ECCI helps Globe Telecom in achieving External Assurance for its 2011 Sustainability Report

Globe telecom released its 2011 Sustainability Report on April 17, 2012 during its Annual Stockholders Meeting. With “Transformation” as the central theme of the report, it reflects the cultural and network transformation within the company – focused on providing excellent customer experience.

The report is based on GRI G3.1 Guidelines covering the Environment, Economic & Social aspects of its performance.

ECCInternational is the leading process consulting and training company in SE Asia when it comes to Corporate Sustainability & Governance (CSG). ECCI helped Globe Telecom in creating their 2011 Sustainability Report and achieving a B+ level of external assurance. This makes Globe Telecom the first telco company and one in few in Philippines to achieve external assurance for its Sustainability Report.

Globe Telecom has also achieved the distinction of being the first company in the country to have the external assurance done by an AA (Accountability) accredited third party assurance provider. The external assurance of the report was conducted by TUV Rheinland, one of the very few.

Globe Telecom has achieved external assurance for its 2011 report to further strengthen its credibility in the market, emphasize management’s commitment towards sustainability, and increase the level of confidence among its stakeholders.

With the increasing popularity of promoting sustainability, more and more organizations are leaning towards developing Sustainability Reports which give a holistic information on the financial, environmental, and social performance of a company. Meanwhile, external assurance helps protect the interest of stakeholders and provides a level of comfort to key decision makers, allowing them to know that the information they are using for their business decisions are reliable and comply in all material aspects with the relevant reporting frameworks. By taking the lead in this practice area, ECCI has helped companies in Philippines, Vietnam, China and India create their sustainability reports.

View Report or Learn More about ECCI’s CSG services

What’s the latest on Business Continuity Management?

ISO will very soon be releasing a new standard which will be replacing BS25999. ISO 22301 – “Societal Security – Business Continuity Systems” is standard in the area of societal security, aimed at increasing crisis management and business continuity capabilities, i.e. through improved technical, human, organizational, and functional interoperability as well as shared situational awareness, amongst all interested parties.

Organizations are now keen to compare ISO 22301 and BS 25999, especially those that have already achieved certification to BS 25999 or are considering certification. ISO 22301 contains all of the principles and processes present in BS 25999 and it seems unlikely that any additional significant requirements will be included in the final standard. This will be good news for many but there will be some changes as a result of the public commenting period. Significantly, both standards use a business continuity management system. The concept of using a management system framework for managing and continually improving the organisation’s policies, procedures and processes is relatively well known. (IRCA)

A Business Continuity Management system is designed to protect and recover business operations during the most challenging and unexpected circumstances. But what does continuity mean in the face of transitioning to a new standard? How will you prepare towards ISO 22301? Join APEX Global on April 27, 2012 as this new standard is released and know more about its components, similarities and differences compared to BS 25999. For more information and registration, you may call 632 403 8668 or email training@eccigroup.com.

APEX Global launches “iNugget”

APEX Global recently launched a new communication medium called iNugget. Short for Information Nugget, this free weekly email delivers information bites with the latest industry news and best practices.

iNuggetThe logo carries ECCI’s “i” delta triangle to signify the company’s continuing mission to promote organizational change and improvement. It is designed in APEX Global’s blue color with an image icon to symbolize learning for professional excellence.

iNugget brings knowledge in a convenient format from a wide array of sources for the readers to have solid and sound understanding of relevant business trends, concepts, and processes. Click here to sign up for the free weekly iNugget.

APEX Global is also offering free webinars to the APEX community of users. A webinar is a web-based seminar, presentation, lecture, or workshop which involves active participation between the audience and the presenter. The service allows real-time point-to-point as well as multicast communications from one sender to many receivers. It offers information of text-based messages, voice and video chat to be shared simultaneously, across geographically dispersed locations.

These webinars provide added value to the participants by being knowledge and networking portal. For the month of March, 2 webinars have been successfully organized on HR Certifications and eLearning. The next webinar on Strategies for Benchmarking Data Centers is scheduled on April 11, 2012. Click here for details and registration.

February 2012: Be Certain

Reblogged from Dice Media Center:

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There are very few certainties in tech contracting. It isn’t just another way of approaching a technology career. It’s more akin to starting a small business and that means taking risks, marketing, financial management and more.

One aspect of marketing that tech consultants appear to value is certifications. Forty percent of tech consultants said obtaining a certification helped them land a new gig, which is about 10 percentage points higher than their colleagues working in traditional roles.

Read more… 256 more words

Manage quality through both quality control and quality assurance techniques

By Tom Mochal

Managing quality on your project means that you must first understand the specific quality expectations of your customer and then put a proactive plan in place to meet those expectations. The “proactive plan” contains a number of elements — the most important of which are the quality control and quality assurance activities that need to be performed.

Quality control and quality assurance are important concepts, yet most project managers have only a vague understanding of the meanings and the differences between these terms. It’s actually pretty easy.

Quality Control refers to quality related activities associated with the creation of project deliverables. Quality control is used to verify that deliverables are of acceptable quality and that they are complete and correct. Examples of quality control activities include deliverable peer reviews and the testing process.

Quality Assurance refers to the process used to create the deliverables, and can be performed by a manager, client, or even a third-party reviewer. Examples of quality assurance include process checklists and project audits. If your project gets audited, for instance, an auditor might not be able to tell if the content of a specific deliverable is acceptable (quality control). However, the auditor should be able to tell if the deliverable seems acceptable based on the process used to create it (quality assurance). That’s why project auditors can perform a quality assurance review on your project, even if they do not know the specifics of what you are delivering. They don’t know your project, but they know what good processes look like.

