The Best Guide to Past Performance Evaluation in Government Contracting Just Got Better! The Past Performance Handbook has long been the resource contracting professionals have turned to for guidance on evaluating contractor performance and making award decisions in competitive acquisitions based on the evaluation results. Now this essential resource has been completely updated and revised to bring readers the most up-to-date information they need to conduct past performance evaluations. Past Performance Handbook: Applying Commercial Practices to Federal Procurement, Second Edition, not only includes a detailed explanation of the process of past performance evaluation, but also presents new approaches to standardizing assessment areas and rating scales, streamlining the source selection process, and ensuring that awards are made to the most qualified offerors. This thoroughly revised second edition offers: • Additional focus on the collaboration between the government and contractors in providing past performance information • Enhanced definitions of numerical scoring, adjectival ratings, color coding schema, and risk assessments - all consistent with the current guidelines issued by the Department of Defense and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) • Updated citations from the Federal Acquisition Regulation, OFPP, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) • Abridged GAO decisions that provide details for citations included in the text. Contracting officers and contractors working with the government will find value in every chapter of this updated edition.

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Systems Performance Written by the winner of the 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration Large-scale enterprise, cloud, and virtualized computing systems have introduced serious performance challenges. Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux(R) and Unix(R) performance, while illuminating performance issues that are relevant to all operating systems. You'll gain deep insight into how systems work and perform, and learn methodologies for analyzing and improving system and application performance. Gregg presents examples from bare-metal systems and virtualized cloud tenants running Linux-based Ubuntu(R), Fedora(R), CentOS, and the illumos-based Joyent(R) SmartOS(TM) and OmniTI OmniOS(R). He systematically covers modern systems performance, including the "traditional" analysis of CPUs, memory, disks, and networks, and new areas including cloud computing and dynamic tracing. This book also helps you identify and fix the "unknown unknowns" of complex performance: bottlenecks that emerge from elements and interactions you were not aware of. The text concludes with a detailed case study, showing how a real cloud customer issue was analyzed from start to finish. Coverage includes - Modern performance analysis and tuning: terminology, concepts, models, methods, and techniques - Dynamic tracing techniques and tools, including examples of DTrace, SystemTap, and perf - Kernel internals: uncovering what the OS is doing - Using system observability tools, interfaces, and frameworks - Understanding and monitoring application performance - Optimizing CPUs: processors, cores, hardware threads, caches, interconnects, and kernel scheduling - Memory optimization: virtual memory, paging, swapping, memory architectures, busses, address spaces, and allocators - File system I/O, including caching - Storage devices/controllers, disk I/O workloads, RAID, and kernel I/O - Network-related performance issues: protocols, sockets, interfaces, and physical connections - Performance implications of OS and hardware-based virtualization, and new issues encountered with cloud computing - Benchmarking: getting accurate results and avoiding common mistakes This guide is indispensable for anyone who operates enterprise or cloud environments: system, network, database, and web admins; developers; and other professionals. For students and others new to optimization, it also provides exercises reflecting Gregg's extensive instructional experience.

Systems Performance, Second Edition, covers concepts, strategy, tools, and tuning for operating systems and applications, using Linux-based operating systems as the primary example. A deep understanding of these tools and techniques is critical for developers today. Implementing the strategies described in this thoroughly revised and updated edition can lead to a better end-user experience and lower costs, especially for cloud computing environments that charge by the OS instance. Systems performance expert and best-selling author Brendan Gregg summarizes relevant operating system, hardware, and application theory to quickly get professionals up to speed even if they have never analyzed performance before. Gregg then provides in-depth explanations of the latest tools and techniques, including extended BPF, and shows how to get the most out of cloud, web, and large-scale enterprise systems. Key topics covered include Hardware, kernel, and application internals, and how they perform Methodologies for rapid performance analysis of complex systems Optimizing CPU, memory, file system, disk, and networking usage Sophisticated profiling and tracing with perf, Ftrace, and BPF (BCC and bpftrace) Performance challenges associated with cloud computing hypervisors Benchmarking more effectively Featuring up-to-date coverage of Linux operating systems and environments, Systems Performance, Second Edition, also addresses issues that apply to any computer system. The book will be a go-to reference for many years to come and, like the first edition, required reading at leading tech companies. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The how-to guide for exceptional management from the bottom up The Effective Manager is a hands-on practical guide to great management at every level. Written by the man behind Manager Tools, the world's number-one business podcast, this book distills the author's 25 years of management training expertise into clear, actionable steps to start taking today. First, you'll identify what "effective management" actually looks like: can you get the job done at a high level? Do you attract and retain top talent without burning them out? Then you'll dig into the four critical behaviors that make a manager great, and learn how to adjust your own behavior to be the leader your team needs. You'll learn the four major tools that should be a part of every manager's repertoire, how to use them, and even how to introduce them to the team in a productive, non-disruptive way. Most management books are written for CEOs and geared toward improving corporate management, but this book is expressly aimed at managers of any level—with a behavioral framework designed to be tailored to your team's specific needs. Understand your team's strengths, weaknesses, and goals in a meaningful way Stop limiting feedback to when something goes wrong Motivate your people to continuous improvement Spread the work around and let people stretch their skills Effective managers are good at the job and "good at people." The key is combining those skills to foster your team's development, get better and better results, and maintain a culture of positive productivity. The Effective Manager shows you how to turn good into great with clear, actionable, expert guidance.

The second edition of the Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policy makers and development practitioners. First published in 2011, it has been used widely across the development and academic communities. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing impact evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of impact evaluations and the best ways to use them to design evidence-based policies and programs. The updated version covers the newest techniques for evaluating programs and includes state-of-the-art implementation advice, as well as an expanded set of examples and case studies that draw on recent development challenges. It also includes new material on research ethics and partnerships to conduct impact evaluation. The handbook is divided into four sections: Part One discusses what to evaluate and why; Part Two presents the main impact evaluation methods; Part Three addresses how to manage impact evaluations; Part Four reviews impact evaluation sampling and data collection. Case studies illustrate different applications of impact evaluations. The book links to complementary instructional material available online, including an applied case as well as questions and answers. The updated second edition will be a valuable resource for the international development community, universities, and policy makers looking to build better evidence around what works in development.

Increase profitability, elevate work culture, and exceed productivity goals through DevOps practices. More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The consequences of failure have never been greater―whether it's the healthcare.gov debacle, cardholder data breaches, or missing the boat with Big Data in the cloud. And yet, high performers using DevOps principles, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, and Netflix, are routinely and reliably deploying code into production hundreds, or even thousands, of times per day. Following in the footsteps of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to replicate these incredible outcomes, by showing how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company and win in the marketplace.