Maja Ferle

Project management in NGOs

19 December, 20129 September, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

After more than 20 years in corporate IT consulting environments, I volunteered my project management services to a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Cambodia. Here are some of my experiences of the challenges facing project managers in NGOs and in developing countries in general. NGOs are non-profit organizations that typically function in the areas of social development and improving the quality of life of underprivileged individuals. They are most often funded by international aid and donors. Initiatives from NGOs are usually performed as projects. The aims of such projects may be to alleviate poverty improve living conditions ensure human rights protect the environment help victims of natural and man-made catastrophes further develop the health and education systems Project success is measured in terms of socioeconomic progress and the levels of desired outcomes that resulted from the project. In turn, this translates into effectiveness of the donor funds. These types of results are not always tangible in nature and may not be straightforward to measure. Project...

Introduction to data science

2 December, 20125 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Managers often discover that they have tons of business reports but no real data for decision support. Business intelligence is not always enough, therefore it is supplemented by analytics and data mining which enables users to discover hidden patterns in data and predicting probabilities of events in the future. -- MonitorPro winter 2012, p. 30-31...

Green Project Management

16 November, 201219 January, 2014 by Maja FerleNo Comments

In their book Green Project Management authors Richard Maltzman and David Shirley tell us that project managers are inherently green because they constantly strive to decrease costs, increase business value and protect scarce resources. This all contributes to being green. Companies are increasingly more aware of the need to become green and therefore it makes sense that project management becomes green as well. The authors introduce a new term that denotes the level at which a project is green. The term is greenality and was chosen because it sounds similar to quality. They argue that greenality can be managed the same way as quality, for example, we could introduce a greenality management plan. We could measure greenality both in the project sense and in the end product sense. They even suggested that greenality might be added to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) as a new knowledge area. They further explain the analogy between greenality and quality by introducing the cost of...

Data virtualization

20 October, 20125 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Everything is agile nowadays. Businesses run faster and there is very little time between a business event and the need to respond. To enable business processes to be quick and agile we need efficient access to data that enables us to make decisions. -- MonitorPro autumn 2012, p. 30-32...

Do we have a business analyst in agile?

10 October, 20125 October, 2013 by Maja FerleNo Comments

When we talk about agile projects and the most popular agile approaches such as Scrum, XP, Lean or Kanban, there is never any mention of specific team member roles that correspond to waterfall projects. For example, where are the specialists, such as system architects, database designers, or business analysts? Are they no longer relevant in agile? Or are the tasks that would have been performed by people in these roles fulfilled in some other way? Let’s focus on the role of the business analyst, a role that is vitally important in waterfall projects and as we shall see it is implicitly addressed in agile projects as well. In general, the business analyst can help agile teams by representing the customer, especially when the business domain is complex and the team is not very familiar with it. He or she can elaborate the requirements and clarify their purpose in the business environment. What the BABOK says about agile For more information about the business analyst...

Project management adds value

10 September, 20125 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Project Management Institute (PMI) published the results of a major research in 2009 which confirmed that project management adds value. The result was expected because all of us who are professional project managers believe in its merits. This research was the first of its kind to scientifically prove our beliefs. -- GEA Forum Issue 13, september 2012...

Truth and myth about agile

29 August, 201224 May, 2015 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Agile is popular and the web is brimming with information about it. Due to so much information it is not easy for a newbie who wants to get involved with agile development to decide how to begin or to distinguish between truth and myth. To make it even more confusing there are conflicting facts - what someone claims is the truth, someone else declares a myth and vice versa. -- MonitorPro summer 2012, p. 22-23...

Agile risk management

14 August, 20125 October, 2013 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Contrary to traditional project management where risk management is an integral and crucial part of the project management process, there is no explicit mention of risk management in popular agile methodologies. This makes us wonder whether we manage risk on agile projects at all. It should make sense that since agile project management differs from traditional project management, agile risk management should differ from traditional risk management. There is an understanding that agile does not explicitly define risk management simply because agile manages risk implicitly. How does that make sense? There is a good explanation in the book “Becoming Agile: …in an imperfect world” by Greg Smith and Ahmed Sidky where the authors state that “a secondary definition of agile could be continuous risk management”. In fact, agile processes are intended to stay on top of risk management by making the team alert and responsive to new information and changes as the project progresses. Implicit agile risk management There are several aspects of...

Alpha Project Managers

19 July, 201226 July, 2014 by Maja FerleNo Comments

The book »Alpha Project Managers: What the top 2% know that everyone else does not« presents results from a research among a large number of project managers conducted by the company Velociteach. The purpose of the research was to discover what the best project managers do differently as well as to find out what they know that everyone else does not. The researchers invited more than 3000 project managers to participate in the study and they finally chose 860 qualified participants who fulfilled strict criteria to be included in the research. Among others, participants must have had at least a certain number of hours of project management experience, they must have led at least one project worth more than a certain amount of money and they had to secure the participation of their superiors, team members and clients. The first part of the research was to rate the project managers. This was done by their superiors, team members and clients while the project managers themselves...

Heaps of data

29 March, 20125 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

A hot topic related to data management is the ability to deal with huge volumes of data. We are talking about such huge volumes of data that we can barely manage them with current technologies in reasonable response times. New technologies that have become available are more suited for working with such huge amounts of data. They can be meaningfully applied to uncover hidden patterns in data and implement business intelligence solutions. -- MonitorPro magazine, spring 2012, p. 28-31...