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Yammer is the social networking site aimed at businesses. It was designed to be a company’s internal communications tool. It brings all of a company’s employees inside of an internal social network so that they may collaborate and communicate in an effective way. It reduces the need for meetings, increases communication across silos, surfaces pockets of expertise and connects remote workers.

Some of Yammer’s tools include Enterprise Microblogging, Direct Messaging, Files, Links, and Images upload, Groups, Communities, Profiles, Company Directory, Knowledge Base, third party applications and mobile connectivity.

In an effort to grow and compete with other enterprise networking sites like salesforce.com, Yammer has recently earned significant funding that it plans to use it to triple its marketing efforts and increase its global presence in the marketplace. Yammer is also working on increasing users by making its application available in more languages.

They have recently made the application available in Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Yet they also plan to add additional languages each week with the help of a professional translation firm as well as its own Translations application.

The app makes use of crowdsourcing as part of the translation process by allowing volunteers to submit translations and vote on existing ones. Ninety-four languages are currently available for user translation:

We have all heard of and have probably used MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and Orkut. But have you heard of Yammer?

“Yammer has a huge global opportunity,” said David Sacks, the company’s founder and CEO. “We believe that every company will want its own enterprise social network, no matter its size or industry, and that includes companies in countries that don’t speak English. Translating Yammer massively increases our market opportunity.”

By comparison, Salesforce.com is currently available in 16 languages, while other competitors such as Huddle and Jive come in less than ten.

Wanna volunteer? Check this out: http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2010/11/yammer-in-translation.html

Any project can entail various communication channels, the most common of them being personal meetings, email, documentation and phone calls.

Personal meetings are considered one of the most important communication means of a project; they are critical for the integration of team members and follow up of action items.

Meetings provide a greater level of commitment by establishing face to face communication, where speech, facial expressions, intonation and body language can be perceived more clearly. However, many people criticize the need for meetings and doubt their effectiveness. In fact, the way certain meetings are conducted sometimes gives you a strong feeling of time wasted.

Therefore, experts stress how important it is for organizer and participants to pay attention on how they drive or participate in meetings; they should attempt to not waste time so that the company or the project achieves the desired efficiency.

A successful meeting should have time tracking, leadership, adequate groups, goals and documentation. Moreover, in decision-making meetings, a well-defined purpose must be clearly informed to all participants.

Below are some recommended procedures for successful meetings for both leaders and participants. After all, it does no good to have a leader if he cannot hold the attention of participants.

Leader
– Plan
– Pre-establish the purpose of the meeting
– Invite the right people
– Explain the purpose of the meeting in advance
– Avoid sitting
– Keep track of time and the amount of information
– Create the meeting record and documentation

Participants
– Prepare for the meeting
– Arrive on time
– Focus
– Control your emotions
– Do not monopolize the conversation
– Do not interrupt the other participants
– Do not change the subject
– Never answer your cell phone during the meeting!

Watch in this video an example of bad behavior during a meeting:

Obviously, neither the meeting leader nor the participant made use of good meeting behavior. And do not try this at your office!

Employment of interpreters and translators is projected to increase 22 percent between 2008 and 2018, much faster than the average for all occupations, according to the Labor Department, says the U.S. News.

Interestingly enough, the demand is not only driven by increased world globalization but is all driven by the increasing number of non-English speakers in America. Being a native Southern Californian, I can tell you that every sign, form, informational pamphlet is already printed in English and Spanish there. As a matter of fact, I used to practice reading in Spanish while waiting in long lines at places like the Department of Motor Vehicles and such. So the concept of all information being bilingual is not surprising.

Areas of the most growth include anything related to Spanish as well as healthcare and law. Healthcare in general is growing so all services related to healthcare ranked high on the list. Other languages in demand include Chinese, Korean, and Japanese—as well as Arabic, Farsi, and indigenous African languages. So, too, are European languages like French, Italian and German.

The list is made up of the top 50 careers for 2011. U.S. News considered job-growth projections from the Labor Department, estimates for 2008 to 2018, the most recent data available. They narrowed it down to occupations that are expected to add jobs at an above-average rate over the next decade, as well as those that provide an above-average median income. It is also based on job-growth projections, salary data and other factors like job satisfaction.

Needless to say, we at Ccaps have already seen a growth in demand for translation and localization. We expect this to grow specifically in Brazil, one of the largest emerging economies today, and the various incoming sports events to be held in the country. You can see more about this growth at Cecilia’s blog post, The Growing Demand for Translators.

Happy translating, everyone!

If you realize that your project is going to be late, do not despair. Try to keep calm, after all you are not the first nor will you be the last project manager to miss a deadline. Anxiety will only make things worse.

Now that you have calmed down, the first thing to do is to analyze the situation. Do not do anything before this analysis; as the project progresses, things could get worse.

Ask for help. As a project manager, you can (and should!) ask for all the help you need. A good alternative is to ask for help from someone outside of the project, preferably someone higher in the hierarchy, such as a department manager or director who can help you assess the situation more clearly. Often times, an outsider tends to perceive minute details and might be able to detect some weak point that passed unnoticed by you or the project team.

Once the situation has been evaluated and all problems have been detected, you should create a new timeline and communicate it to the stakeholders. According to the PMBOK, project managers should spend 90% of their time communicating. Besides, negotiation is one of the main skills a project manager should have.

So this is the right time to start using that skill. This is the time to negotiate a new deadline with the client, but make sure the result of the negotiation is good for all parties. Remember that you will not have much chances to start a new negotiation, therefore, all aspects of the project that need to be renegotiated should enter the discussion right now.

Have a nice work day!

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