Professional practices in IT which IT professionals should know
Differences are necessary when dedicated and passionate employees work in an organization. Many times it has been observed that a project team when assigned a new job after their successful completion of the orientation program, find it very difficult to work together to accomplish their common task. Why this does happen? This happens when the team development is at “dissatisfaction” stage, where they figure out discrepancies between the tasks expected from them and how it is going to be done in reality.
According to our leadership assignment help experts, in such a scenario, it is required for the leaders to make use of their Emotional Intelligence (EI) and leadership management skills to develop trust, encourage everyone in the team, effectively communicating with employees who fail to perform, dealing with conflicting situations, give and receive criticism constructively, and infuse a sense of commitment.
Why have most of the projects never get a good start? The sole cause behind it is ad hoc, the absence of concrete solutions, haphazard, and incapability to find methods that can materialize ideas into workable plans. Here is what you need is strategic project management. This approach helps in formulating project flow and actionable that is based on significant questions which teams must thoughtfully answer to develop a robust and strategic foundation.
A leader has to efficiently look at the various sorts of conflict that are experienced by its team members and thus prepare a diligent plan to successfully resolve these issues and move forward enthusiastically. Below are mentioned four types of basic team conflicts with some helpful tips to get through them properly.
Conflict-Related to positions, views and strategies
When various strong, but differing, parties are arguing in the team and these series of arguments is not taking them into any conclusion, then a leader may intervene in between to stop the debate and ask each employee to put their views turn by turn and thus avoiding interruption. All the rest of the employees will only listen and understand the issue and ponder on its feasible solution.
In this case, the leader’s task is to ensure that everyone has got the opportunity to put their views in front of the team. When this exercise is done the leader should think about the concerns or milestones that members have in common. Once every little area is touched, the leader can proceed with any plans that have been shared in the discussion. Well often it has been observed that this way of dealing through conflicting situations gives a fresh and new focus and turns the scenario from conflict to resolution.
Moving ahead through Conflict Management
Conflict can be best described as the difference in views. The prime focus of a leader in case of team conflict is to understand the varying styles of conflict among team members. Once understood, he can use the ability of team members to build more effective workplace skills. In other words, conflicts prove to be beneficial to the team when managed successfully. Using effective negotiation skills, ethical behavior and practices, he should devise a plan for the team’s negotiations for resources that would lead to success.
Managing Teamwork and Challenges of Leadership
Issues related to gender in Leadership
Conflicts related to gender are very common in the workplace. Apart from gender, you can also see some people being culturally biased, all of which should be properly mediated. Sometimes gender becomes a challenge to open communication, responsibility sharing and cooperation. Once a leader sorts out this diversity, these issues can be lessened to increase comfort and output.
Lack of trust or communication
A team has a mix of different types of people. Some are calm and composed while others are dominating and loud. So if you have some people in your team who seems dominating the conversation, leaving others to feel as dropped out, a leader should hold the process and ask every member what do they expect from others to make them feel effective in the team and how others members can help them. In absence of open communication within the team results in poor performance, demotivation and anxiety among team members. This needs to be reduced.
Another popular professional practice in project management is to appoint a process observer whose would see the interaction among team members for a specified period of time. If the temper of any member is on the rise or communication is not smooth then process observer would make the remarks and hand over all the details to the leader. An outside person can give a very honest response about the behavior and interaction among the team members. You can come to know if this has been the prime factor behind the weak performance of your team. If this has been the case, then to resolve the underlying communication issues the leader will tell the observations to everyone in the meeting. This technique is very helpful in bringing a positive change in the team’s interaction. It is difficult to misbehave when you know that your behavior is influencing the entire team and productivity.
