Maja Ferle

Agile program and portfolio management

29 March, 20129 September, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

The business environment is changing at a fast pace and projects are not always up to date with achieving business goals. Agile project management ensures quick results that satisfy stakeholder requirements in a timely manner. On top of that we should also implement agile program and portfolio management which ensures that a collection of projects follows the constant changing requirements of the business environment. -- paper presented at the International Conference on Organizational Science Development, March 21 – 23, 2012...

Sex discrimination in IT? I don’t think so!

4 February, 20125 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

In the February issue of PM Network magazine you can read an interview with me about my views on sex discrimination in IT. The article is written as a debate between two project managers with opposing views. My opinion is that based on my experience there is no sex discrimination in IT. Who knows whether my opinion might be different had I been exposed to different experiences? My co-interviewee in the article (whom I never actually met because the article was composed through several e-mail exchanges) says that I was lucky that I always managed to work in environments without sex discrimination. Her opinion made me wonder whether this may be because I always worked in environments where they hired women in IT - after all, they hired me - which shows that they had nothing against women in the first place. I've worked both in places where I was one of a handful of women in predominantly male environments as well...

IT is too slow

21 December, 20115 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

The end of the year is near and it's time to look back and review what was noteworthy in the past year and whether last year's predictions came true. Information Week published a list of the 20 most important IT trends in 2011. According to the article's author Eric Lundquist, the first on the list is the realization that IT is too slow, something that the magazine wrote about at the beginning of the year. It strikes me as so true because my experience in IT also collaborates that IT is often like a heavy brick that drags behind and makes business more difficult instead of just the opposite. IT was supposed to make business faster, better and more efficient. The pace of business is faster and users are more anxious to get quick results and immediate responses to their queries. IT must constantly struggle to catch up. And IT isn't too slow just because of poor technology or slow information systems....

Interview with the founders of Skram.si

19 December, 201125 December, 2019 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Interview with the founders of the group Skram.si in Slovenia, Tilen Travnik from Domenca Labs (D•Labs) and Dušan Omerčević from Zemanta. -- PMI Slovenia Chapter Newsletter, Issue 2 Year 6, December 19, 2011...

Data is the basis for both business processes and business intelligence

1 November, 20115 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

This year's Business process management conference hosted several discussions about the (non)connectivity between business processes in companies with business intelligence. The theme was introduced by a professor from the Zagreb Economic Faculty who presented research into this area with a case study and concluded with a round table of IT managers from various local companies. More or less everyone agreed that the areas of business process management and business intelligence are currently not interconnected enough and discussed what benefits could be achieved if they were. They mentioned several examples of how the business users required reports and analyses that were produced by the business intelligence department. But reports themselves don't necessarily illustrate that business intelligence is aware of business processes. The question remains whether those who design business processes in companies take into account the consideration how they will analyze them or measure their effectiveness, what data will be needed to do so, how often will the data have to be updated...

Data warehousing is a mature information infrastructure

29 September, 20115 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Data warehousing has matured to the point where it has become required as a necessary part of business information infrastructure. No longer are data warehouses regarded as a new and untried concept. In recent years we have seen developments in technologies, methodologies, architectures, approaches and ways of using the data warehouse. But this does not mean that everything is known and there are no new challenges to address. -- MonitorPro fall 2011, p. 37-39...

Data warehouse maintenance

29 September, 20115 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Data warehouses must be constantly kept up to date – on the one hand due to changing business requirements and on the other hand due to technological advances. We can say that a warehouse is never really completed. Maintaining a data warehouse may in time become even more demanding than its initial implementation. How do we approach this challenge? -- MonitorPro fall 2011, p. 40-41 ...

New Chaos study: IT projects are becoming more successful

19 September, 201120 October, 2016 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Everyone in project management has probably heard of or perhaps even quoted the Chaos study, conducted every two years by the Standish Group which repeatedly concludes that IT projects have an amazingly low rate of success. Finally we anticipate clearer skies ahead because the newest Chaos study finds that IT project success rates are slightly better compared to the success rates in previous years. They cite stronger awareness of project management in general and higher project management maturity in companies as the reasons for greater project success. Improved risk management is an additional factor for greater project success. Another aspect of better project success might be that the projects that were analyzed in the current study are typically smaller compared to those in previous studies and therefore they may be less complex and easier to manage. The current economic crisis is probably related to project size, as companies don’t want to embark on huge and riskier projects but rather implement smaller, more manageable...

How to segment customers

27 June, 201124 May, 2015 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Customer segmentation is becoming a popular topic. As with anything new there are many misconceptions, misunderstandings and too little clarity. Each stakeholder has their own definition of segmentation and each understands it in a different way. The basics are actually always the same and the required tools are known and established. -- Article published in MonitorPro summer 2011, p. 24-26...

Social media for project managers

1 June, 201126 July, 2014 by Maja FerleNo Comments

PMI introduced the »New Media Council« in 2009 whose members were tasked with writing blogs, delivering web presentations and do anything related with modern social media technologies. Their goal is on one hand to promote PMI in the web environment and on the other hand to understand how new trends in social media affect project managers. Elizabeth Harrin, a member of this council and author of the popular blog A Girl's Guide to Project Management, authored a book on the topic of how to successfully utilize social media in project management. According to her, social media is »Collaboration and Communication with Purpose«. Since the work of a project manager is mostly communication, this fits together well. In her book the author first describes different media that are available to project managers, such as messaging systems, videoconferencing systems, podcasts and webcasts, blogs, microblogs, social networks, Wikis and more. She indicates how each technology could be incorporated into project management. She then discusses implementing social media...