Category: Technology

Meeting report – January 2020

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Mehrdad Speech: OKRs in Goal setting

We all see that companies lose their capital and people waste their time and exhaust their resources not because they’re dumbbut because not setting appropriate goals or choosing wrong objectives orperhaps considering wrong metrics.
Many of us are setting goals wrong and most of us arenot setting goals at all.
A lot of organizations set objectives and meet thembut they lack a sense of purpose to inspire their teams.
So how do you set the goals right way?

First, you must answer the question WHY. Why?
Objectivesand key results (OKR) is a†goal-setting†framework that helpsorganizations as well as individuals define†goals†ó or objectives óand then track the outcome.
OKR†has been around since the 1970s. Theconcept was created by intel president Andy Grove, and popularized by JohnDoerr, who was one of the earliest investors in Google.
Andy Grove who invented the OKRsystem was a superb leader. It is all about excellent execution.

The objective is the direction and the key results has to be measurable.
The Objectives are WHAT you want to have accomplished and the Key Results are HOW am I goanna get that done?
ObjectivesÖKeyResults. What .. and how.

The difference between OKR and SMART goals
On the surface, SMART goals and OKRs look similar. They both offer a structure, and they both have rules that help set scope, time frames, and alignment.
However, the similarities end here, and where SMART ends, OKR takes over.
SMART views goals in isolation and provides a simple, yet memorable acronym and criteria to describe their structure.
OKR also provides a structure but draws a distinct line between the Objective of the goal (what you want to achieve) and how to measure progress towards it using Key Results.
This an area where the ìMî in SMART can cause confusion since there are several variations of what the acronym SMART means.
For example, the M can stand for measurable, meaningful, or motivational.

Meeting report – November 2019

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At PITON we talk about professional development, achievement and success.
We encourage members to share, collaborate and grow.
Today’s theme is growth mindset. Raise your hand if you know what it means?
Why mindset is relevant to our mission?
Our emotions drive actions and our actions yield results.
The significance of mindset is that it determines our emotions.
There are two main types of mindset:
Fixed and growth.
People with fixed mindset have different impression on success or failure than people with growth mindset.
People with fixed mindset believe in fixed capacities, talent or strengths. A person with fixed mindset is demanding people’s approval. They don’t believe in effort. To them, effort is equal lack of intelligence. Their failure determine their weaknesses and there is no drive to try hard.
People with growth mindset on the other hand thrive in challenges. Failure means more effort. It does not cause negative emotions that could prevent further effort. They don’t need people’s approval. Such feeling drives different results!

Knowing the difference, ask yourself in which areas of my life do I demonstrate fixed mindset?

The good news is mindset can be changed through awareness and practice!

Supporting Documents:

01-Introducing-SAFe-4.6-for-Lean-Enterprises.pdf

cojg-deck-employer-training-2019-en.pdf

LEC-presentation-Nov-2019-Marzieh.pptx

PITON - Professional IT Occupational Network - Toronto

Meeting report – August 2019

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We talked about benefits of membership and distributed registration forms.

Members can either register online at https://piton.ca/join/, or via money transfer to [email protected] or can pay cash.

For the first year the discounted annual membership fee is $60.

We will share a coupon code with the members to get the free ticket online.

Non-members would pay $10 per session.

Below is the summary benefit that members will receive:

1.      Free ticket for monthly meetings. Regular price for non-members is $10.

2.      Up to 80% discount on Conferences and Seminars organized by PITON.

3.      Success mentor-ship: Including professional assistance with SMART goal setting, progress monitoring, and success accountability pairing.

4.      Discounted coaching sessions with one of our professional and certified coaches of your choice if required.

5.      Practicing personal-branding, public speaking, and leadership skills.

6.      Certificate of participation for the time you spend in meetings that can be submitted to certification bodies as education units.

7.      Free G-Suite account under “piton.ca”domain (reserved for volunteers and leadership team).

8.      Members can bring along guests for a maximum of 2 sessions free of charge.

Click here to download registration form.

Meeting report – July 2019

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July meeting started at 6:00 pm as scheduled.

Mehrdad, PITON’s president, provided an introduction on PITON and its mission. He explained how PITON creates an environment in which people become empowerd by assisting each other.

As a regular practice in PITON, all the attendees are given time to introduce themselves in a professional way to stand up and be noticed.