Managing Human Resources in IT, and Change Management
Human resource management (HRM) is a very important art and science of managing employees in any Australian IT organization. This is also thought of a procedure which adopts a very constructive, structured and thorough approach to managing employees in an organization. This is a vast field which covers the processes of recruiting people, retention of employees, deciding and managing their pay and perks, monitoring and managing performance, check any violation of company’s ethical policies, effectively managing the additions and deletions in the number of human resources and performing the exit formalities and ensuring the completion of assigned tasks to an employee when he decides to leave the organization. Amongst all the roles of human resource department, the first and foremost role is to manage employee relationships in the best way. This fact was verified by the human resource experts of ExpertAssignmentHelp.
Human Resource Management or HRM aims at valuing and building people at the workplace and for anyone seeking some help with human resource assignment help or leadership assignment help their task comprises of understanding the nuances of.
- Staffing and selection
- Effective and open communication with each and every employee of the organization
- Create better engagement among employees to maximize employee retention
- To enable them with various training programs to boost technical and soft skills of an employee
- To help them develop their leadership skills
Nothing is permanent here. Everything is experiencing change and so is a human resource in any organization. Change has always there and will continue to be observed in every organization. There is always an increase and decrease in the number of employees in an organization due to various reasons, but one needs to manage this change very effectively. How does this job to manage changes in the organization? Yes, it is the Human Resource Department. You can’t return to the good old days.
An employee has to keep working on his skills and to deliver in accordance with the increasing job expectation of the clients. The advancement of technology and over the demanding nature of the client has led them to a platform where they have to outperform their skills in order to retain their position in the organization. Accomplishing more jobs with fewer resources needs changes at various levels: –
- Redefining roles and responsibilities of employees,
- Making amendments to systems and
- Refining the level of customer service.
Employees are expected to make quick decisions and respond quickly within the deadlines to match up with the increasing demands of customers and to make the workplace more flexible than ever.
In this rapid change of work environment in Australia, change management skills hold large significance for those who have the vision to succeed. Irrespective of the job, one must learn how to deal with change and manage it effectively. It does not matter whether you welcome change or stay far from it for an enriching and fulfilling job, you should be equipped with the capabilities to manage and take charge of change.
Take some time off from your busy schedule and talk to your employees to know them better
Change management is the procedure of assisting employees and an organization to move from the present state to the desired state. When observing the goal of the change management processes in any Australian IT organizations, you will notice high amounts of reduction of the distraction that an organization experiences when it transits from the present state to the desired state.
These distractions can be the over-reaction or resistance of employees towards change, change in day-to-day priorities, changes in the vision of an organization that create an impact on the ambitions and goals of employees, and spending valuable time and resources on planning lower priority goals.
Change Management procedure makes use of methods, tools, skills and best professional practices in the IT Industry:
- Executive leadership and support
- Communication
- Employee Engagement
- Formulation of plans and effective analysis
- Development of support using sound preparation
Various types of Change to Manage
Some change initiatives are wide, concerning the whole organization while others are small, confined to department, employee and personal level. As a result, you must be sensing the requirement to address and manage these changes in the most appropriate way.
- Change in the organization’s mission or vision depending on the market trend.
- Changes in consumer’s expectations and needs based on the comparison between available competitor products.
- Changing needs of an employee with respect to generation difference, an amendment in employment regulations, competitor attractive policies, and the varying needs and expectations of an employee from his/her job.
- Change in the managerial committee with the appointment of a new board member as a result of which the priorities sometimes get changed due to the difference in opinions.
- In case of job promotion wherein one has to understand the working, roles and responsibilities of the new job.
This change management process can be as wide as the organization can involve each and every employee of the organization or limit it to a department, team or an employee. When a large number of people are involved in the process it would definitely require a large amount of time, resources, energy, and commitment. Thus, effective skills in change management assist an organization to navigate the journey smoothly and hassle-free.
IT systems Audit and Quality Assurance
Quality assurance (QA) and audits are completely two different areas that are fulfilling similar objective: enhancement in quality, regularity and authenticity in operations. Quality assurance is implemented in an industry through various operating policies and regulations.
