Eyebrows were raised in 2004 when Google’s $23 billion valuation raised an IPO of $1.9 billion. Eight years on, a new record is in the offing. Facebook, the social networking giant is jumping in the ring of stock markets with a $10 billion IPO. Morgan Stanley group is tipped to lead the deal.

Dealogic reports that the IPO is ranked fourth in the history of IPOs in the US. It trails behind biggies – Visa Inc., General Motors Co. and AT&T Wireless.

Facebook is currently valued around $75 billion and $100 billion. In terms of growth, it is one of the fastest. It all started at a Harvard dorm room in 2004, and the company boasts of 800 million registered members.

The company is planning to launch the IPO sometime between April and June.

James Skinner of the McDonald’s fame once addressed a group of MBA students that the business they are in is real estate and not burgers. They started in 1948, buying land all across the world, and today they are valued around $100 billion – same as Facebook – whose valuation is made up from the virtual world alone. What an irony that virtual world has overtaken the physical one from all aspects.

If you are a certified Project Management Professional (PMP)®, then you know that the acronym PDU stands for Professional Development Unit. Every PMP needs to earn 60 PDUs every 3 years in order to keep his or her certification. Why? The idea behind PDUs is simple: the Project Management Institute (PMI) wants every PMP to continuously learn. Just like doctors or pilots who have to take classes regularly and practice new skills in order to keep their license, PMI wants credential holders to learn new project management skills so that we can be the best project managers possible.

This article is based on an interview with Rory McCorkle, Product Manager Credentials, from PMI, and you can listen to the full interview for free at The Project Management Podcast website: http://bit.ly/pmpodcast204.

The rules around PDUs changed in March 2011, but many people are still confused about the new structure. Let’s look at the main changes.

One hour equals one PDU

When Rory and his team were benchmarking PMI against other organizations, they realized that it would be useful to standardize the amount of PDUs individuals get for the time they spend on activities. “We’re truly global and dealing with a global audience has challenges,” he said. “That was something we found an important learning: regardless of whether you are sitting in a classroom, giving a presentation or volunteering, we have rewarded you appropriately for the investment of your time and what you were getting out of that.”

As a result, nearly all activities are now credited on the basis of one hour of activity equaling one PDU.

PDU divisions and categories

The old system had 18 different PDU categories – not including the sub-categories. The new system divides PMI PDUs into two broad areas: education and giving back to the profession. This makes it much easier to understand, but there was another reason for the change too. “The other important thing division enabled us to do was to ensure that through their recertification cycle every practitioner had at least some hours in the education area,” Rory said. “That gave us the assurance that everyone would continue to invest in their lifelong learning.”

In the new structure both divisions have 3 categories.

The Education division

Category A: Courses offered by a PMI Registered Education Provider (REP), Chapters or Communities. “Most of these activities are stored in the Continuing Certification Requirements System already,” said Rory, “so all you need to claim them is simply to enter that activity number and demonstrate that you were there if you’re audited.”

Category B: Continuing Education. This covers any training that you undertake at a college, university, or with any other training provider that is not a REP. Training in your workplace counts as Category B too. Rory advises that you keep proof of attendance in case you are audited. “That could be a certificate of completion,” he said.

Category C: Self-directed Learning. “This is really a great place for folks to be able to get learning that you don’t have to go to a classroom for,” Rory said. “It captures a lot of the things that I hope certainly that professionals are doing, if not on a daily basis, certainly monthly”. This includes being mentored, webinars, podcasts, reading and so on. You can only claim a maximum of 30 PDUs in this category.

The Giving Back to the Profession division

This division has a maximum of 45 PDUs. Any PDUs earned in the following 3 categories counts towards this cap.

Category D: Creating New Project Management Knowledge. “This is a whole number of different things that all are looking to create, develop, expand and communicate new project management knowledge or perhaps augment existing knowledge that might be out there in the field,” Rory said. It ranges from authoring a textbook to giving a presentation at your Chapter dinner about a topical issue in project management, and can include writing articles. “At PMI we have a lot of publications that you can get knowledge pieces produced in,” Rory said.

