (Martocchio, 2009, p. 9). It is essential that these objectives are met to retain employees and make them feel valued and appreciated; all while functioning within the organizational budget. As Riordan Manufacturing considers themselves to be a leader within their industry, they understand that listening to the voice of their employees and remaining flexible regarding the compens ation benefits offered worth together in alignment with their company mission. As â€Å"compensation systems are changing† (Martocchio, 2009, p. 23), Riordan Manufacturing will do well o consider plans offered by their competitors so that they will remain an industry leader. Trends and Issues An evaluation of current trends and issues in the company’s total compensation shows the company meeting goals in certain areas, but needs to improve in other areas. Riordan Manufacturing wants and â€Å"will maintain an innovative and team oriented working environment. By assuring that our employees are well informed and properly supported, we will provide a climate focused on the long-term viability of our company. Our Future must be focused in achieving and maintaining reasonable profitability to assure that the financial and human capital is available for sustained growth† (University of Phoenix,  2013, p. 1). The company’s current trends such as the flexible benefits program, salary administration program, and the CRM system is used to help meet the organizations vision and goals, and keep the employees interested and motivated. However, technology changes each day and in today’s business world it is important to keep the company’s IT system updated to meet the demands of the customers, and the day-to-day operations. Riordan has a system to track historical sales. In the past, most sales data was recorded using paper and pencil. In the last few years, the firm has managed the information electronically† (University of Phoenix,  2013, p. 1). In the future it is best the company does an update to improve the communication between the different sites, employ ees, monitor inventory, customer demands, and sales. The company should prepare to make some changes in its current infrastructure to sustain profitability and growth within the company. Internal and External equity Internal equity is based on the employee’s values and fairness, the values, and fairness of the pay relationships within the organization. â€Å"The pay relationship within the organization has an affect on three compensation objectives. They affect the employee’s decisions to stay with the organization, to become more flexible by investing in additional training, or to seek greater responsibility† (Milkovich, 2008, p. 64). The external equity is based on how the employee sees the company’s pay structure and compensation system. What the employer pays, relative to what other employers will pay for the same type of work. The Riordan Manufacturing Company works toward a fair base system, attracting, and maintaining good workers when considering internal and external equity. Implementing job analysis, employee evaluations, work structure, pay ranges, and pay grades are ways the company endorse internal equity. Marketing surveys, supplying a competitive pay system, and salary surveys are used to implement external equity. This will allow the company to manage and implement a compensation structure that will add value and continue to make the organization successful. Wage Management and Rationale Riordan Manufacturing’s salary administration program was created â€Å"to achieve consistent pay practices, comply with federal and state laws, mirror our commitment to Equal Employment Opportunity, and offer competitive salaries within our labor market† (University of Phoenix,  2004,  p. 11). Employee compensation is based on several factors including but not limited to job analysis, evaluations, the duties and responsibilities of the job, and salary survey data on pay practices of other organizations in the same labor market to ensure Riordan’s compensation plan remains competitive (University of Phoenix,  2004). Merit-based pay adjustments may be offered for excellent employee performance. Riordan manufacturing’s salary administration program is review periodically and reconstructed when necessary (University of Phoenix,  2004). A retirement plan and how participation will be driven Riordan Manufacturing wants to make sure their employees participate in the company’s retirement plan. We will offer 401(k), Pension Plan and Profit Sharing plan. We feel that the futures of our employees are important. The way the Riordan will drive participation is by communicating clearing, emphasizing the benefits of plan participation, and to be creative. Communication is very important, using poorly or confusing materials do little to encourage plan participation. Some points to remember when communicating the plan information is to use examples that employees can relate to, keep communication brief and, use graphics like charts. Also making sure that we highlight key points will drive participation. Being creative is always a great way to encourage employees. An example would be to hold contest to promote participation. How will it be communicated? Want to promote retirement plan participation, so we want to make sure that the plan is communicated the