Conducting an audit is comparatively much more specific than quality assurance Audits are used to carry out an investigation of a particular field of operation. Audits can be performed to figure out the reliability of operations in the diverse range of operations for example production, information technology, accounting, sales and marketing, human resources etc.
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance methods supervise the vast range of operations and checks outputs to figure out possibilities of failure and scope of improvement. This helps to ensure that the deliverable is consistent in quality and conforms to the industry standards. This is one of the many professional practices in IT Project Management. Some reputed companies know the importance of Quality Assurance and so either they dedicate a group of talented people to accomplish this job or appoint a quality assurance manager to assess the quality of output of simplex to complex programs.
In the Information Industry, Quality Assurance is a procedure that is formulated to get the management as well consumer into confidence that all of their products and services will be of superior quality to provide maximum customer satisfaction. If a firm invests a large amount of money in developing advanced software applications, then management needs to be reassured that their IT manpower will make the best use of their skills and available resources to render best of services in return.
In other words, companies should receive more than what they have invested. Consumers also get the all the features that they wish to get into their product on agreeable time and money. Management needs to have this confidence before investing huge capital and throughout the process of application development.
Depending upon the area of operation, Quality assurance can be accomplished through a well-defined series of steps. QA managers closely analyze the way a software is developed and checks its quality at all stages of SDLC (Software development life cycle) against a set of parameters. If Quality Assurance is done in an IT industry then it may begin with the random checking of resources, infrastructure, checking the performance of methods with different inputs, testing the quality of resultant software, capital invested and utilized in the development of software, does it fulfil the project objectives etc.
The following steps are performed as a part of Quality Assurance:
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Process assurance
In this step. the software development processes are checked to make sure they are well documented. This is achieved by way of reviewing projects and audits.
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Product assurance
As the name suggests, in this step the quality of the product is checked to ensure that the product is developed in compliance with the consumer’s requirements. This is achieved by way of verifying each product with its specification and validating the final output against the consumer’s requirements
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Quality system assurance
In this step quality management system audits to check whether the system conforms to Industry standards and best practices and in accordance as per ISO 90011 and other standards as mentioned in the contract.
Encourage implementation of best professional practices
What is Auditing
Audits are dealt with in all the areas where a company performs its operations. Different companies perform their audit in a different way. Some companies may choose to carry out their own internal audits to exercise complete control over the audit procedures, while others may choose to hire the services of a third-party auditor to perform investigation methods to uncover hidden issues which the company has overseen in their own investigations.
Quality Assurance Audits
Quality assurance audits can basically evaluate the performance of Quality Assurance processes. The fundamental job of Quality Assurance audits is to determine the effectiveness of a Quality Assurance process of finding and minimizing errors in the various phases of software development. Along with that, it offers feedback to enhance Quality Assurance efforts.
The work of Quality Assurance is not just limited to identifying and inspecting mistakes to generate quality performance metrics but also takes into consideration a comprehensive range of factors that are accomplished to result in a final product. It encompasses a series of strict and continuous review of factors like communication, integrity, reliability and teamwork, which finally results in a high-quality product and service.
Quality Assurance Advantages
Quality assurance supports this statement that faulty products are the result of faulty processes. So identification and improvement in the quality of the process will improve the quality of the product. Quality Assurance gives below-mentioned advantages to a company:
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Increase demand and craze among customers
By conducting efficient Quality Assurance programs an organization can give a proof of its quality to its consumers. For Ex: Products which conform to industry standards – ISO 9001 are high on demand and successful too among consumers
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Quick and easy identification and resolution of issues
Quality assurance helps in figuring out problem areas and areas which needs improvement before the development of the final product.
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Satisfaction for management and consumers
A sound and efficient quality assurance program gives an organization confidence that quality management rules are being followed diligently and the resultant product would be of the best quality.
