StormWind Studios uses proprietary technologies to provide live, interactive IT training courses online in technologies such as Cisco, VMware, Microsoft, CompTIA, ITIL, AWS, cybersecurity, project management, and more. Our blog aims to share the goings-on at StormWind Studios, as well as industry news, blog posts, and some fun stuff, too.
Nathaniel Miller
Your team already uses AI assistants for drafts, summaries, and quick research. The bottleneck shows up when someone asks the model to pull live data from SharePoint, query a SQL database, or trigger an action in a line-of-business app. Copy-paste works once. It does not scale across departments, vendors, or security reviews. That gap is […] Read More: What Is MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Why It Matters
Nathaniel Miller
PMI raised PMP exam fees on August 6, 2026. Members now pay $445. Non-members pay $675. Search for PMP certification cost and you usually get that one number. It is real, and it is incomplete. Membership, the required 35 contact hours of project management education, study materials, and the three-year renewal cycle typically push the […] Read More: PMP Certification Cost in 2026: Every Fee, Broken Down
Nathaniel Miller
If you manage a virtualized Microsoft datacenter, you eventually outgrow managing hosts one at a time. SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) is Microsoft’s answer: a centralized management platform for your virtualization infrastructure, from Hyper-V hosts to VMs, networking, and storage, all from a single console. This guide explains what SCVMM is, what it does, […] Read More: What Is Microsoft SCVMM? A Beginner’s Guide
Nathaniel Miller
A project manager uploads a vendor contract draft into a public chatbot and asks it to “flag risky clauses.” The model returns confident language about liability caps. Two clauses are wrong. The PM sends the summary to procurement anyway. That is how AI project management risks show up in real work: not as headline breaches, […] Read More: When AI Is Useful, Risky, or Off-Limits for Project Managers
Nathaniel Miller
Before Agile became the default in software, one methodology ran nearly every large project: waterfall. It is a linear, sequential approach where each phase finishes before the next begins, like water flowing down a series of steps. Decades later, waterfall is far from obsolete. For projects with fixed requirements, strict compliance, or heavy documentation needs, […] Read More: Waterfall Project Management Explained: Phases, Pros, and Cons
Nathaniel Miller
Why do some employees pour themselves into their work while others do the minimum? Motivation is the answer, and for decades psychologists have built theories to explain it. For managers, these are not academic curiosities. Each theory is a practical lens for understanding what drives your people and how to bring out their best. This […] Read More: Theories of Motivation Explained (With Workplace Examples)
Nathaniel Miller
Getting promoted into management is one of the biggest role changes in a career. The skills that made you a strong individual contributor (technical expertise, personal productivity) are not the ones that make you a strong manager. Management is a different job, and it runs on a different skill set. Here are ten essential management […] Read More: 10 Essential Management Skills Every New Manager Needs
Nathaniel Miller
Project managers are already using AI to draft status updates, summarize meetings, and organize risks. The hard part is not finding a tool. It is knowing where AI for project managers helps, where it creates risk, and where you still own the decision. That is the core message from Ashley Hunt’s StormWind session, Using AI […] Read More: Practical AI Use Cases for Project Managers (Keep Human Judgment in the Loop)
Nathaniel Miller
Every team has sat in the meeting where one loud voice dominates, quieter experts stay silent, and the “decision” is really the highest-paid person’s opinion. The nominal group technique (NGT) was built to fix that. It is a structured decision-making method that gives every participant equal weight, surfaces more ideas than open brainstorming, and ends […] Read More: What Is the Nominal Group Technique? A Step-by-Step Guide
Nathaniel Miller
Linux file permissions control who can read, write, and execute files, and knowing how to change them with chmod is a core skill for anyone working on Linux systems. This guide explains how permissions work and walks through changing them, both the numeric and symbolic way. Read the permission string first. Then decide what chmod […] Read More: chmod: How to Change File Permissions in Linux