best way possible. Since everyone works at different shits there will be different times that are available for the employees to sign up for. The discussion of the retirement plan will be in a classroom setting with a representative to explain the retirement plans that Riordan Manufacturing will offer. In these classes there will be handouts with information explaining the plan in detail and also a shorter version that will highlight the key points of the plan. In this setting this will promote participation because someone will be there to help with any questions that the employees may have and also help with the initial sign-up of the plans offered. Conclusion: Riordan Manufacturing’s goal is to maintain an innovative and team oriented working environment. By assuring that all employees are well informed and properly supported. Riordan Manufacturing considers themselves to be a leader within their industry, they understand that listening to the voice of their employees and remaining flexible regarding the compensation benefits offered worth together in alignment with their company mission. The company meets goals in certain areas, but needs to improve in other areas, and the current trends of the company such as the flexible benefits program, salary administration program, and the CRM system is used to help meet the organizations vision and goals, and keep the employees interested and motivated. However; the company should prepare to make some changes in its current infrastructure to sustain profitability and growth. In Riordan Manufacturing; the Employee’s compensation is based on several factors including but not limited to job analysis, evaluations, the duties and responsibilities of the job, as well as the salary survey data on pay practices of other organizations in the same labor market, to ensure Riordan’s compensation plan remains competitive. References Martocchio, J. J. (2009). Strategic compensation: A human resource management approach (5th ed. ). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Milkovich, G. T. , Newman, J. M. (2008). Compensation (9th ed. ). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. University of Phoenix. (2004). Riordan Manufacturing Employee Handbook. Retrieved. from University of Phoenix, HRM324 – Total Compensation website. University of Phoenix. (2013). Week Five overview. Retrieved from University of Phoenix, HRM324 – Total Compensation website. York, NY: McGraw How to cite Ridoran Manufactoring, Essay examples

Advancement of Civic Engagement by Community Foundations in Low Income African American Communities Essay Example For Students

Advancement of Civic Engagement by Community Foundations in Low Income African American Communities Essay The role of civic engagement in neighborhood revitalization, particularly in low income African American communities, has gained increased awareness and in recent years. Community, nonprofit, and government leaders now view civic engagement as a critical component of effective solutions as they seek to address crime, unemployment, low graduation rates and numerous other neighborhood challenges. Several successful initiatives have come to fruition and provide strong evidence of the benefits that increased civic engagement provides. Experts commonly define civic engagement as individual and group actions that collectively address general issues of concern that are public in nature. Civic engagement takes many forms such volunteerism, community organizing, and involvement in public policy and political issues. Individuals and community residents can express civic engagement through a variety of activities including participating in neighborhood associations, communicating with elected officials, and volunteering for local nonprofits. Golod (2008) analyzed the Southside Family Charter School located in Minneapolis, MN which serves as a prime example of early civic engagement. Students enrolled in the school reside in a low income community that is close to 50% African American. To improve civic engagement of students and parents, school administrators have developed lesson plans with a focus on civil rights. As a result, the community is preparing a new generation of residents focused on improving their community who follow in the footsteps of parents serving in volunteer capacities and as strong neighborhood activists. The McCormick Foundation recently demonstrated a commitment to civic engagement here in Chicago by . .are: Pushing the boundaries of civic engagement for african american youth. Liberal Education, 97(2), 34-39. Golod, F. (2008). Civil rights and social justice: A path to engagement and transformation. Horace, 24(3), 6. Grillo, M.,C., Teixeira, M. A., Wilson, D. C. (2010). Residential satisfaction and civic engagement: Understanding the causes of community participation. Social Indicators Research, 97(3), 451-466. Kimball, K., Kopell, M. (2011). Letting GO. Stanford Innovation Review, 9(2), 37- 41. Maton, K. I. (2008). Empowering community settings: Agents of individual development, community betterment, and positive social change. American Journal of Community Psychology, 41(1-2), 4-21. Tester, G., Ruel, E., Anderson, A., Reitzes, D. C., Oakley, D. (2011). Sense of place among atlanta public housing residents. Journal of Urban Health, 88(3), 436-53.