Written and Oral communications in IT
Communication can be understood as spices, which are available in different types. Though is good to have a range of variety, one must know which type of spice to use and at what time it should be used to leave the best impression on your family and friends. At the same, there are various modes of communication used in IT firms such as non-verbal communication, written communication and interpersonal communication. It is very important to understand which mode is appropriate under which situation for making a successful career. Let us understand each of these modes of communication in detail:
Interpersonal Communication
This is the very significant and commonest forms of communication in any Industry. A manager interacts with team members on a regular basis is interpersonal communication. For a leader, proper communication is essential to effectively guide and manage their team members.
When talking in terms of management, interpersonal communication can be defined as communication between a group of employees, engaged in a face-to-face conversation where people exchange their views and opinions with each other. This type of communication involves people who share some sort of familiarity with each other and discloses information or project details to the one whom they feel known and not a stranger
This type of communication is open communication which breaks down the hindrances and obstacles which sometimes are being put for self-defense. It allows one to act vulnerable by putting themselves in front of others. Those managers who prefer such type of communication with their teammates shows how much they care for the organization and also for the team members. It is very important to take some time off from your busy schedule and talk to your employees to know them better.
Engaging in interpersonal communication with your team members is often adopted as standard professional practices in IT Industry. Implementing this approach make employees feel valued. Though every employee in your team wants to know about their leaders, you should give them some indication that you would also wish to know about them. Make the employee feel important and you will notice that the distances they feel within themselves diminishes. This will helps in the easy and smooth flow of information and better execution of jobs.
Elimination of gaps between employees and between employee and leader results in the strengthening of relationships, increased job satisfaction, better ambience and motivation in the workplace. Not only to the lower departments, but there should also be interpersonal communication with higher management too.
Nonverbal Communication
It is very interesting and surprising to know that most of the communication that we do with people is nonverbal communication – without words? Non- verbal communication can be described as any type of communication devoid of words like gestures, body language, facial expressions, actions, body language, physical appearance etc., which communicates a lot. There is a proverb “Action is louder than words”. So it is not what you say is important, but how you say it matters!! People in an organization give, receives and understands nonverbal communication in the same way as oral communication or written communication.
At times understanding the importance of nonverbal communication can be difficult for people in an organization. This type of communication is effortless and spontaneous just like you breathe without thinking about whether you should or you should not. Sometimes nonverbal communication can also lead to inconsistencies between oral and nonverbal communication. An intelligent manager understands it and maintains consistency between what they have spoken and their nonverbal communication.
Written Communication
Written communication is a type of communication wherein one person sends messages to another person in the form of writing. A manager does not have a whole day interacting with their subordinates or higher department via conducting face to face meetings, they also communicate with them through emails and voicemails. Some other ways they adopt for written communication is by writing memos, letters, and reports. Some of the benefits of written communication are as follows:
1) Quick and cost-effective
In this communication, a message can be sent quickly to others without any delay in terms of their geographical location, physical absence etc. This is a cost-effective solution compared to telephonic calls and commutation charges. This type of communication is very beneficial when one member has to send a message to a larger group of employees.
2) Effectiveness and preciseness
Written communication gives an employee with an opportunity to make changes in the message many times before sending it, whereas in other modes of communications one does not get take to make several reviews before outing their opinions across.
3) Ease
It gives the receiver to review the arrived messages at their convenience and ease.
With the lack of effective and open communication between lower and upper departments and within employees, not only the Industry suffers, but its impact reaches to every single employee in the organization. As managers are the medium for the exchange of information between top management and employees, a good manager knows the importance of communication and so keeps the communication open.
Planning IT Project Management
The perfect combination of planning, supervising, and controlling can help in timely completion of a project, within the agreed budget, and with the best quality output. This article will throw a light on some of the best professional practices to be inculcated in your work to see a drastic improvement in the productivity and efficiency of the project.
The sure shot way that your project objectives are met is by using effective project management methods and techniques. Below is the list which tells you the fundamental phases of managing your project and the necessary steps to implement for each the phase.
PLANNING PHASE
1: Prepare a project definition and plan your work accordingly
One of the common mistakes that are observed in IT projects in Australian organizations is that they try to amend the planning phase by emphasizing on straight away jumping into the project without thoughtful planning. It is very important to spend quality time on deciding the actual requirements, analyzing the goals, resources and execution of the project.
