Maja Ferle

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...

Agile delivery of data models

13 January, 201713 April, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Agile methodologies typically focus on software development. It may appear as if writing code is the only aspect of agile delivery. But we know that most applications use data and this data must be stored somewhere, preferably in a database. This is an integral part of any application. The question then becomes: how do we develop the data model for the database in an agile manner? The book The Nimble Elephant: Agile Delivery of Data Models using a Pattern-based Approach by John Giles addresses this question and gives in-depth advice on how to make it work. Choose a data model pattern How do we come up with a data model quickly in order to allow iterative development to start? The author of the book John Giles suggests to use industry-standard data models or data model patterns as a starting point and customize them as you go. He says that off-the-shelf proven data model patterns may go a long way towards bridging the speed versus quality...

The current state of Scrum: it’s all about coaching

19 October, 20165 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

While my memory is still fresh after attending the Scrum Gathering in Munich 2016, the first thing that comes to mind is that it's all about coaching. My impression was that the main purpose of the conference was to come together so that independent consultants who offer coaching services can have access to a huge pool of potential clients. Or perhaps I was just unfortunate to run into too many such individuals, some more pushy than others. Note to Scrum coaches: not all conference attendees come because they want to buy your services. The second impression I have from the conference is that it’s not about the Scrum methods or tools or techniques; it’s not even about case studies or success stories. It’s about soft skills and personal development. The current buzzwords are responsibility, mindfulness, emotional intelligence and more coaching. Sure, I get it, you want a self-organizing team and to do that, you want the team members to be responsible and mindful...

Planning for project unknowns

25 June, 201630 June, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Project contingency planning is among the least understood topics related to project management. This is probably due to the fact that contingency deals with the unknown. How do we plan for something that might happen but we don't even know what that might be? And how much will it cost us if it does happen? While risk management is a related area that deals with the unknown, at least in risk management we start by making a list of all the possible scenarios that can go wrong that we can think of. And if we can imagine a negative scenario, then we can estimate what it would cost if it manifested. On the other hand, contingency planning is to cover everything else that we haven't thought of as a risk but that still might happen. The June 2016 issue of PM Network magazine has an article about contingency planning and once again they reached out to project management practitioners for their input. I was...

My take on why IT projects still fail

15 April, 201612 April, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

The findings of PMI's 8th annual Global Project Management Survey as published in The High cost of Low Performance are disturbing. They report declines in many of the project success factors that they track. Furthermore, the percentage of projects meeting their goals is lower than it has been over the past four years. According to the study, the reason for these findings is that leaders in organizations still don't trust that projects deliver strategy. It has been several years since PMI conducted the first formal research study which confirmed that project management brings value to organizations. Sadly, project management is still not embraced as strategic in real life. According to the High cost of Low Performance report, money continues to be wasted when projects aren't managed well. Still, we continue to read reports in various media about projects that failed massively (examples here and here). Will we truly never learn? I ask myself this question whenever I am involved in delivering a...

Scaling agile in enterprise-wide data warehousing projects

9 March, 20169 September, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Agile software development is most often associated with small companies and small development teams. The very fact that agile teams should have no more than about a dozen members sets limitations that lead us to question the possibility of doing large enterprise data warehousing projects in an agile manner. Despite the limitations, agile can nevertheless be done in large projects. It may require more organizational change than in small companies that work on smaller projects and must coordinate more than one agile development team. -- Article published in MonitorPro magazine, 03/2016, p. 22-23...

Evolving from project manager to Scrum Master

26 January, 20167 April, 2017 by Maja FerleNo Comments

For those of us who started our careers as traditional project managers, transforming into a Scrum Master role is an arduous journey. To be truly agile, we must surrender being the one who is in command and control. Our new role is to be coach and facilitator, teacher and observer. This is easier said than done. The book Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition by Lyssa Adkins is an invaluable resource in helping us to get there. The author's extensive experience and her own journey to becoming a renowned agile coach is valuable input for the reader who is thinking about their own transition. The most important take-aways from this book are that the agile coach listens, observes, doesn't solve the team's problems and for the most part doesn't even speak. When required, the coach guides the team back on track by asking powerful questions that help team members to find new directions...

Beyond dimensional modeling: what lies ahead?

23 December, 20155 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Ever since Ralph Kimball, the guru of dimensional modeling, announced his retirement, it has felt like the end of an era. He was among the first data warehousing/business intelligence pioneers some 20 years ago and although there has been much advancement in the field since then, his dimensional modeling principles are still strongly rooted and widely used even today. Dimensional modeling is easy to understand because it clearly represents measures that are used in business and dimensions by which we analyze them. The dimensional data model can be shared with business users which allows better alignment between the technical implementation and the intended use. However, dimensional modeling is best suited for relational or OLAP databases. In order keep up with big data trends we should examine how to extend dimensional modeling to make it fit with the latest trends. This article was first published in MonitorPro magazine, VI. 2015, p. 34-35...

Is data modeling still required in NoSQL databases?

27 October, 20155 December, 2018 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Relational databases introduced data modeling concepts where we represent a data model with tables, fields and relationships. A new generation of NoSQL databases which are more suitable for big data environments no longer rely on relational data models. We have to think about data modeling in a different way, primarily to ensure that data is written quickly while sometimes sacrificing consistency. -- Article published in MonitorPro magazine, V. 2015, p. 24-25...