1984 Themes, Symbols, and Literary Devices

'1984' Themes, Symbols, and Literary Devices Written at a time when dictatorships and totalitarian regimes were establishing a hold over much of the world despite the defeat of Hitler’s Nazis in World War II, in 1984 Orwell described what he saw as the inevitable outcome of any political movement that embraced authoritarianism and the cult of personality. Orwell was extremely frightened of political power being concentrated in a small number of individuals, correctly seeing it as a pathway to the loss of personal freedoms, and foresaw the technology that would make the erasure of those freedoms a simple task. Totalitarianism The most obvious and powerful theme of the novel is, of course, totalitarianism itself. A totalitarian state is one where there is only one political force legally permitted- all opposition to the state’s policies and actions is illegal, usually categorized as treason and met with violent retribution. This naturally stifles freedom of expression and makes change within the system impossible. In democratic societies, opposition groups can form political parties, express their ideas freely, and force the state to address concerns or be replaced. In a totalitarian society, this is impossible. Orwell’s Oceania goes further than even most existing totalitarian states. Where real-world authoritarian leaders seek to restrict information and control their populations in terms of their physical movements and spoken or written communication, Orwell’s government of the future seeks to inhibit thought itself and alter information at the source. Newspeak is a language invented by the state specifically to make independent thought literally impossible, and even Winston’s physical surroundings are designed to inhibit his freedoms, like the way his small apartment is dominated by the enormous two-way television screen, crowding him into a corner he incorrectly believes offers him some degree of privacy. That illusion is crucial to Orwell’s theme, as he strives to demonstrate that in a truly totalitarian society all freedom is in fact an illusion. Winston believes he finds ways to resist and meaningfully fight back against repression, all of which turn out to be gambits controlled by the state. Orwell argues that people who imagine they would heroically resist such a repressive regime are kidding themselves. Control of Information A crucial aspect of Oceania’s control over the citizenry is its manipulation of information. Workers at the Ministry of Truth actively adjust newspapers and books on a daily basis to match the ever-changing version of history that suits the purposes of the state. Without any kind of reliable source of facts, Winston and anyone who, like him, is dissatisfied or concerned about the state of the world, has only their vague feelings on which to base their resistance. More than simply a reference to Joseph Stalin’s practice of literally airbrushing people out of historical records, this is a chilling demonstration of how a lack of information and accurate data renders people powerless. Winston daydreams of a past that never actually existed and sees it as the goal of his rebellion, but since he lacks any real information, his rebellion is meaningless. Consider how he is tricked into overtly betraying the state by O’Brien. All the information Winston has about the Brotherhood and Emmanuel Goldstein is fed to him by the state itself. He has no idea if any of it is true- if the Brotherhood even exists, if there is even a man named Emmanuel Goldstein. Destruction of the Self Winston’s torture at the end of the novel is not simply punishment for his Thoughtcrimes and incompetent attempts to rebel; the purpose of the torture is to eradicate his sense of self. This is the ultimate goal of totalitarian regimes according to Orwell: A complete subservience to the goals, needs, and ideas of the state. The torture Winston undergoes is designed to destroy his individuality. In fact, every aspect of life in Oceania is designed to achieve this goal. Newspeak is designed to prevent negative thoughts or any thought that is not approved or generated by the state. The Two-Minutes Hate and the presence of Big Brother posters promote a sense of homogeneous community, and the presence of Thought Police- especially the children, who have been raised in the poisoned environment of the totalitarian state and who function as credulous and uncritical servants of its philosophy- prevents any sort of trust or true kinship. In fact, the Thought Police do not have to actually exist to achieve this goal. Simply the belief that they do is sufficient to inhibit any individual expression, with the ultimate result that the self is subsumed into Groupthink. Symbols Big Brother. The most powerful and recognizable symbol from the book- recognized even by people who have not read it- is the looming image of Big Brother on posters everywhere. The posters obviously symbolize the power and omniscience of the party, but they are only ominous to those who retain any kind of individual thought. For those fully assimilated into the party line, Big Brother is not an ironic term- he is seen as a protector, a kindly older sibling keeping them from harm, whether it be the threat of outside forces, or the threat of unmutual thoughts. Proles. Winston is obsessed with the lives of the proles, and fetishizes the red-armed prole woman as his main hope for the future, because she represents the potentially overwhelming power of numbers as well as a mother who will bear future generations of free children. It is notable that Winston’s best hope for the future takes the responsibility from his hands- he is not the one counted on to deliver this ill-defined future, it is up to the proles to rise up. And if they do not, the implication is that it is because they are dull and lazy. Telescreens. Another obvious symbol are the wall-sized televisions in every private space. This literal intrusion by the state is not a commentary on modern television, which did not exist in any meaningful way in 1948, but rather a symbol of the destructive and repressive power of technology. Orwell distrusted technology, and saw it as a grave danger to freedom. Literary Devices Limited Point of View. Orwell chooses to restrict our access to information by tying the narrative solely to Winston’s point of view. This is done specifically to keep the reader reliant on the information they are given, just as Winston is. This underscores the betrayal and shock that both feel when, for example, the Brotherhood is revealed to be fictional. Plain Language. 1984 is written in a very plain style, with few flourishes or unnecessary words. While many students take this to mean Orwell was a humorless man, or who simply lacked the ability to write in an exciting way, the fact is the opposite: Orwell had such control over his art he was able to match his writing style precisely to the mood and setting. The novel is written in a sparse, grim style that perfectly matches and evokes the grim, unhappy, and hopeless setting. The reader experiences the same dull, plodding sense of mere existence that Winston does.

