Stories by Meridith Levinson

Vendors tout the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model as an easy way to deploy applications. But is SaaS all it’s cracked up to be?

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has implemented a variety of innovative HR policies and programs to support working parents and to help its employees, especially working moms, achieve work-life balance.

Economic downturns pose all manner of threats to professionals in the workplace. There's the threat that your employer will go out of business. The threat that you'll lose your job. And the threat that you'll have to take on more work when you already feel like your brain is bursting from its meninges.

It's easy to view a layoff as an end-of-the-world situation, especially when the economy is bad. But a negative attitude will only hurt your chances of finding a new job. To help you mentally and emotionally, a career coach offers his seven tips for surviving a layoff and finding a new job

Generation Y is known for being high-maintenance in the workplace. So when an economic downturn brings Gen Y workers pink slips instead of promotions, you might think they'll wither like flowers. In fact, they may be better positioned for survival than their older co-workers.

A recent experience of being in a writing slump got me thinking about just how transparent we should be with our bosses regarding our workloads and our productivity--especially when we're not performing at our best and especially when the economy is bad. When it comes to your boss, there's honesty, and then there's too much information, and your job security may depend on you knowing the difference.

One-third of technical women wait to start families in order to advance their IT careers, according to new research on mid-career technical women. Nearly 10 percent forgo having children altogether--and despite these moves, women are still struggling to win executive roles in IT.

Conventional wisdom says that an economic downturn is not a good time to change jobs and that employed professionals should just hunker down in their current positions and try to prevent getting laid off. But staying put could potentially do more harm to your career than pursuing a new opportunity. And a new opportunity could be your ticket to stability and economic prosperity.

The discipline and transparency imposed by a project management office (PMO) can benefit the entire company, not just IT, says Myrna Soto, MGM Mirage's CISO and vice president of IT governance.

When you're more qualified for a new job than the individuals with whom you're going to be working, your mere presence can threaten them--so much that they conspire to make your life miserable, and ultimately, to get you fired. That's precisely what happened to a software engineer, whom we'll call John Doe, this summer. (John didn't want to use his real name in this story because he's pursuing legal action against his former employer.) Here, John explains how he was unfairly targeted at work and shares the lessons he learned from the experience. (Note that certain details have been changed to protect John's identity.)

Project managers are ultimately responsible for making sure projects are completed on time, on budget and with the features and functionality specified by the project's stakeholders. So one would presume that project managers' performance would be evaluated based on those same criteria. It sounds obvious, right?

Matt Fahrenkrug and Bill Culhane get paid to handle the nuts and bolts of complicated construction projects. As the owners of Culhane & Fahrenkrug Consulting, they facilitate every aspect of commercial construction efforts, such as the second phase of a three-year, $US170 million building expansion for the Van Andel Institute, a cancer research facility based in Grand Rapids, Michigan

If you're a nice person, you probably think that being nice works to your advantage in the office. After all, how could it be any other way? Genuinely nice people are well liked. They're generally easy to work with. They care about others and tend to have good values. In a fair and just world, that sort of behavior should be rewarded. Right?

How do you tell a hiring manager that you're no longer interested in the job he has to offer?

On Monday, I spoke with Stephen Viscusi, author of a new book called Bulletproof Your Job: 4 Simple Strategies to Ride Out the Rough Times and Come Out on Top at Work. Viscusi is an executive recruiter in NYC, and his career advice has been featured all over the media, from the New York Times to the New York Daily News. Bulletproof Your Job, which you can read portions online, is his second book.