This will help in cutting down the cost, project duration and give you quality output throughout the lifespan of the project. A project definition is a document that encompasses all phases of the project from its planning to its maintenance. Once the customer and related stakeholders agrees on this document, it is treated as the reference point for the entire task to be carried out as suggested by project management experts of ExpertAssignmentHelp.
PROJECT WORK PLAN CREATION
2: Formulate a workable plan for your project
Once the project definition is prepared and agreed by the respective parties, you can start off with the project work plan. The work plan gives you instructions for developing the deliverables of the project at different stages, testing it against varying parameters and properly managing it. If there is any existing work plan for the project available, you can have a look at it or you can prepare a detailed one with the help of fragmenting your work in a structured way and using network diagram.
This work plan will take into consideration all the allocated resources, estimation of work and description of goals to the extent you find it achievable. The work plan will continue to be amended with the progress of the project.
PROCEDURE TO MANAGE YOUR PROJECT
3: Describe project management procedures at the starting of the project
The project management methods highlight the resources to be needed to manage the project effectively. It will also consider the manner in which these resources are utilized by the team, modification in project scope, accessing probable risk, level of quality, communication, compliance with prominent Industry standards etc.
It is beneficial to manage the project religiously, rigorously and with a proactive thinking. It will be icing on the cake if the team, customers and stakeholders share the same level of understanding on the way the project has to be managed.
4: Managing work plan and supervising its schedule and finances
Done with the above two steps successfully, we can now move to the execution phase. In this phase, you need to review the project work plan on a daily basis to keep a track of your progress in respect timeline and budget. Identify those activities that have already been accomplished and mark them completed in the work plan. Figure out if there are other activities that need to be performed apart from those already mentioned.
If so, then update the work plan by adding these activities. Once done, you must check whether the project activities will get completed within specified timeframe and budget, if not, then an urgent measure should be adopted to speed up the pace of the project in order to keep it on the right track.
5: Be alert about tentative risks and take proactive measures
Look for all possible indications that might become trouble for your project in later stages. Some of these indications according to various project management assignment samples can be:
- A Small or considerable gap in estimated time or finances that tends to get bigger with time
- Those tasks that you were expecting to get accomplished till now are still not over.
- A major drop in the enthusiasm and motivation of team members
- Productivity and the quality of output starts diminishing
- Steps for controlling and maintaining quality, testing and other key activities have taken a secondary position.
RISK MANAGEMENT
6: Analyze the severity of risks and take proactive action
With the progress of the project, the team should identify the probable risks of the above-mentioned types. For each possible risk, one should identify its overall impact on the project and take necessary preventive actions. High-risk events should be dealt with specific and strict measures to eliminate them completely so that it doesn’t happen again.
Medium risk events should be analyzed to check whether proactive actions can help to mitigate them. Low-risk events should be treated only as assumptions, whose chances of a positive outcome are comparatively more. One should resolve all the issues and risks that crop up in the system on a priority basis.
Following the above guidelines would help in efficient execution the project within the deadline, budget and will produce high-quality output.
Managing Software Testing
Almost all IT Industries adopt testing strategies and validating the software to assess its quality. Software Test Management can be understood as a method which organizes, monitor and manages the processes and data needed to perform testing. Many times it has been observed that the end users who utilize software come across several types of flaws in functionality. So it is better to adopt sophisticated testing measures at each phase of software development, to achieve the desired improvement in software quality.
Standard professional practices for managing software testing involve following test management activities such as:
Organization
This step organizes and maintains the data which needs to be tested, along with the other necessary things required to conduct the software testing like test scripts, test software and hardware. It enables project teams to track dependencies and build relationships among the various test assets.
Test Planning
This is the second step of test management, which constitute a series of tasks that deals with the basic questions like why, what, where, and when to test. Here the test data are broken down into various test cases for a software project. Where to test is resolved by determining the required software and hardware configurations. When to test is answered by associating the cycles to the testing.
