Maja Ferle

Moving data into production at the click of a button

24 February, 201824 July, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Alongside with DevOps, which ideally means deploying code into production with the click of a button through a well-defined process, data professionals are thinking about a similar concept for moving data into production. What if a business user wants new data in an analytical application, can we do it with the click of a button? Despite new technology that can handle vast volumes of data at lightning speed, organizations are still struggling with implementing analytics in a timely manner, with good quality data and before the results become obsolete in the constantly evolving environment. Roadblocks There are misconceptions about what it takes to capture, store, organize and analyze data and eventually get it into a productive environment. While tool vendors want you to believe that it all happens at the click of a button, the reality is that data typically can’t be used without prior knowledge and understanding of what it represents. Data often has errors that must be recognized and dealt with,...

Analytics in the Lean Startup movement and beyond

30 December, 20174 January, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

The book Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz builds on the Lean Startup movement. The authors say that we live in a digital world, and we can build something on the cheap, measure its effect, and learn from it to build something better next time. Lean Analytics is used to measure the progress, helping you to ask the most important questions and get clear answers quickly. In the book, the authors show you how to figure out your business model and your stage of growth. They further explain how to find the One Metric That Matters to you right now, and how to draw a line in the sand so you know where you stand. Analytics is about tracking the metrics that are critical to your business, such as where your revenue comes from, how much you are spending, how many customers you have, and so on. In a startup, you don’t always know which metrics are key, because you...

Comparing PMI-ACP and Scrum Master certifications

19 October, 20175 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

As a practicing agile professional and a holder of both the PMI-ACP and Certified ScrumMaster certifications, I will share my insights on how such agile certifications compare in order to help you decide which one is better for you. The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner certification or PMI-ACP is issued by the Project Management Institute. I wrote a post about preparing for the PMI-ACP exam here. There are several ScrumMaster certifications. I hold the Certified ScrumMaster certification from Scrum Alliance. Another agile certification with which I am familiar is the Professional Scrum Master I certification from Scrum.org. Following is a high-level overview of each of these certifications. PMI-ACP issued by PMI Difficulty and time commitment: High (substantial study time required) Cost: Medium-High (the choice is yours what trainings you attend and at what cost) Scope: Covers all aspects of agile, including Scrum, Lean and Kanban as well as organizational aspects of agile project management Requirements: Prior experience on agile projects, contact hours in agile project management...

PMI should not be a synonym for waterfall

30 September, 20172 October, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Whenever I hear that someone refers to PMP or PMI as a methodology, I want to tell them that neither of these is a project management methodology (PMP is a certification and PMI is the name of the organization that issues the certification). The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is also not a methodology but a standard. In addition to misusing these abbreviations it is even more disturbing that they are used as synonyms for waterfall project management. True, PMBOK was historically all about waterfall project management. But PMI has been adding agile to the PMBOK for many years now and the most recent 6th edition is more agile than ever. To explain how waterfall and agile can be combined, PMBOK now has an appendix about the continuum of project life cycles. PMBOK has always stated that it is the nature of projects to evolve as more detailed and specific information becomes available and that the project life cycle needs...

Learning MapReduce

30 August, 20175 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Chances are that when you started learning MapReduce, the first example that was covered was counting how many times a word appears in a given text or set of texts. This example is sometimes referred to as the “Hello, world!” of MapReduce. The example is straightforward enough and it explains how MapReduce works nicely. But once you’ve got “Hello, world!” out of the way, what next? How do you become comfortable applying the principles of MapReduce in real world situations? For me, the book MapReduce Design Patterns by Donald Miner and Adam Shook was the next step. The authors of the book state that “…motivation for us to write this book was to fill a missing gap we saw in a lot of new MapReduce developers. They had learned how to use the system, got comfortable with writing MapReduce, but were lacking the experience to understand how to do things right or well.” They further explain that the intent of this book...