Category E: Volunteer Service. You don’t have to be a PMI Chapter officer to claim these PDUs. “This can be volunteer service for any project management organization,” explained Rory. “We know there are other project management organizations out there. They do have to be non-profit in order to count here, so volunteering for your company isn’t going to count because that could be your job.” Another opportunity to earn PMP PDUs in this category is by providing project management services to non-profit organizations.

Category F: Working as a Professional in Project Management. This is the only one of the 6 categories where the “1 hour of service equals 1 PDU” rule doesn’t apply. “This is essentially an amount we give for working as a professional project manager,” Rory said. “As on your original application for your certification, we recognize experience as part of the eligibility requirements.” As long as you work a minimum of 6 months within the 12 month period you can claim the PDUs relevant to your credential.

Learning more

“I’d encourage folks to look at the handbook for their certification,” said Rory. There is no longer a separate handbook just for continuing certification requirements, as the rules are embedded in the handbook for your credential. While the new guidelines are much clearer than the old system, Rory recommends asking for help if you are unsure.

“I would encourage folks if they have a question about specific activity to reach out to Customer Care,” he said. “We’ll make sure we get an answer for you because the categories can encompass a lot and sometimes can be a little confusing as to what counts and what might not.”

Earn PDUs regularly

Why not get started on your PDUs now via a subscription and get your PDUs regularly? The PDU Podcast (www.pducast.com) is a convenient way for you to earn unlimited PDUs in Category A, and you don’t have to go to a classroom. Get project management webinars delivered to your portable player like an iPod, Android phone or Blackberry and earn at least 1 PDU every month, which is a really convenient way for PMPs to earn PDUs for your renewal.

About the author: Cornelius Fichtner, PMP is a noted PMP expert. He has helped over 16,000 students prepare for the PMP exam with The Project Management PrepCast and he is the host of The PDU Podcast.

Another area of ITIL where people generally get confused. Functions and processes.

Functions perform specialized tasks. That is it. This is all that a function does. You go to a salon, and your barber is an expert in cutting hair. He is a function as he is performing a specialized task. Here’s the official definition from exam perspective - units of organizations specialized to perform certain types of work and are responsible for specific outcomes.

Processes on the other hand have a specific goal, and have a feedback mechanism for self reinforcing and self correcting action. So, a process is a combination of a number of coordinated activities in achieving a common goal. Important aspect to note is that a process will have a feedback mechanism which helps it to improve further. I will explain functions and processes with an example, but before that here’s the official definition of a process- A process is measurable, performance driven, responds to specific triggers and delivers specific results to customers or stakeholders. Once again, important from exam perspective. To understand what a process means, follow my examples.

Let us say you are disgusted with the dirt lying on your car, and finally decide to clean it. You position your car in the driveway where ever convenient and hook the water pump to a water source. First you rinse the car with water through the water pump. Apply shampoo manually. Rinse it again. And, dry it with a microfiber cloth.

In this example, the outcome you want to achieve is a clean car. Your dirty car is the input for the process. Trigger for cleaning the car could be your spouse’s not stop shouting. The process activities that you need to engage to achieve a clean car are – position car, connect pump to a water source, rinse, shampoo, rinse and dry. I counted 6 activiites, rather it’s 6 coordinated activiities that are needed to achieve a clean car. You cannot do any of the activities out of sequence. This is a process. You have an input, an output and some activities in between. You can add a feedback mechanism, which could your spouse to give you a rating between 1 and 5, and let you know where the dirt is still visible. You can take this input and improve your car cleaning efficiency the next time around. This is the beauty of a process in action.

In the above example, the water pump spits out water. Yes, that is all it does. Does not matter whether you are rinsing the car the first time or the penultimate time. It’s action is specific. Throw out water at a specific rate. This water pump is an illustration of a function.

Functions are leveraged inside processes for effectiveness and efficiency. They do work very closely indeed. In this case, a function called water pump nicely fitted into the process of cleaning a car.

In ITIL V3, there are 26 processes and 4 functions that are spread across 5 lifecycle phases.

ITIL V3 comes compartmentalized as five phases, each phase is a book, 5 books in total.

Service strategy is the first phase of ITIL V3. It deals with the business end of service management – strategizing which service to offer to customers and opting for services depends on the market space, the ROI and the customer demand for the service.