Josef Mengele Angele of Death essays

Josef Mengele Angele of Death essays Josef Mengele was a cruel and very henious man. He ripped twins right from thier mothers arms. Mengele was the "seletor" at Auschwitz ( now don't get confused , he was only in charge of the womens'selections the mens' camp was called Birkenuea) and was nicknamed by the camps inmates , "ANGELE OF DEATH", he was nicknamed this for he choosed who was to live and who was to die. Often the twins of his expirements were permanatly or severly damaged , sometimes even killed and dissected. Those who survived Mengeles' "expiriments'" , were usally severly or permanately damaged and tramatized for the rest of thier lives. The twins' in Mengeles' labatory were given extra rations' and sometimes even chocolate. Some recall Mengele as a nice man that gave them extra rations and Chocolates', but this was only because they were taken from thier family at a young age and saw Mengele as a father figure.They had no knowledge of what Mengele was doing outside of the labratory. ...

Infrastructure Vulnerability Analysis and Network Architectures Essay

Infrastructure Vulnerability Analysis and Network Architectures - Essay Example Refinery and storage stages are more vulnerable than at other supply chain components because of faults in the control systems security. It is a phenomenon often enforced by vulnerability analysis in a security framework of processes that include conveyor belts and other industrial networks. Consequently, the improvement of a computer system means all the vulnerabilities that form the infrastructure of refinery and storage phases become strong and less susceptible to attacks. Finding a solution to the Energy Vulnerability Analysis is another critical step of protection the machinery that guides the SCADA structure (Ramalingam, 2004). On the other hand, at the supply chain level, the gas processing plant uses a critical infrastructure of valuable resources and other quantifiable values of cataloguing assets. The risks surrounding the vulnerability assessment, therefore, denote the capacity to defend mitigation and other potential threats. Assessment of the methodologies, thus, forms a security design that is also fundamental when using application servers through penetration mitigation. Overall, the procedure has an impact on denial of service attacks that often has serious ramifications at the refinery and storage stages. Information Technology-Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (IT-ISAC) as an organization established in 2000 helps in boosting IT infrastructure to avoid vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities are tied to cyber information particularly in analysis and sharing of energy aspects to implement protection modules within a supply chain. Contrastingly, the prevention of cyber threats begins by conducting coordination and analysis activities that embody sharing issues because of a specialized forum that manages risks as seen when dealing with computer products. Consequently, the role of IT when analysed from a SCADA structure assists in

Budgeting Memo Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Budgeting Memo - Assignment Example Upon questioning, I learned that people in charge of budgeting and procurement have to spend all of their budgets for fear of losing it the next year. Perhaps you got that idea from government spending which has a totally different setting with a non-government agency such as ours. It is widely known that most government agencies are under pressure to fully expend budgets that are set to expire (Boris Angelov, 2014) I am not happy with this situation because you have the wrong notion of budgeting. The rush of spending at the end of the fiscal year is only costing the organization unnecessary expenditures and wasteful. Budget is supposed to be an allocation to ensure that there are enough resources to accomplish set of goals. It is defined as an estimation of revenue and expenses over a period of specified time (Investopedia). For instance, if you have budgeted, $30,000 for training of personnel, and at close of the fiscal year, you have spent only $20,000 for the actual training; this does not mean you have to think of ways to spend the balance of the budget. Necessarily, it should be treated as a savings and be returned to the Treasury. An approved budget does not mean that you have to spend it to zero. We should form the practice of returning balances because as you contribute to our fund balances, you are adding to the health of our company. From now on, the practice of spend all will not be tolerated. Each manager has to explain why there are balances/deficits from the budgeted amount, and if there is a balance, the need to spend it should be rightly justified. Please be informed that I will not approve expenses not tied up with our goals but will commend managers who are efficient in their surpluses. If you fear of losing your budget for next year, I will propose to our Board of Directors to use Zero budgeting wherein every expenditure is justified, or each spending starts with an assumed value of 0 (Accounting Tools, 2014).

