When you come to us for training in PRINCE2, or to learn how to use Microsoft Project, we'll teach you about using Gantt charts to plan and track the progress of your project.

But what do we know about where they came from? Here’s a little bit about Henry Gantt, the brains behind the Gantt Chart.

Henry Laurence Gantt

Henry Gantt was born in 1861 in Maryland, USA. He died in 1919 and developed the management tool that is the Gantt chart just after the turn of the century. He was educated at the Stevens Institute of Technology and became a mechanical engineer.

Gantt soon became known for his passion for economy/efficiency and for his sense of social responsibility. He was an advocate for the social responsibility of businesses and of applying scientific analysis to improve efficiency in industry. While he was a technician, he always strove to develop the most economical methods of production, and achieved a job role of “efficiency expert” at a textile plant in 1904.

What Is Negative SEO?

In simple terms, negative SEO is any act performed to harm a competitor. In this case I'm going to look at links as that's the biggest talking point and easiest to spot, but if you want to scare yourself then I recommend reading Kristine Schachinger's hair raising post on Extreme Negative SEO.

The act of building bulk backlinks to your site with exact match anchor text used to be a great idea. It resulted in higher ranking and was relatively easy to do. However, since the search engines have started cracking down on this hard, it's become a very bad thing for your site - just the sort of thing that can get your site penalised or even delisted by Google.

This is a move that promotes quality - that's great! But what if you're not the one building links to your site? What if a rival decides to turn their mass link building schemes on your site instead of theirs?

Shaun is one of our lead Management trainers. He regularly runs our Management Skills, Leadership and Train the Trainer courses. In this blog post he draws on content from his Facilitation Skills course. If you want to know more about this topic then why not give us a call on 01273 622272? We will do our best to find you the most suitable course. 

The word "facilitate" doesn't mean to lead, control, or direct. Facilitate simply means to make easier. In a practical sense, the job of a facilitator is to help create a space that is comfortable and productive for a group of people. Facilitating is like adding oil to a car. Facilitators make meetings, discussions, and events of all sorts run smoothly.

Here are some tips on facilitating:

Setting the Tone

The opening stage of any session is a good time for setting the tone and establishing group norms. Facilitators are carefully watched for signs of behaviour that is appropriate or inappropriate, so lead by example and use this time to introduce and model appropriate types of behaviour.

Stay Neutral

You should avoid sharing a strong opinion; as a facilitator, if you want to say something, call on yourself in turn, but make sure you don't use your role to dominate the discussion. Furthermore, you should not allow people with race, class, gender, or other subtle or non-subtle privilege to dominate a meeting. As a facilitator, you should encourage everyone to participate while moving the meeting along to meet time and agenda limits.

Some people say otherwise, but a wedding *is* a project. It has a set purpose and the project has an end date. It has a project team, project manager and most certainly has a budget. Certain milestones must be achieved at certain times in order for the goal to be reached. Later goals depend on achieving earlier ones.

So, you could be a PM professional with a wedding to plan; or you might have found us because you are a bride-to-be looking for structure to tackle this massive task. You could take our 1-day Project Management course, or even our PRINCE2 qualifications to really know how to manage your wedding! Following on from our popular Project Manage Your Life, here’s our simple guide to project managing a wedding:

Benefits Criteria

The first thing to do is identify the benefits criteria that will define project success. These can be such things as:

• Everyone being where they should be at the right times
• Happy guests
• No family conflict (yes, it’s a factor)
• (For the bride), feeling beautiful
• Having a stress-less wedding planning experience
• Choosing wedding suppliers you can trust to deliver

Risk Assessments are required for businesses as under UK law, but small and medium businesses often struggle to assign responsibility for the task or are unaware of what a risk assessment actually involves!

We launched our Risk& Assessment course (the only one in the UK accredited by IOSH!) to plug the knowledge gap but we've decided to go one step further by producing a Risk Assessment template.

You can download the template as a Word doc or PDF, and then edit it with your company information. We will run through each item on the document in this post but we do highly recommend training to make sure that you are completing and documenting your risk assessments to meet Government specification.

For a more comprehensive Health & Safety training, we also run a 4-day IOSH Managing Safely course. This workshop also covers risk assessment in more detail and will teach you how to manage health and safety in the workplace in a way that meets UK Health and Safety Regulations.

Risk Assessment Template

First, download the risk assessment template:

Risk Assessment Template.doc Risk Assessment Template.PDF

Obviously, you're going to want your own branding and your own introduction, so the first thing we recommend doing is changing the header to your business name and removing all the text above the table.

This would be an ideal place to write down your expectations of employees so that everyone is clear.

UPDATE JULY 2014: Google has now withdrawn authorship photos from SERPs. With this in mind it is unlikely that publisher info will start showing. We still recommend implementing authorship & publisher markup as results will still have a byline and your content will rank better for your Google+ connections.

Recently, while testing out some new titles and markup for our Photoshop courses using Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool, I was surprised to notice a new addition to the preview:

This will be a familiar sight to those who have marked up their blogs with rel=author already, which we highly recommend. Author info in SERPs is highly visible and many sites (big and small) are seeing a marked increase in click through since implementing author markup. Pages with author markup look similar in the testing tool but usually show the author info on the left of the result in SERPs:

As yet, I haven't found any example of Publisher information appearing in SERPs but if Google is showing it in Rich Snippets previews it can only be a matter of time before they go live.

Last year we wrote our SEO Glossary, which covered all the important terms you need to know when running an SEO campaign. In that glossary we mentioned that PPC (Pay Per Click) is "where digital advertisers pay for their web pages to appear in a prominent place on a SERP for targeted keywords. Advertisers pay every time a user clicks." 

Now that our Google AdWords course has been firmly established alongside our SEO training, we think it’s time to provide a glossary for Paid Search as well! After all, studies show that clicks on Google Ads are nearly double organic clicks for searches with high commercial intent (this post on Search Engine Land has more to explain the significance of this).

Glossary of AdWords Terms

A/B Testing

Once visitors have clicked on your Ad, A/B testing means taking them to different versions of your landing page to see how their behaviour differs.

We are pleased to announce the addition of Risk Assessment Training to our Health & Safety training options. It's our second IOSH accredited course, joining our highly popular IOSH Managing Safely training course.

The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) is the only Chartered body for health and safety professionals in the world, and currently, we are the only organisation to offer an IOSH accredited Risk Assessment course!

At the end of our 1-day IOSH Introduction to Risk Assessment training course, you will be able to carry out effective, comprehensive risk assessments that meet industry standards. You will also take a short practical test at the end of the day resulting in an IOSH Risk Assessment certificate.

IOSH Risk Assessment Course Dates

The first available dates for our brand new Risk Assessment course are:

• 3rd October 2012
• 10th December 2012

If those dates aren't suitable for you then it is also possible to arrange a private session either at your premises or at our training centre in Brighton. Please call us on 01273 622272 for a tailored quote.