Once the board of directors decide to introduce a new service, technical people need to burn the midnight oil to give flesh and bones to mere ideas. This is covered in the service design lifecycle.

Post design, it needs to be launched for customers to start leveraging on the service. Service transition looks into it.

Service operation lifecycle manages the maintenance of a service. For example, for your cell phone service to be operational at all times, there are a number of activities running in the background to ensure that it doesn’t fall apart.

Last, but definitely not the least important. Continual service improvement ensures that the service does not stagnate but improves on a regular basis. Remember the verse from the bible – if you are not growing, you are dying. It applies here and everywhere else as well.

This is ITIL 101. ITIL starts, lives, breathes, swims and eats service for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Service is everything in ITIL. For somebody getting into ITIL, understanding service is critical to make any further progress. If you don’t get the understanding of a service right, your ride through ITIL will get murkier by the second.

You will find that reading the official literature may not be very helpful in ITIL, well this is a common case in every field of study but more so in ITIL. I will prove it. ITIL definition of a service goes something like this - A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

Going by the definition, one can derive that customers are getting some value add, something they would like to possess, and they don’t have to bear the costs, and it seems that somebody else would own the risks for providing the value add. Huh!

This is one complicated definition and confusing too, and my mock interpretation is not what they are trying to convey. All this said, if you are appearing for the foundation exam of ITIL, you need to know this definition from memory. On the exam, definitions appear in verbatim, and you are required to choose the right answer from 4 possible choices.

I love to explain concepts with examples and analogies. Here’s the first one to explain a service. After the example, I will interpret the official definition the way they actually meant it.

We all use cell phones, and a cell phone service provider enables us to make calls from anywhere in the country. The ability to call people from the comfort of our choice of location is a service. In this context, you can call it a cell phone service. Here’s a non IT example. I have seen that people generally grasp theories faster through examples that they deal with day to day, and preferably non IT. Coming back to the example, we get our cars washed at certain outlets. The service these outlets are providing us is the car washing service. The input is a dirty car, and the output is a clean car.

A service is always represented from the customer’s perspective and not from the service provider. Going back to our cell phone example. To set up a cell phone service, the service provider will have to run network infrastructure in the background, certain applications for communication and routing, and he would need to setup towers to ensure you receive the service wherever you go. The service provider may as well call the enabling pieces as a network service, application service and a tower service to set up your cell phone service. But, what matters for a service to be called a service is the way a customer sees it. A customer does not see the towers, applications nor the topography used. He sees it in the form of making calls. Making calls is a service, and ITIL concurs.

Let’s try to understand the definition of a service. A service in ITIL is defined as a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. The value for the customer is the ability to make calls, and this is definitely what the customer wants – referred in the defintion as facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve. Now the sticking point. Customers don’t own the costs? Is it free? I haven’t seen any cell phone provider offer free service. Something is wrong! Something is definitely wrong, it’s the interpretation. The customer does not have to bear the costs for what makes a service – read it as for the networks, applications and towers. Customer is charged at some rate for the service he leverages – say $39.99 for 800 minutes in a month. All the back end charges get absorbed for the service provider through this costing, but the customer sees it through the service he is obtaining – once again service from customer perspective.

Now the last part which doesn’t make much sense. Risks. There are risks associated with any service. The application might crash, a tornado could bring down towers. The risks associated with the service is owned by the service provider alone. It does not get passed onto the customer. Hey, two of my towers got ripped off last night, why don’t you pay up $150 for the repair costs… Nope. Risks associated with a service is borne by the service provider.

Now, after reading my mini sermon on service, I am quite sure that you are nodding at the ITIL official definition of a service. Comment below if you still have some questions lurking around your mind.

I am probably certain a future headline will read something like this – men are the reason for growing population. I will not be surprised when I read such a piece as there are several similar stories that are breaking out recently. The latest is on the biggest social community host – Facebook. The crime statement reads something like this – Facebook is the leading reason behind divorces in 2011.

The survey conducted by a law firm called Divorce-Online said that a third of the 5000 behavior based divorce petitions filed in 2011 is linked to Facebook – mainly as evidence.