Experiences in a cross curricular manner education essay

Experiences in a cross curricular manner education essay The following essay will focus on the Skills Framework introduced by the Welsh Assembly Government into the national curriculum. The essay will discuss the shift into developing pupils skills across the curriculum rather than subject specific skills. The essay will also discuss how to develop pupils skills in the core subjects through a series of practical based activities through active learning. The term skill can be hard to define. Resnick argues that the term can not be defined exactly, but the term is easily recognisable, although it is very diverse (Resnick, L.B. 1987). Resnick also argues that in the world of education, we must try to teach study and problem solving skills. However can these types of skills be related to the different skills across the curriculum? The term skill requires a working definition as the different elements associated with skills are far too vast to be confined to one single, ridged definition. The Skills Framework being brought into the National Curriculum is linked to the Education Reform Act of 1988, which suggested that a curriculum should prepare pupils for challenges that they may face in adult life. However, past teaching practices prior to the Skills Framework being introduced were very much based around subject knowledge rather than skills. For example, in Science pupils would have learnt about the human heart. Now, under the new Skills Framework, pupils do still learn about the human heart, but the main focus of the lesson is to improve pupils scientific investigation skills rather develop their subject knowledge alone. Emphasis on teaching has now moved from less subject detail, to looking more at how and why and with a more thematic/topic method of teaching not only the core subjects, but subjects across the curriculum (James, B. et al). The need for a Skills Framework was outlined by the Future Skills Wales 2003 Generic Skills Survey which discovered that emplo yers could see gaps in employees skills, including communication and problem solving skills and in particular, Information Communications Technology (ICT) skills (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). As a result of this survey and a previous publication from Estyn in 2002 which also stated a need to improve learning skills within schools, Awdurdod Cymwysterau, Cwricwlwm ac Asesu Cymru (ACCAC) advised the Welsh Assembly Government to revise the National Curriculum to ensure it became more learner centered, skills based, up-to-date with the 21st Century and far more skills based than just focusing on subject knowledge alone. It was also suggested that the new curriculum had to be inclusive for all learners, something it could be argued that a subject knowledge based curriculum is not. The main points suggested by ACCAC were to implement a curriculum that focuses on and meets learners needs, is inclusive and provides equality of opportunity, equi ps learners with transferable skills, supports bilingualism, is relevant, challenging, interesting and enjoyable for all learners, transforms learning to produce resourceful, resilient and reflective lifelong learners, is achievable and adequately resourced. (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). With these skills based activities implemented into the National Curriculum, it is believed that a pupils education will be much more fulfilling, enjoyable and successful. The skills framework is organised into four different sections; developing thinking, communication, ICT and number. It is argued that these skills are needed to not only help learners in schools, but also when they reach adult life and require these skills. The Skills Framework has also been organised so that learners can acquire different skills and progress in these skills from the Foundation phase right through the different key stages and into post sixteen education. Although learners acquire and develop skills set out in the framework as they progress through the different key stages, certain skills are not necessarily associated with a particular stage in in education. This is because some skills that young adults in the upper key stages have acquired may also be demonstrated by learners in the Foundation Phase, all be it at a much simpler level. As learners progress from the Foundation Phase and into the different key stages, their skills develop. This can be viewed as learner s begin to work more independently with less support. Learners also choose to work with others to better their education, rather than just casually listening and work with those around them (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). Although the Skills Framework has a major influence on the National Curriculum, it is by no means supposed to replace it, but merely act as a guide to help teachers with their planning. One of the main stages of the Skills Framework is developing thinking. Educators believe that it is important to develop thinking to enable learners to have a greater understanding of what they are studying. As part of the Skills Framework the process of thinking is organised into plan, develop and reflect. In relation to the classroom, this process allows learners to plan out tasks effectively, develop their own ideas, and then reflect back upon their work (Swansea Grid for Learning). The Skills Framework has been put in place to help teachers develop a learners thinking across the curriculum, although it is not possible to cover all subjects within the curriculum (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). Developing thinking is seen as a continuous process. This allows learners to keep improving, as they are constantly planning, developing and reflecting upon their work (See Figure A). Figure A. (Swansea Grid for Learning) One of the most important features of this continuous process is metacognition, thinking about thinking. Metacognition is a process whereby learners reflect upon their own work, and then use this reflection time to improve their learning. Metacognition is also crucial in allowing learners to progress through the different skills stages. In mathematics, thinking can be