Business Ideas

Check Your Nannies First!

In this day and age the world is made up of so many bad people that pretend to be good. And we do not want them to be in our households with our families most especially our children. While we should only think that best among people it is still extremely important to check on individuals that have will access to our families especially if we are planning to get a baby sitter or a nanny. Conducting a background check on your child’s nanny or babysitter is almost a given in today’s society. Here is a list of some of the checks you might want to consider.

Criminal Record
Ask your nanny for current and any previous addresses as well as their date of birth and social security number. From there you may want to hire a firm to conduct the check. They will be able to provide a social security trace that should list previous addresses you can cross check. Remember don’t just check the current county and city they live in. Check all adjacent counties as well.

Reference Check
This can be one of the most useful tools in determining someone’s character. Although you have to ask the right questions in the correct fashion. Don’t just ask for friends and relatives get previous employers as well. When interviewing references remember to ask if they are aware of any other places the individual has worked. These are known as developed references and they can be invaluable if the subject has left out any information. Call the references and tell them that your discussion is confidential to encourage them to be completely honest in their comments. Explain to them the importance of the position as it involves working with children.

Driving Record
If your nanny or babysitter will be transporting your children in a vehicle this is a very good idea to check. This may also reveal any type of erratic behavior such as DUIs.
Last but not least don’t be afraid to ask questions. This person will be spending quite a bit of time with your children and loved ones. It is important that you feel comfortable with your decision.

Even when background checks turn out perfect you may not have the perfect nanny or baby sitter. If the person makes you uncomfortable or upsets your children follow your gut instinct. Pay attention to detail when interviewing your child’s new caretaker. If something doesn’t seem right then do not get that person.

About the writer:  Cecile Artates is a technophile who is interested in anything and everything new in the world of gadgets communications and the Internet.Visit my site free background checks

Challenges To The Core Banking Solutions Implementation Projects – Part 2

This is a sequel to my previous entry titled “Challenges to the Core Banking Solutions Implementation Projects 1.”

Continuing on the problems faced in core banking solution implementation projects let us look at some other problems.

Lack of IT Resources with Banks
Usually the core banking solution vendors claim to offer lower overheads advanced technology lower maintenance costs etc. After all such claims win the clients and especially their finance people as they see IT as a big cost center instead of a strategic asset. Vendors are also aware of the fact that the banks will calculate a minimum of five years total cost of ownership TCO before they make any decision about a vendor and its solution. If the system requires a large number of IT resources it will reflect negatively in the TCO spreadsheet. They thus would not recommend the banks to hire the adequate sized IT team. Even if they are forthright about it the banks may not take the suggestion that seriously and try to bargain this number. Also banks are not that big on IT and the trends in software such as Agile Methodology and other object oriented frameworks. They thus cannot or find it hard to appreciate the roles of user experience documentation quality control and quality assurance engineers. Ironic isn’t it? During negotiations with the application vendors the same bank managers vouch to create their own IT team to manage the solution during and after implementation. They ask the vendors to train their teams on the technology and features so that the bank could reduce dependence on the external vendor. Yet they do not hire enough people.

In my experience I haven’t even heard about a single bank going for ISO 9001:2000 compliance. But don’t be misaken here: a number of banks are very active on IT security and service delivery. While this is a good trend that shows that the IT managers of the banks are waking up to the security threats and service delivery they are not aware of the software development advancements.

Lack of Experienced Project Managers
A bank changes its core banking system once in decades. Same goe s for any other IT solution that a bank purchses such as credits risk management middleware and the likes. Also such projects are so large that it is difficult to find project managers from the market with experience of similar sized projects. The project manager is expected to provide insight skill communication and foresight to steer the project in the right direction. While a project manager can bring skill and communication if he/she is not from the banking arena the foresight risk management and insight will be missing. A newly inducted project manager will also face issues in taking control of the things because he/she is a new entrant.