Apparently, the messages exchanged between spouses and third wheels are cited as evidence in the court of law. There are some cases where drinking issues are brought to fore through the statuses dropped on Facebook – going out to be sloshed.

I am surprised that such connections are made, and a harmless friendly neighborhood called the Facebook is made to look like a crook, not by an editor of a daily called Jameson but by an online law firm which is taking a small sample, which is perhaps not diversified across continents.

Why not the reason for divorces something like – cheating husbands, wives habitually sleeping with other women in the neighborhood, abusive spouses, and something and anything on such lines.

One might get evidences from Facebook, but that is not the root cause. A husband who finds it fun to share his bed with whoever it is, must cover his tracks. If he lets something loose on Facebook, he might have done the same in public or shared his adventures with all his acquaintances. To point out Facebook as  a major reason is a game played by the law firm to get a bigger market pie.

Many are getting to know each other, in marriage or maybe affairs as well – thanks to Facebook. Lost friends are finding each other and people share sentiments and things close to their hearts with their loved ones who live across the globe – once again thanks to Facebook. The positives eat away the negatives even before they are in sight. Law firms just don’t find it apt to highlight the positives, huh!

Dale Carnegie in his book – How to Win Friends and Influence People said people like to feel important. Fifty five years after his death, IT companies in India are indeed becoming believers.

Some common designations in company hierarchies include project manager, team lead, software developer and so on. This according to me satisfies the safety layer in the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but the ones above that – belonging and esteem needs something else.

IT companies are playing game to the employees’ needs by assigning quirky designations that not only indicates what the person is in charge of, but retaining the talent within the office premises as well.

Here are some unusual designations – chief fun officer, cost kill analyst, first impression officer, chief happiness officer, chief blogging officer and many more that I find hard to keep note of.

So, if you are a chief happiness officer, your main objective is to ensure that employees are happy. There is a budget given to you, but wait, the cost kill analyst who is in charge of shredding the redundancies will keep a tab on what is given to you. With the budget you have in your kitty, you need to keep employees happy.

Your appraisals will not be done like the rest of world, but through employee satisfaction surveys. And, some KPIs for you would include measuring the happiness index, and the index achieved vs cost spent and so on.

It surely sounds fun, listing the roles and responsibilities of fun designations but what about the person himself. Is he happy? If he does a good job, will he be promoted to some other role which has something to do with fun. Nah!

This is where the buck stops and fun goes draining down the whirlpool. These designations make sense if they are temporary and additional to what one does for a living. Fun designation by itself is like an airplane which can never land in its lifetime.

Does it work?

I think it does to a certain extent. People get bored easily. So, keeping this role active during some dull times of the year makes better practical sense than clinging onto it forever.

It need not always be a designation which is out of the box. Maybe something that is meaningful as well. A security guard in an office I know is designated operations manager as he is coordinating certain admin activities daily. This designation not only makes him feel important, but takes out monotony of being associated with security.

Whenever I have discussed this topic in small forums, I find people speaking for and against; mostly against. I guess the world is getting serious for the fun we have left to enjoy. Where do you stand?

Apple made history by launching a new iPhone in its fall music event, which is totally unheard of off late. Generally iPhones are released in their Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) which is held in June.

The new phone is not the iPhone 5 with a much larger screen and super dyno-mechanisms. Instead, Apple have extended iPhone 4 to the next level – 4S.

iPhone 4S’ hardware is same as iPad 2 – A5 dual core processor and  is comes with a dual-core graphics card. Performance is touted to be 7 times faster than its predecessor. However, the retina display still clings onto it – unlike the state of the art super AMOLED which Samsung carries.

The new phone is touted as a ‘World Phone’ which can carry both CDMA and GSM networks. The camera finds an upgrade with 8 MP with backside illuminated CMOS sensor that can potentially provide 73 percent more light.

Battery life which was the bane of Apple iPhones all these years finds something to cheer about. The new one can last for 8 hours of 3G talk time, 6 hours of browsing, 9 hours for WiFi, 10 hours of video, and 40 hours of music.

The prices are competitive as well. 16GB is available at $199, 32GB at $299, and 64GB/$399. Both black and white colors are available.