Test Authoring
In this step, an elaborate plan describing how the software will be tested is developed. This plan consists of a series of well-defined steps which has to be implemented to accomplish a given test. Here abstract test cases are developed which is further refined to form manual or automated test scripts
Test Execution
Once the test scripts are formed, test execution can begin. This step comprises of performing the tests by combining the series of test scripts into a comprehensive suite of tests. Test data are then tested against the suite of test scripts at different iterations.
Report Generation
This step analyses the various results obtained as a result of software testing. After analysis, these test results are put together in the form of reports to determine the present status of project testing, and the degree of quality of the software achieved as a result of this testing procedure. The software that generates reports should be capable of generating reports in a wide range of format that makes it flexible for a variety of systems.
According to experts at ExpertAsignmentHelp one of the fundamental objectives of performing software testing is to assess and measure the quality of the software, but what means should one employ to measure quality? Though various methods exist to measure the quality of the software, all of them varies with the type of software/application.
Quality metrics must be a perfect solution to capture and store the test results to obtain completeness and accuracy. From the information obtained as a result of testing, metrics can be developed that clearly determines, measures, and track quality objectives for the software project.
Effective management of software testing involves storing the output of software testing in one centralized place like a common repository or database would ensure that their analysis and use become easier and quicker. This also saves one from the issues resulting from different versions of test results, i.e, test results with outdated information. Software test management must coordinate the testing effort of all project team members as one collective unit.
For software projects that are not just limited to one site or team requires proper site organization and efficient team coordination. It will be beneficial for team members (testing team and development teams) to view the efficiency of testing, overall progress, and make decisions on the basis of the efforts put to perform testing. Software testing produces “defects” which are used as a source for developing quality metrics. More effective testing will yield more effective quality metrics.
Let us see some other factors in software test management
Along with software and hardware test cases and resources, according to information security assignment help experts. The testing team has to be efficiently managed and coordinated. Management of software testing also needs controlling of user security and permissions for testing members. While all the phases of the software development lifecycle have a linking to testing, there are some of the phases that are highly critical to software testing, these are
- Requirements management
- Change management and
- Configuration management
All the tasks involved in performing and managing software testing take up a lot of time. It is better to use automated tools or partially automated tools that help to accomplish the job in less time. Though common tools like word processors and excel offers greater flexibility, specialized automation tools for testing brings more focus and time-saving advantages.
To enhance software quality of their software projects, one should use advance test management practices in place of old-custom, traditional and document-based processes. To overcome these problems it is advisable to begin test activities early and imperatively to focus laid on achieving objectives and the desired output. Encouraging the reuse of test cases, supplying remote testing resources, incorporating a flexible testing process, and automation tools will all help an IT Industry to overcome acute resource constraints.
Managing, protecting and systems integration
Importance of efficient management of the system
For every organization, it is very significant to effectively manage their systems. It is possible for important company information to get corrupted, loss or leaked anytime. Shrewd software programmers and hackers can easily penetrate into network security via deployment of viruses and other malicious programs which can harm confidential information or lead to sudden system failure or shutdown.
Besides this, the systems we use, including hardware, operating system software, and other programs that is being manufactured by us or from any other manufacturing company can contain serious defects or bugs that could interrupt the sound operation of the system. Due to such issues, your productivity would reduce, supplies will get delayed, loss of contract or potential clients that hamper your sales, production, distribution and other important aspects of a company. Thus, it becomes utmost necessary to manage, protect and integrate your system in a highly secure and robust way.
Incorporating standard professional practices is a prime focus for many organizations, to achieve better functioning of their system and increased level of productivity. System management becomes very essential when there are various systems to integrate, a vast range of business requirements to be fulfilled, and complicated issues (organizational and cultural) to be resolved.