developed through a variety of different problem solving activities. Whilst on school placement, I found that Abacus Maths Scheme had a range of practical activities that helped improve pupils thinking skills. The Abacus Activity book 6, by Ruth Merrtens and David Kirkby features a range of different practical mathematical activities whereby learners work through the different activities and then answer questions at the end. One particular activity consisted of letters from A to K. An example of the worksheet used in this activity can be found in Appendix 1. Learners had to work in groups to identify what number each of the different letters represented. To find the correct answer, learners had to answer different questions such as I+C=D. To find the answer, pupils had to reflect upon what answers they already knew, for example they may already know that I= 4 and that C= 8, so they could therefore identify what number D must represent. Once learners ha d identified what numbers all of the letters represented they then had to answer questions such as What is the total of B, C and F? (Merrtens et al 2001). The plenary for this activity also presents an opportunity for learners to use the process of metacognition. Questions such as, what did you learn from this activity? How did you identify what numbers the different letters were? How did you answer the different questions? What parts did you find easy? What parts did you find hard? all allow learners to reflect upon their work and how they planned and developed their work throughout the activity to solve the different problems (Revill 2010). Another method to develop thinking is using a KWHL grid (what learners already Know, what they Want to find out, How they will find out and what they have Learnt). The grid allows learners to reflect upon prior learning to fill out what they already know on the grid. Learners then think about what they might want to find out from the work and how they are going to find this out. Once learners have completed the work, they then reflect up on what they have learnt. The use of KWHL grid very much incorporates the ideas of developing thinking and metacognition as learners must plan what they want to find out, develop this into how they are going to find out, and then reflect upon how they have found out certain information (The Centre for Research in Primary Science and Technology (CRIPSAT) 2007). I have found one of the best uses of a KWHL grid is to assess what learners learn during a science investigation. On school placement I used a KWHL grid during a science lesson looking at different food groups and their effects on the human body. Once the learners had identified what they knew and what they wanted to find out, they then set about writing down how they would find out information. Without prompt, learners reflected on previous lessons when they has been asked to research information from material provided from textbooks and wrote this in their KWHL grids. KWHL grids are not only good at developing thinking skills, but also at as a means of allowing learners an element of control by letting them decide what they want to find out, and how they are going to find out. In the science lesson on food groups, using the KWHL grid also led to pupils working in groups to research the different food groups, and then presenting them back to the class. An example of a KWHL grid prod uced by a pupil from the class can be fond in Appendix 2. The research and presentation skills needed were skills that pupils had previously learnt by doing a similar task. They had then reflected on this task to use the same skills to find out and share information about food groups in the form of presentations, which also promotes practical, active learning. In language lessons, one of the best examples that I found whilst on school placement for developing thinking skills and making the lesson more practical and active was through a method of story writing by Pie Corbett. The Canal by Pie Corbett is learnt not by simply reading text, but by looking at pictures that illustrate events in the story. The Canal and a sample of pictures used to tell the story ca be found in Appendix 3. This process uses a multi-sensory approach, combing actions with speech which enables learners to learn the story quickly and more effectively (Cambridge Literacy Catalogue 2003). Once learns know the story, they can then use the framework to design their own versions. This develops thinking skills as learners have to reflect upon what language and structure they have learnt from the Pie Corbett story, and use this in their own writing. Learners can also reflect upon the structure of the Pie Corbett text to generate speech within their own text. The next step f or learners was to sketch pictures illustrating the events in their stories and then acting them out. This again created an active and practical means of learning, whilst developing learners thinking skills. The main principle of the Skills Framework is to develop learners skills which they may transfer to different aspects of life (Revill 2010). By learning these different thinking skills through a range of practical activities, this section of the framework will definitely help fill the current gap in skills suggested by employers. Another stage of the Skills Framework is developing communication. Communication is a very important aspect of learning as it enables learners to communicate what they already know or want to find out. To be able to communicate correctly, Valette (1973) suggests that learners must engage in a variety of activities such as listening and reading comprehensions and be able to express themselves through speech and writing. Osborn et al (2003) argues that there is increasing evidence which proves that by improving communication skills, other aspects of learning in general will also improve. The Skills Framework organises communication into oracy, reading, writing and wider communication skills such as through ideas and emotions (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). In language lessons, a good way to enable learners to communicate is through guided reading activities. The book 20:20 Vision, part of The Navigator series by Harcourt