CEO Tim Cook took the centrestage for the first time, replacing the legendary Steve Jobs during the launch event. Many Apple enthusiasts had expected Steve to make a grand entry, but didn’t look disappointed when Cook presided.

One of the key processes in ITIL V3 is IT Information Security. This process is a part of Service Design phase. A technique used in countering basic hacks is the repressive/repression technique.

When a certain action is performed incorrectly multiple times, the system supporting the action represses it, thereby preventing potential hack.

I know whatever I stated above went right over your head. When I state it with an example, the aaah moment will follow.

Everybody I know who has an email account, has a gmail one. On the login page, when you enter wrong passwords multiple times, first a captcha phrase pops in – to test if the user keying the password is not a bot. Next, the account gets locked out, and the unlock process identifies the right owner through the registered cell phone number.

I am interested in the locking process rather than unlocking.

When wrong passwords are keyed in a number of times, to protect against a possible hack, the account getting locked is a repressive action. It ensures that the potential damage is minimized by repressing the threat.

In the gmail example, repression technique is two-fold. First is to check whether a script is trying to gain access by trying a number of permutations and combinations. Second control – locking the account is the second tier control which can protect against a person trying to gain access by manually trying out different passwords.

Generally financial institutions use the repression technique to protect against fraud. I have seen that a number of banks give three or five tries before locking the account.

If you have further questions on the repression concept in ITIL V3, comment below. Other techniques include detection, prevention and correction. I will pick the remaining in the near future.

Most companies follow the pyramid structure, where lower paid resources are hired in huge numbers forming the base of the pyramid, and further up the pyramid, people who are paid better make the cut. This is logical and practical given that people who actually do the job are in the lower rung, and are not paid as well. At the same time, people who manage are not needed in big numbers, and their management skills are a specialty that commands a higher pricing.

What sets people apart in any organization (in truly professional sense) is the capability, salary and the position in the company. Well, is it these things only that segregate people of different levels? Let’s discuss.

People in the higher ranks have some amenities added in their overall benefit plan. Some examples could be that the company would bear the cost of cell phone bills, internet charges, and chauffeur salary amongst many other imaginative ones.

There is some thinking that goes behind these perks. Managers are not 9-5 resources. They are expected to take and make phone calls on the go, reply to important e-mails over the weekend and work with least redundancy.

The amenities that I listed above are in a way supporting their expected style of work, and although it may look like a perk, the company is ensuring that availability of their top dogs are exploited well enough.

I am OK with managers being offered these as there is some thought that has gone into the decision. But does it end at some petty chewies?

The answer is a big NO. There is more to it than it meets the eye.

The unjustified differences begin to emerge when you start reading between the lines.

Let’s review the travel policy that companies generally stick to.

People in a company who do the actual work (read developers, programmers, analysts etc) are asked to travel in economy class, and those who ensure things are going as they should (managers) are upgraded onto business class. Why?

Probably the thinking is that people who manage have a tougher and arduous task at hand (at work), and hence much more valuable to the organization. So, they need to be comfortable at all times, and the lower rung of the ladder that come in big numbers are disposable units.

Putting different levels of employees into different classes on an airline is unjustified, and promotes inequality in an organization which can give birth to other negative factors such as distrust between employees who are at different grades, envy, jealousy, hatred, anger (at the system), and a lot more offshoots.

How can this be prevented?

Simple. Treat all employees equally. People may be in different stages of hierarchy in an organization mostly due to respective experiences, and flying them in different classes is not the way to go forward. Salary and hierarchical positions are already setting them apart, why broaden the gap further more?

I know that most companies around the globe follow the inequality structure, especially while booking flight tickets, but one company that is heading against the wave is Cisco. The Californian major believes what I have been supporting all along – employees are to be treated equally, and all employees, despite their levels will travel economy class. Amazing! No wonder it is a company that harbors love coming from within the organization is one of the top companies that most want to get into.

Other companies must note this for the betterment of their own. The point I make can also be a path for cutbacks.

I can probably write a thesis listing down all other areas of such segregation, but I won’t. My aim in writing this article is to showcase how companies treat employees who are at different levels, and probably influence them to stop this heretical practice which will bring them down crashing into the abyss.

What about you and the organization you work for? How do they treat you? I am sure you have a tale to share.