Can you really build a data warehouse in 15 minutes?

1 July, 201730 August, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Has this happened to you before? You spend months designing, building, testing, and delivering a data warehouse solution. You feel a sense of accomplishment, not just because you delivered on time and on budget, but because you delivered something that was needed and that is now being used and appreciated by the end users. And then some vendor walks in and laughs at the amount of time you spent developing your solution. They say to management: why don’t you just buy our tool, and you could click-click-click have your solution ready in 15 minutes! Sometimes I want to grab such vendors by the neck and shake them: do you really know what you are talking about? Before expanding on this topic, let’s be realistic: today’s data warehouses are not keeping up with the big data explosion. It takes too long to deliver reports to the business users who may have lost interest in the time it took from initial enthusiasm until they...

Business intelligence is not on the way out … but ETL may be

25 May, 201731 May, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Recent references to business intelligence being on the way out (examples here and here) may be a result of misinterpreting what Gartner said about business intelligence competency centers being dead. Probably everyone agrees that business intelligence itself is not on the way out. It is evolving from the traditional data warehouse and single version of truth to a more self-service, distributed, in the cloud format. We can rest assured that there will continue to be a need for data analysis and reporting. Business users will still want their financials and sales figures and market share in a spreadsheet despite new trends in self-service data access. They will not all learn to become their own data scientists. Many business users are not tech-savvy enough to be able to get their own data from various sources so they will still require support from business intelligence professionals. The new BI To fulfill modern requirements and ways that business wants to exploit data, BI will shift from building a single...

Being Agile in a Waterfall World

22 April, 20173 July, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

There are various opinions on mixing agile and waterfall. On one hand, there are strong arguments against mixing agile and waterfall, for example the term scrummerfall was coined to denote a combination of the two approaches and defined as “the practice of combining Scrum and Waterfall so as to ensure failure at a much faster rate than you had with Waterfall alone.” Surveys suggest that “pure agile projects are more successful than those that use a combination of agile and waterfall.” On the other hand, organizations often start doing agile projects by introducing agile approaches into their traditional waterfall methodologies. The term water-scrum-fall is one example of a methodology that combines waterfall with agile and although this approach is not ideal, it is useful in organizations that are transitioning to agile and want to maintain some waterfall while attempting to go agile. The book Being Agile in a Waterfall World by Joseph Flahiff unveils a completely different perspective on the agile vs. waterfall debate....

Big data and personalization: where do we draw the line?

7 March, 201730 August, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

As a private citizen, I am ever more annoyed with the rising amount of advertising that hits me everywhere: on the Internet, in magazines and newspapers, on billboards, in public transportation, even in public toilets. It is especially annoying when I am bombarded with ads for stuff that I don’t want because the advertisers missed the boat on personalization. On the other hand, as a professional, my job is to analyze data to come up with insights about behavior, trends and to provide recommendations that can be packaged into advertising. And so I am conflicted: am I really doing to others what I don’t want to be done to me? Personalizing ads It frightens me how much personal information the advertisers have about us. I came across one example in the book Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. The author of the book Thomas L. Friedman explains that a lot of people may not realize...

How I passed the PMI-ACP exam

12 February, 201730 August, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Recently, I was approached by a colleague who is preparing to take the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) to share my experience. It has been almost 5 years since I passed the exam and I would probably have forgotten many of the details, were it not for this article that I wrote for the PMI Slovenia Chapter newsletter soon after the exam. I dusted off the article and am publishing it here for anyone else who is interested in the process. When PMI first announced the agile certification, I knew immediately that I wanted to take it. I had become familiar with agile a few years earlier and I was already practicing it in my consulting work. Becoming certified in agile seemed a logical next step. Eligibility requirements To apply for the PMI-ACP certification, I had to meet the following eligibility requirements: 2,000 hours of general project experience working on teams. I automatically fulfilled this requirement because I am PMP certified. 1,500 hours working on agile...