Education et al, offers a range of activities whereby learners read, and then report back answers and ideas to the rest of the group. However, many of the activities in the books do not contain any text but pictures instead. One example is comparing pictures of a town in 1900, with the same town today. Learners must read the pictures, and then answer questions about what they have read in the picture. This helps develop not only a learners reading skills in a way other than reading text, but also their wider communication skills, as they are having to communicate ideas in regards to the picture. Learners also develop oracy skills by answering questions and reporting them to the group. The book also contains written questions to complete at the end of the activity, which will then improve learners writing skills. This e xample of a guided reading activity incorporates all of the skills listed in the Skills Framework under developing communication. It is also an active and practical activity which encourages learners to communicate with each other. There are many opportunities for learners to develop their communication skills in science. When studying science, learners must often write clearly and concisely and be confident with oral presentations (Osborn et al 2003). When writing a science investigation learners are expected to communicate clearly using specific language and structure. Learners use the future tense to communicate what they think may happen in an investigation, the present tense to explain how to do carry out the investigation, and then the past tense to reflect upon it. Learners must also explain the results from the investigation in a way which will enable the reader to understand. Oral presentation is also very important to developing communication skills. Whilst on school placement, part of a science lesson required members of the class to prepare a presentation to the rest of the class which would inform them about the different organs in the body. The children worked in groups to research a particular bo dy organ, produce a fact file and then prepare questions ready to present to the class. This activity developed the childrens communication skills by allowing group members to feedback information that they had researched to the rest of the group. The children then communicated through writing by recording the information they had found out into fact files. The template given to pupils to produce the fact files can be found in Appendix 4. The groups then had to prepare a presentation about their chosen organ to the rest of the class. This allowed for communication within the groups, as the children sorted out what would be said and who was saying it. The groups then presented their information to the class, again drawing on their oral communication skills. After the presentations the rest of the class had to answer questions from the group. An example of the questions asked by the pupils can be found in Appendix 5. This again improved communication skills as pupils were able to answ er questions with confidence, in front of the whole class. This science based activity therefore helped to improve and develop the children written and oral communication skills. In mathematics, learners use mathematical vocabulary when working with others. Learners also use a variety of written methods for communicating data such as diagrams, graphs, tables and symbols (Mathematics in the National Curriculum for Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). At Key Stage 2 level, learners are given opportunities to their reading skills in mathematics by interpreting graphs and diagrams, and then explain the data either orally or in written format. Another feature of developing communication skills in mathematics at Key Stage 2 is to visualise and describe shapes, movements and transformations (Mathematics in the National Curriculum for Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). Whilst on school placement, I carried out a mathematics lesson based on 2d shapes. Over the course of the lesson, the children learnt the names of different 2d shapes, what they looked like and if they were a regular polygon, irregular polygon, or not a polygon. As a plenary activity I arranged for the c hildren to sit back to back in pairs, one facing the whiteboard. The member of the pair not facing the whiteboard was given an individual white board, on which they could write. I then wrote the name of a 2d shape on the main whiteboard. The child facing the board had to communicate with their partner what the shape was by saying if it was a regular polygon, irregular polygon, or not a polygon and how many sides the shape had, but could not say the name of the shape. The other member of the pair then had to interpret this information and draw what shape they thought it may be on their own individual whiteboards. This activity helped to develop communications skills as one member of the pair had to interpret what they were reading on the board, reflect upon what they had learnt about polygons from the lesson, and then orally describe to their partner the information, so that it could be easily interpreted by their partner, who would then be able to draw the correct shape. This activi ty was done more than once so that both members of the pair had an opportunity to describe the 2d shape. The importance of developing communication skills is critical for all learners. Some researchers even suggest that there is a clear relationship between communication skills and having a positive relationship with other peers as well as achieving academically (Brigman et al 1999). It is therefore essential that subjects across the curriculum incorporate the development of communication skills to enable leaners to develop both academically and socially. Another part of the Skills Framework is developing number. Following research over the last twenty years it is apparent that numeracy involves more than calculation work, it also encompasses a learners ability to use number accurately including working with shape, measurement, creating graphs, and then using them to explain data (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). Although using number is mainly a mathematical skill, number