The first and foremost factor that comes into design strategy for effective system management is that it should provide a tangible and visible outcome, by way of meeting fundamental requirement and goal of the business. A better system will always target the underlying and visible issues of an organization.
According to information security assignment help experts, successful management of system can only be achieved through strong leadership. Begin by creating a crystal clear vision of the value you expect from the implementation of system management strategy. This will help you define not just how systems work together to accomplish the goal but also the way an organization will function to deliver desired results.
The leader should focus on conducting detailed communication via meetings with its team members to ensure that every employee has the absolute understanding of the working of the system and the benefits it is going to deliver. Many times it has been observed that projects which are completely driven by gathering and deployment of advanced technological solutions lack the characteristics of leadership. To make your strategy effective, it is important to get involvement and support of stakeholders outside the IT zone.
There can be a variety of risks in managing your system, like choosing an ideal technology solution, crossing the pre-specified deadlines and budget, modification in business requirements, technical issues which happen mostly while integrating systems, etc., dealing with these risks effectively by spending smaller amounts in conducting small projects to figure out issues and potential solutions instead of investing large capital to start enterprise-wide deployments. Implement proper UDS (User Data and Settings) to ensure a reduction in costs, enhanced security, mobility, enhanced productivity, and business continuity.
With the efficient use of the features presented by the operating system such as redirected folders, quotas, roaming profiles, file screens, encryption, DFS namespace, backup management, firewalls, and offline files would greatly help you manage your system effectively.
Let us see some of the ways which, when incorporated would make your system highly secure:
- Document your local technical environment to give a clear understanding to the team
- Gather all the required resources and technological solutions to implement security on your system
- Use of fixes, supplied from vendor to repair security challenges
- Install and maintain anti-virus software. Regular scanning of computers to check security threat using anti-virus software and other technical tools
- Remove unnecessary programs and software
- Keep updating your anti-virus software definition to stay updated and prevent new security risk
- Use Encryption for your sensitive data using encryption software
- For systems and software which are less secure, you can implement security provisions for them
- Develop and follow robust procedures to create user accounts, user passwords and provide access to user accounts
- Provision for maintaining adequate system logs
- Provision for maintaining efficient system backups
- Protect your system from physical damage using accessories
- Develop provisions to restrict access to IT information on local network addresses
- If data is present on storage media, then using a security measure will remove data from those media
Thus protecting system containing critical data to ensure privacy and prevent identity theft is the final goal of all IT security measures.
Integration of system
System Integration merges various IT and business areas together as one single unit, mandate the execution templates, enables combining of a plan to assist in the complete execution with associated dependencies. Security experts at ExpertAssignmentHelp suggest below-mentioned tips for a successful system integration:
- Define responsibilities clearly among team members for the various activities to be accomplished as a part of system integration
- Develop naming conventions for units and activity types. It is of a large significance, particularly when moving backup servers.
- Many organizations use a specific tool for integration and other technical functions. It depends from organization to organization which tool they prefer. Most of the professionals understand Excel and are proficient in using it for various operations. IT project teams should work in close association to build an activity template along with a presentation layer to provide immediate effect and re-planning forecasts.
- Incorporate translation and refresh automation features that will speed up the planning activity, including a demonstration of real-time progress, updating the status of tasks etc.
Despite the best integration practices and technological solutions, possibilities of systems failure can occur. Effective failure planning should be done in advance to recover from such situations easily.
Ethics, Ethical Behavior and professional responsibility
Importance of ethical guidelines
The education and training curriculum of IT professionals is mainly focused on providing technical knowledge and expertise. It teaches you how to perform tasks, but not about ethical practices. Information about ethics, code of conduct and how rights can be misused and its consequences are missing in the course contents. Therefore, many times violation of the set rules and regulations happens due to ignorance too.
Ethics should be incorporated in each of our actions. The decisions we make in our day to day life raises ethical questions. In this article created by experts at ExpertAssignmentHelp, we will present to you some of the real issues of ethical dilemmas that are faced by company employees on a daily basis.