The first presentation was performed by Fatima Omar, Leadership and Business Consultant, and the topic was “3 Steps to Success”. The three pillars of success can be summarized as “CUBS”:

Commitment: Declare your ultimate goals and remain focused on it.

Un-Learn: Find your barriers. Put aside your logical brain, listen to your curiosity and expand your abilities, move on.

Believe in yourself: Be kind to yourself

It leads to “Success”.

Second presentation was on Phishing scams that was delivered by Mehrdad.

He introduced Phishingfree.com that has a free browser add-on that can help detecting suspicious URLs. You can install it on Chrome and IE browsers for free.

This free add-on is provided by Safetoopen.com company based on Auckland, New Zealand.

Safetoopen provides phishing detection and protection solutions.

Meeting report – February 2019

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We had two guest speakers:
Hard skills (technology) track guest speaker was Masih Omid who talked about micro services. Summary of key points:
Micro-service architecture characteristics

  • Componentization via Services
  • Self-contain
  • Deployable independently
  • Cloud-native
  • Organized around business capabilities
  • Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
  • Decentralized Data Management
  • Design for failure
  • Infrastructure Automation

The Soft Skill track guest speaker was Fatima Omar who talked about 3 Steps To Writing A Book:

  • What’s your why?
  • Provide a SOLUTION for your ideal client.
  • Open KDP Account, Enter Book Details and Upload your Book

Meeting report – December 2018

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Meeting started with 30 minutes delay due to the traffic issue.

We extended the networking session at the beginning followed by two presentations:
Elham talked about secure online shopping since we are approaching to holidays and people tend to buy online.
Few things to remember from this presentation are as follows:

  • Make sure the entire traffic is encrypted using https
  • Verify the URL and ensure the spelling is correct. Sometimes fake websites use a very similar URL to fool people
  • Use a strong password for online accounts
  • When possible use PayPal rather than credit card
  • Don't trust public WiFi

The second presentation was about Emotions and Subconscious mind by Dr. Alireza Sharifi. In his presentation, Alireza mentioned that the 4 steps to learning:

  1. Unconscious Incompetence which is when we are exposed to something we don't know,
  2. Conscious Incompetence, which is when we start learning something new
  3. Conscious Competence which is a level in which we are getting better at something we learn,
  4. and finally, Unconscious Competence which is the level we do things automatically.

After the formal speeches, Mehrdad provided an update on community project about January 12th seminar on raising security awareness for the general public.

It was an enjoyable and informational session.
On behalf of PITON board members, we thank our participants who made it.

PITON is a networking group of IT professionals for IT professionals to advance in their business, career or professional life.

Meeting report – November 2018

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The meeting started on-time at 5:30 pm and ended at 7:30.

Elham talked about IoT and security concerns around it. She provided some useful tips for everyone based on the question during Q/A after her presentation, I noticed the interest among participants on this topic. Thank you, Elham for preparing and presenting on such an interesting and useful topic.

Our next speaker was Dr. Alireza Sharifi, one 9f our sponsors and the founder of Alta Training and Coaching. His speech was the fist section of a series on emotional mastery and strategies to manage our emotions that stem in our subconscious mind. We look forward to its second part in our next meeting.
We all need to master the techniques to control our emotions to our benefit. I personally love this topic and based on the feedback, I realized everyone was also interested in this topic. Thank you so much Alireza for enlighting us with your presentations.

We had a special guest that considering snow and bad road conditions made to attend our meeting. Ms.Vahideh Hashemi is a business coach and consultant. It was so nice having her in our meeting and hope she can support our network in the future.
I would like to personally thank everyone who made it to attend the Nov meeting despite the weather condition and busy schedule.

Also, special thanks to Mahmood, Payman, and Masih for their support.

Meeting report

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October 18th meeting was hosted at GoSecure office in downtown Toronto.

Special thanks to GoSecure for their terrific support. Meeting theme was Cyber Security Awareness. The meeting started with reciting the mission statement, followed by a quick introduction of GoSecure provided with Moni.

Then we had a 15 minutes time introducing new guests by highlighting three areas of expertise for each person.

We also had the presentations as follows: 1- 2019 - filling in your enterprise's Cyber Security Gap (Presented by GoSecure) 2- Cyber Security Awareness (by Mehrdad Janbeglou) 3- Rapport Building (by Amirpouyan Harandi).

Thank you, everyone, for making this event happen.