can also be used in a variety of contexts across the curriculum. In Science, number is often used in scientific investigations. A good activity to involve number in science is to investigate how the heart rate changes with exercise. Whilst on school experiences, the children recorded their resting heart rate over a period of 30 seconds, using a heart monitor linked to a computer. They then interpreted the results from the graph to give their resting heart rate. The children then ran around for five minutes and then once again recorded theyre heart rates. Once they had interpreted the results of the graph following the exercise, they could then compare the two graphs to work out the difference between theyre resting heart rate and heart rate after exercise. This activity helped to develop the childrens number skills because it allowed them to gather information from a graph, compare and interpret data and accurately measure their heart rates using suitable equipment (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). Normally, you would not associate developing number with work in language. However, there are a number of activities which incorporate developing number into language lessons. When doing instruction writing, learners develop number along with their language skills. For example, when writing a recipe, learners must use number not only to sequence their writing, but also to quantify the ingredients. Whilst on school experience, the children were firstly given a recipe cut up into different pieces and jumbled up. They then had to put the recipe back into the correct order. This developed the childrens number skills as they had to sequence the order of the recipe from the first instruction to the last. After the children had done this they then had to write their own recipes. An example of a pupils recipe can be found in Appendix 6. Before they began writing the instructions to the recipe, the children had to list the ingredients and what quantity of the ingredients should be used. This again helped develop number because the children had to choose and use everyday units of measurement (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). In mathematics it is obvious that the subject helps to develop number skills. However, it is still important to ensure that activities are practical and enjoyable to help learners develop their number skills. One enjoyable, practical activity to help learners develop their number skills is to play multiplication bingo. An example can be found in Appendices 7 and 8. In the activity, each child is given a bingo card with multiplications of six and seven on them. The teacher has cards with times tables on them, for example the six times table and seven times table, but with a blank answer. The teacher had to read out each calculation, and the children would have to mentally work out the answer, and then check if they had the number on their bingo board. Like in normal bingo, the winner was the one to cross off all of their numbers first. I found this activity to particularly enjoyable with the children while on work experience. The activity also helps develop number as it allows learner s to identify suitable calculations to get the result needed for the task (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). The use of a calculator to allow the children to check their answers could also be incorporated into the activity to help develop number skills. Developing number is very important to a learners development in all aspects of life. Being able to use numbers is a global activity which brings together people from all cultures. It is therefore essential that learners develop their number skills not only by calculations and formulas, but as a means of solving problems and learning about the world (Sharma 2010). The Skills Framework will help to develop number in a way which helps learners to develop their number knowledge and skills across the curriculum, and not limit the development to mathematics. The Skills Frame work also has a fourth stage, Developing ICT. It is essential that learners today have good ICT skills, as it was one of the main skills gaps pointed out by employers in the Future Skills Wales 2003 Generic Skills Survey. Developing skills in ICT has two strands; finding and developing information and ideas and creating and presenting information and ideas (Skills Framework for 3 to 19-year-olds in Wales. Welsh Assembly Government). It can be argued that all subjects across the curriculum, not only the core subjects incorporate these strands. For example in nearly all subjects, learners will have researcnhed information using software programmes and also the internet. Learners also use ICT to create and present information such as word processing their work, or creating graphs to show results from an investigation. Developing ICT skills is more than just teaching learners about ICT. Rather, it helps learners develop their knowledge of different technologies, add how these technologies maybe used to improve and benefit their learning. Also developing ICT skills will also greatly benefit learners from the very beginning of their journey through education and on into adult life, as ICT skills have become almost essential in modern ways of living. The Skills Framework introduced to into the national curriculum by the Welsh Assembly Government has been incorporated as a means of improving and developing skills that are currently needed not only in Wales, but the rest of the United Kingdom. By introducing skills into the curriculum such as developing thinking, communication, number and ICT will help learns to develop essential skills needed not only in education, but also later in adult life. It can also be argued that these skills will also help a learner improve both academically and socially. With the introduction of the Skills Framework into the national curriculum, we are now beginning to see a shift from a very much subject based way of teaching the curriculum, into a more skills based method. I firmly believe that in the future the shift into more skills based teaching will become even greater, with teachers focusing far more on the Skills Framework, and then planning the curriculum around it.