Missing Comprehensive Training Programs
This problem hits the implementers and the banks both and equally hard. The way banks and implementers lose their IT manpower there is almost always a dire need of hiring people “yesterday.” New bugs are being pointed out unused or untested features are brought to operations requirements are evolving and new faces are being introduced in the team as older ones are leaving or have left already. Continuous trainings of fresh employees must take high priority in such cases. We have seen that this doesn’t happen. Batches are trained no doubt but not in the way they should be. Application vendors and implementers are too stretched to move their consultants from clients to training labs. With banks pressing hard upon delivery and expanding their featureset at the same time and the implementing engineers/consultants taking other opportunities the implementation managers do not do what they must: training training and more training.

No QC
I haven’t seen many banks with QA people honestly. And even those who have QA personnel have up to two people. How can two people possibly do a quality check of the whole banking system? Furthermore it is highly likely that QC people are picked up from the general IT industry which means that they may not have the experience of the banking environment and applications. They may not know or understand fully the requirements of a user. Also it is possible that the QC personnel are hired after the requirements analysis is complete. By that time it is too late. I am not contending the human ability to learn and act; the QC engineers can still pick things up but that is only a subset of what they should and in a very short time span. Ultimately you would see QC people checking the application for crashes and interface related errors mostly.

No Stress or Automated Testing
A banking application is supposed to take a large number of users. Add to it the users of Internet Banking and you see a dramatic number within the usual eight business hours. Since the applications are built with older or proprietary technologies the choice of tools to stress and load test the applications is very slim. If the application has a web interface or if it is developed using Oracle Developer then you have a few options. But because of the tough timeline and no time for testing load testing also stays under the radar. Realizing late in the process banks find it convenient to purchase more hardware horsepower. There is hardly any calculation behind the assessment of the required hardware resources. Thus the limits of the available hardware are never assessed. Also not using an automated tool makes the users and QC personnel test each newly developed or fixed feature. And when an update/fix/patch is received from the application vendor people have to test everything again. This is a huge investment of time and resources which is avoidable by using an automated testing tool.

For web application we have used IBM Rational Performance Tester Rational Functional Tester and WebLoad. Creating scripts requires some programming as well.

To be concluded…

This blog is also available at http://www.sapphireconsultingservices.com/scsblog/blogs and at http://imranadeel.wordpress.com

About the writer:  I am currently a Director of Impact Executives which is a Global Interim Management provider part of the Harvey Nash Group and in this role I am at the frontline of dealing with senior clients and candidates across a wide range of change HR and resourcing issues. I have extensive commercial experience gained through general management and board roles within both Plc’s and also through running my own businesses. I have over 18 years international experience of providing crossfunctional resourcing solutions to both global businesses and startups. I specialise in the following sectors: Technology Media Telecommunications Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Local Authorities. Visit my blog at http://www.impactexecutives.com/journal/clivesexton or the Impact Executives website at www.impactexecutives.com.

Cell Phone Number Look Up Is Now Possible On The Internet!

We have a lot of resources where we can search for phone numbers the easier way where we could also gain access to the owners phone number. You can browse through volumes of printed white pages or yellow pages and look for the alphabetical listings of names of phone number owners. For business listings you check out the category of the business first and then the name of the company in yellow pages. It seemed easy to check out these phone numbers on those sources. How about cell phone number listings?

Cellular phones are in popular use nowadays and one of the problems attached to this is the nonavailability of directories for cell phone numbers. Cell phone numbers are intended to be more private than any other kinds of phone numbers that is why they are usually considered as unlisted numbers. On the Internet you can use white and yellow pages in a more convenient and faster way. Just by typing the name of the person most importantly the surname and the database will browse its contents and give you specific results matching your surname search.

Free services of online white pages and yellow pages may provide you with the personal information and contact details that you need but the problem is that the content of their database is just limited. You can be lucky if you will find the person you have been searching in free phone searchservices. These free sites only handle listings limited to landline numbers and not cell phone numbers that is why searching using cell phone numbers is impossible in these sites.

Dont lose hope about your cell phone number search because there are tools on the Internet where you can actually find database for cell phone numbers. This amazing service is called cell phone number look up. These cell phone number look up services are easy to use. You just have to enter the cell phone number of the person and you will be provided with the results. Cell phone number look up services are found in premium white or yellow pages sites. Just by paying an affordable amount you can possible search for any cell phone number through a cell phone number look up service!

For more information visit: People Finder

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Ashley Beyle

A writer for Reverse Phone Lookup and Cell phone lookup

For almost 3 years