Hello Dusmant, I'm responding to your questions on deployments and thought they were good enough that I should share with the community at large.
My one caveat is that I know nothing about your MFI, and so my answers will remain pretty general as the size, structure, and your strategic plan can affect all of these factors. > Dusmant from Adhikar called me up and wanted to know a few things > related to the implementation that they are pursuing. > Some of the questions that he raised were > 1. More information on the migration of data Data Migrations are one of the toughest areas for any MFI. Factors that affect this include: * Are your operations manual or do you have an existing MIS system? * How important are your historical records in your reporting? Are you comfortable not having all of it in one system? * What's the size of your MFI? How many clients served? We generally recommend most MFI's focus on only moving the active accounts as this is the generally quickest way to deploy. If you're small, manual might be worth it (although I recommend testing thoroughly during the process and keeping multiple backups, in case you have to correct some issues). Another option is to move no data and just use Mifos for all new accounts going forward (so over time all your accounts will be in Mifos). Or you can just automate this process, although that does require some technical skill. You can also try moving all the data, but as an example, with ENDA recently we moved all of their historical data from their old MIS to Mifos and it was about 3.5 months of work, requiring 3 full time resources and 50%+ time of 2 more. > 2. The size of the inhouse team that they will need in case they > implement Adhikar Again, very dependant on the size and structure of your org, along with your staff's capacity. At a minimum I recommend * Executive Champion - Drives things within the organization * Project Leader - Manages the project * IT Specialist - Handles technical details of the rollout * Operations Head - Handles operation side, including updating processes and procedures to work with Mifos * Trainer - Training your staff * Involvement of some your branch staff - For testing, evaluating and rollout support Obviously, in a smaller org, some people might take on multiple roles. Additionally you will probably need to bring on more staff for training, onsite support, monitoring and validation depending on the size of your org and your rollout strategy. After the rollout, some additional positions you'll want to consider * Support Staff * Database Admin (Once you reach a certain size, say 200k+) * Report Writer - Building custom reports * Admin - Manage the Mifos server > 3. What are the scalability issues that they may face and how is > Mifos > geared up for it. Grameen Koota, the largest user of Mifos at the moment, is currently supporting over 200k clients and growing quite rapidly. Again, if you are getting to this size you will probably want to invest in a larger IT staff for support (see my point above) > 4. Project execution timelines Again, very dependent on the size of your org, structure, internal capacity and goals. There are trade-offs on whether you try to run a short and tight schedule, versus a long, more conservative one. My advice here is to look at what you think is possible, what are your overall goals, and what you see as the possible risks and plan accordingly around those. For example, for some organizations they are very concerned about the accuracy of data and so might be a lot more diligent with their training and monitoring of their staff to make sure they are using Mifos correctly. For others, it may be more important to get up and running on an automated system as soon as possible for growth reasons, so they may push it out on a faster schedule. I hope that helps and followup with any questions you might have to the list! Best, Ryan Ryan Whitney Mifos Technical Program Manager [email protected] Mifos - Technology that Empowers Microfinance (www.mifos.org) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Mifos-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users