So what are ethical issues? Most of the ethical issues that are faced by IT professionals are related to privacy, according to human resource management assignment help experts. This becomes a huge professional responsibility of the organization to ensure the data has been accessed by an authorized personnel.
To accomplish this it is equally important for an organization to inculcate ethics in their employees to avoid any sort of deviation or violation from corporate policies and regulations. Leadership can help is the development of ethics in a particular organization. They have to guide their team members about ethical practices, inspire them to follow the ethical code of conduct, and also teach them the consequences when failing to follow the prescribed rules and regulations.
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PRIVACY
This is the most basic ethical issue in any Industry. IT security staff in companies many times have access to sensitive and confidential information about employees, companies, its networks and systems. This empowers them with massive power and rights. This power or rights when abused, either voluntarily or involuntarily can lead to irrecoverable loss and damage to both the company and its employees.
Almost all organizations make a record of the personal information of its employees at the time of their recruitment. This record, if not maintained properly can create negative implications for employees. Personal information includes previous and current salary details, background details, past work experience, family details and personal identification information, such as social security number and account identifiers.
One can access encrypted data with the help of the recovery agent account. All this information has to be safeguarded and accessed only by authorized personnel. Many times software systems are there that tracks such information, it is important to ensure the authenticity and reliability of such systems before using them. Organizations regularly exchange this information with other systems, merges databases to add onto or amend existing records.
Any employee when enters in a company should keep in mind that there is no such thing as “privacy”. The information contained in their folders, keys that have been typed, the site they have accessed, and what is currently going on their computer screen at every instant of time is getting accessed. The question here comes “Is this ethical to monitor each and every activity of an employee which falls outside of their job responsibilities?”
Managing Teamwork and Challenges of Leadership
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OWNERSHIP
Various organizations make their employees agree to NDAs (nondisclosure agreements) and other clauses in employment contracts. In these clauses, they mention that if an employee reveals the company’s sensitive information with other employers or employees and prevent them to join a certain company etc., then it goes against the ethics.
It has been seen people when leave organizations tend to disclose hidden secrets and documents, proprietary methods and technology, and other knowledge with other companies to give them a competitive advantage. Is it justified to use the knowledge gained at one company for the benefit of another company? In addition to this, being a software developer or a project manager, you must have access to the source code, strategic methods, procedural information and advanced tools you have used in your project.
You may have developed a project for your company, but is it right to claim any part of it? How ethical it is to take any code, design or test cases with you to use as a helpful resource in your future company or for starting own company?
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SECURITY
There are many cases in IT Industry wherein it has been observed that networks are breached, personal identification information is leaked, identities are misused and critical confidential official information, financial statistics, and trade secrets are stolen from the systems.
Industries generally have internal ethical policies to take stringent action against such security breaches, but many have not developed specific policies to address this urgency. Should the employees be allowed to read the private e-mail of their co-workers just because you have the right to do it? Well, one can exercise their right as a security measure only when they suspect that the company’s information is getting disclosed.
The question here is do companies disclose to the employee that their emails were getting recorded and was considered legal under company policy rules? How ethical it is to install keyloggers on systems or screen capture programs on the network in order to capture the activities of an employee? As a network administrator or a senior level person, one may have the legal right to supervise all that an employee does with its system. Here we are discussing how ethically you exercise your rights so that it does not go beyond official motive.
Consider a case when the information you were reading showed the company was involved in scandals and did violations of laws regulations or laws prescribed by the government? What should be an employee’s professional responsibility in such a case? Isn’t your moral obligation to bring it in front of everyone or you are bound to follow your company’s ethical policy that prevents you to take any action that destroys its reputation in public.
Summary
Unlike established institutions such as medicine, law, accounting etc. Most of the ethical issues that IT employee faces have not been given a regulatory form. Also, there is no standard mandatory national or state level association that has established a comprehensive code of ethics. Organizations can develop their own codes of ethics and professional conduct, to encourage implementation of best professional practices in the Industry.
