• Tech guns for hire: 5 places to find skilled IT contractors

  Even for organizations with a stellar full-time IT staff, situations often arise where temporary outside help is needed. A big Web project might demand a few extra programmers to meet a tough deadline, for example, or a rollout of tools to support a sales force bent on capturing a broader market may require expertise not available in-house.

• Edgy Communication

  We techies need to take the edge off once in a while.

• The Grill: TASC CIO Barbie Bigelow

  After spinning off from Northrop Grumman in 2009, TASC had one year to establish itself as an independent company. That meant the 6,000-employee systems engineering operation needed to deploy a new IT infrastructure. In overseeing that effort, TASC CIO Barbie Bigelow built an IT organization and infrastructure from scratch. Her team spent about eight months working with 64 vendors and partners to design and build an operation that included a new ERP system, more than 4,000 computers, 800 mobile devices, 400 network devices and 134 data circuits across 60 facilities -- and they did it in six weeks. Here, Bigelow discusses the failures and successes that the team experienced as they pursued the aggressive schedule, and she reflects on how TASC's IT unit has evolved.

• Q&A: CSC CTIO, Bob Hayward

  CSC’s chief technology information officer, Bob Hayward, talks mobility, BYOD, virtual desktops, enterprise app stores and project management.

• Career advice: Careers in the cloud

  Allan Hackney of John Hancock Financial Services Ask a Premier 100 IT Leader Allan Hackney Title: Senior vice president and CIOCompany: John Hancock Financial Services

• Achieving better project management

  IT is often made up of lots of individual projects – some big and some small, but most with a value to deliver to the business. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you stay on path.

• IT the Toyota way

  Given all the things that come out of Japan, it’s remarkable and not a little bit bemusing how often it’s the quirky side of life that dominates any discourse on the country. Off the wall fetishes, cosplay kiddies, vacuous variety TV shows, manga, yakuza tales, ninja, games and gadgets are all top of mind as soon as any flutter of the Hinomaru is raised in conversation.

• Why project management certifications matter

  The value of project management certifications is hotly debated among IT professionals. CIO.com investigates whether certifications make better project managers and whether projects staffed by certified project managers are more successful than projects without PMPs.

• Run IT as a business - why that's a train wreck waiting to happen

  "If you board the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the other direction," said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. It's the "standard model" of information technology organizations - the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies and ITIL.

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  5 open source project management apps to watch

  Five open source project management tools to help CIOs and IT project managers keep their projects on-track and on-schedule -- without blowing the budget!

• 5 free project management applications you must try

  Project management applications are usually centered around Gantt charts, where each step in a project is represented as a bar in the chart. These visuals are linked to lists of the resources tied to each task

Whitepapers about project management

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  Learning To Compete: IT’s Next Transformation

  CIOs must become competitive players in managing relationships between IT and the business. Megatrends like virtualization, consumerisation, cloud computing, and mobility are forcing a new model for operating IT. This interactive white paper from CIO Magazine and EMC explores this transformation as a leadership opportunity, as an opportunity to create new models for IT, and as a catalyst to fundamentally change the dynamic between IT and the business. Embedded videos feature CIOs from T-Mobile USA and Wharton School of Business and a quick survey provides benchmarking between CIO peers.

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  EMC 15-Minute Guide to Smarter Backup Transform your future

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  Seven Steps to Effective Data Governance

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  Optimizing Data Quality in the Enterprise - How to Tackle Your Bad Information