Here’s an example to drive home the point. Let’s say a project manager asked the sponsor to approve the Business Requirements Report. If you were the sponsor, how would you validate that the business requirements seemed complete and correct?

One solution would be for you to actually review the document and the business requirements. If you did that, you would be performing a quality control activity, since your actions would be based on validating the deliverable itself.

However, let’s say the document was thirty pages long and that you (as the sponsor) did not have the expertise, the time, or the inclination to do a specific content review. In that case, you wouldn’t ask to review the document itself. Instead, you would ask the project manager to describe the process used to create the document. Let’s say you received the following reply.

Project manager – “I gathered eight of your major users in a facilitated session. After the meeting, I documented the requirements and asked the group for their feedback, modifications, etc. I then took these updated requirements to representatives from the Legal, Finance, Manufacturing and Purchasing groups and they added requirements that were needed to support company standards. We then had a meeting with the four managers in your area that are most impacted by this system. These managers added a few more requirements. I then asked your four managers to sign off on the requirements and you can see their signatures on the last page.”

If you were the sponsor, would you now feel comfortable to sign the requirements? If it were me, I would feel pretty comfortable.

That’s the difference. Quality control activities are focused on the deliverable itself. Quality assurance activities are focused on the process used to create the deliverable. They are both powerful techniques and both must be performed to ensure that the deliverables meet your customers quality requirements.

This article originally appeared on TechRepublic.

Oil, Food, Water: Is Everything Past Its Peak?

An unprecedented crisis faced America. Oil production was going to peak in just three to five years, resulting in foreign oil addiction and economic calamity. The scientist responsible for slapping the nation into consciousness implored industry and government to act: “The smug complacency that habitually blinds the American public must be torn,” wrote David White, chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. It was 1920.

More than 90 years later, tempers still flare over the prospect of global “peak oil.” Last week a commentary in the prestigious journal Nature argued, “oil’s tipping point has passed.” It’s the most recent high-profile salvo about whether, or how soon, the petroleum extraction that drives the global economy will reach a plateau and then, inevitably, decline.

“Peak” alarms going off aren’t unique to oil. There’s peak coal: Production could top out around 2025, according to the Energy Watch Group, an international group of legislators and scientists studying long-term trends. Peak food: The U.N.’s Food Price Index reached a new high in February 2011, exacerbating poverty in developing countries and creating potential for civil unrest. “Peak water” entered the popular lexicon in 2010, after two scientists classified threats to human use of rivers and underground aquifers, and to ecological stability. Peak coffee, peak chocolate, peak rare earth metals, peak travel have all followed suit. It’s “peak” season.

Two simple trends are driving these concerns. The world has more people than ever, and more of those people than ever are breaking out of abject poverty and competing in a global market for goods and resources.

The human population passed 7 billion last year, and the U.N. projects it will top 9.3 billion by 2050. Most of the growth is occurring in Asia, where the population is on track to balloon 40 percent, to 8 billion, by midcentury.

An even bigger human accomplishment, and cause for worry, is the rise of the middle class. It’s expected to nearly triple in the next two decades, to 4.9 billion people in 2030 from 1.8 billion today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. The Global Footprint Network, which developed a resource-accounting tool for countries, puts it this way: At current consumption rates, we’ll need two Earths by 2030.

That’s a lot of new consumers. It’s the reason Starbucks is extending its franchise to India, U.S. beef exports may rise 11 percent this year, and Kraft is spinning off its sleepy U.S. grocery business and focusing on Brazilian chocolate. And those reports are all from just last week.

The private sector’s reaction to these global trends and others — including climate change — has a name: sustainability. It’s the global race among nations and corporations for secure, long-term access to strategic resources and burgeoning markets. Companies are preparing for this race by probing deeper into their operations to find sources of value and risk that had eluded them before. It’s not about do-gooder business. It’s about smart business.

The concept of peak oil, or peak anything, is imperfect. New technologies and new discoveries have proven most estimates of the world’s limitations to be overly pessimistic. Unconventional petroleum products such as tar sands and shale gas products show that even if the extraction of conventional oil in its purest form has peaked, “peak cars” or “peak electricity” aren’t yet on the horizon. But as a framework for anticipating the world’s resource needs, peaks are a good way to survey the horizon.

This article is written by Eric Roston and originally appeared on Bloomberg.com.

ECCI Group forms partnership with Stratadigm to bring excellence for BFSI professionals

February 7, 2012 – As a knowledge-centric organization constantly looking at solutions that would address the needs in today’s dynamic market place, APEX Global, ECCI’s learning solutions arm signed a partnership agreement with Stratadigm for training courses for Banking and Financial Services Institutions.

Business process professionals and IT professionals working in the banking / financial services can gain a deeper understanding of various processes, products and services in the BFSI industry such as Corporate Banking, Consumer Banking, Consumer Mortgages, Foreign Exchange, Trade Finance, Global Financial Markets, Risk Management, etc.

With the combined market presence and capabilities of ECCI in the Philippines and Vietnam and Stratadigm’s expertise in the area of BFSI, this partnership hopes to bring corporate public and inhouse training programs for the Banking, Insurance, Business Process Outsourcing, Software companies with expertise in banking systems, and other related businesses. The partnership will bring about key accredited certification programs from The Financial Markets Association (ACIFOREX), Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI), National Stock Exchange of India (NSE), National Collateral Management Services Limited (NCMSL), and Professional Risk Managers’ International Association (PRMIA).

ECCI and Stratadigm will also work with educational institutions for the promotion and delivery of industry-readiness programs for students to better equip tomorrow’s professionals for the banking and financial services industry.