This book is a unique guide to making the world a better place. Experts apply a critical eye to the United Nations' Sustainable Development agenda, also known as the Global Goals, which will affect the flow of $2.5 trillion of development aid up until 2030. Renowned economists, led by Bjorn Lomborg, determine what pursuing different targets will cost and achieve in social, environmental and economic benefits. There are 169 targets, covering every area of international development – from health to education, sanitation to conflict. Together, these analyses make the case for prioritizing the most effective development investments. A panel of Nobel Laureate economists identify a set of 19 phenomenal development targets, and argue that this would achieve as much as quadrupling the global aid budget.
“Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the ‘stigma’ of ‘agile only works for small projects’ continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and a rallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell’s book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell’s book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development.” —Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management “There’s tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell’s observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he’s been there, done that, and has seen what’s worked.” —Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development. Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods. Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level. Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale. This book is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale.
Prioritizing Sustainability Education presents theory-to-practice essays and case studies by educators from six countries who elucidate dynamic approaches to sustainability education. Too often, students graduate with exploitative, consumer-driven orientations toward ecosystems and are unprepared to confront the urgent challenges presented by environmental degradation. Educators are prioritizing sustainability-oriented courses and programs that cultivate students’ knowledge, skills, and values and contextualize them within relational connections to local and global ecosystems. Little has yet been written, however, about the comprehensive sustainability education that educators are currently designing and implementing, often across or at the edges of disciplinary boundaries. The approaches described in this book expand beyond conventional emphases on developing students’ attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors by thinking and talking about ecosystems to additionally engaging students with ecosystems in sensory, affective, psychological, and cognitive dimensions, as well as imaginative, spiritual, or existential dimensions that guide environmental care and regeneration. This book supports educators and graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in the humanities, social sciences, environmental studies, environmental sciences, and professional programs in considering how to reorient their fields toward relational sustainability perspectives and practices.
A powerful look at the importance of a mother’s presence in the first years of life **Featured in The Wall Street Journal, and seen on Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, and CBS New York** In this important and empowering book, veteran psychoanalyst Erica Komisar explains why a mother's emotional and physical presence in her child's life--especially during the first three years--gives the child a greater chance of growing up emotionally healthy, happy, secure, and resilient. In other words, when it comes to connecting with your baby or toddler, more is more. Compassionate and balanced, and focusing on the emotional health of children and moms alike, this book shows parents how to give their little ones the best chance for developing into healthy and loving adults. Based on more than two decades of clinical work, established psychoanalytic theory, and the most cutting-edge neurobiological research on caregiving, attachment, and brain development, Being There explains: • How to establish emotional connection with a newborn or young child--regardless of whether you're able to work part-time or stay home • How to ease transitions to minimize stress for your baby or toddler • How to select and train quality childcare • What's true and false about widely held beliefs like "I'm not good with babies" and “I’ll make up for it when he’s older” • How to recognize and combat feelings of postpartum depression or boredom • Why three months of maternity leave is not long enough--and how parents can take control of their choices to provide for their family's emotional needs in the first three years Being a new mom isn’t easy. But with support, emotional awareness, and coping skills, it can be the most magical—and essential—work we’ll ever do.
In 2000, Jakob Nielsen, the world’s leading expert on Web usability, published a book that changed how people think about the Web— Designing Web Usability (New Riders). Many applauded. A few jeered. But everyone listened. The best-selling usability guru is back and has revisited his classic guide, joined forces with Web usability consultant Hoa Loranger, and created an updated companion book that covers the essential changes to the Web and usability today. Prioritizing Web Usability is the guide for anyone who wants to take their Web site(s) to next level and make usability a priority! Through the authors’ wisdom, experience, and hundreds of real-world user tests and contemporary Web site critiques, you’ll learn about site design, user experience and usability testing, navigation and search capabilities, old guidelines and prioritizing usability issues, page design and layout, content design, and more!
This work evaluates and attempts to produce a model for effective professional development. It contrasts the work in Britain with that in other countries, with case studies and exercises to illustrate points, highlighting good practice.
What difference can an aspiring HR strategist really make to business value? Is HR making the most of its new opportunities to become a pivotal part of the business? In a world where HR can suffer from a low, administrative profile, Linda Holbeche shows how some HR strategists have impressed and delivered at the highest level. Building on surveys undertaken through Personnel Today magazine, and research via Roffey Park Institute, Holbeche provides a set of tools and case studies that show how HR strategists have utilised their skills to deliver a variety of key business objectives, often within their current job role. The relationship between an effective people strategy and business success is hard to quantify in financial terms, but Holbeche provides persuasive examples to add to the growing body of evidence. Case studies include Mergers & Acquisitions policies, organizational design, retaining high flyers in an international environment, and core competency approaches. Linda Holbeche's previous book on Motivating People in Lean Organizations was shortlisted for the MCA book prize in 1998.
At a time when the global development industry is under more pressure than ever before, this book argues that an end to poverty can only be achieved by prioritizing human dignity. Unable to adequately account for the roles of culture, context, and local institutions, today’s outsider-led development interventions continue to leave a trail of unintended consequences, ranging from wasteful to even harmful. This book shows that increased prosperity can only be achieved when people are valued as self-governing agents. Social orders that recognize autonomy and human dignity unleash enormous productive energy. This in turn leads to the mobilization of knowledge-sharing that is critical to innovation and localized problem-solving. Offering a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives and specific examples from the field showing these ideas in action, this book provides NGOs, multilateral institutions, and donor countries with practical guidelines for implementing "dignity-first" development. Compelling and engaging, with a wide range of recommendations for reforming development practice and supporting liberal democracy, this book will be an essential read for students and practitioners of international development.
Human rights in peace and development are accepted throughout the Global South as established, normative, and beyond debate. Only in the powerful elite sectors of the Global North have these rights been resisted and refuted. The policies and interests of these global forces are antithetical to advancing human rights, ending global poverty, and respecting the sovereign integrity of States and governments throughout the Global South. The link between poverty, war, and environmental degradation has become evident over the last 60 years, further augmenting international consciousness of these issues as interconnected with the rest of the human rights corpus. This book examines the history of this struggle and outlines practical means to implement these rights through a global framework of constitutional protections. Within this emerging framework, it argues that States will be increasingly obligated to formulate policies and programs to achieve peace and development throughout the global society.
