A snapshot of both the internal and external IT resources and personnel necessary for carrying out a successful deployment.

• Internal Mifos Project Team

• Mifos Partner Requirements

• Data Migration Staffing Requirements

• Ongoing Maintenance

Internal Mifos Project Team

The number of staff you’ll need to hire for supporting Mifos will vary depending on the size and complexity of your operations and the degree of in-house expertise that exists. Here we’ve provided information about the roles that need to be fulfilled and the number of staff that might be required.

First, your organization will need to set up an internal Mifos project team. This team may consist of the following:

• Project Champion: Provides management oversight and decision making so that Mifos integrates into your financial institution's operations.

• Project Manager: Coordinates and serves as a liaison between the different stakeholders in the project, which may include the financial institution's internal MIS team, the Mifos Support Specialist and the Mifos Development Specialist.

• Project Coordinator: Provides support for all project activities, including requirements gathering, reports design and data migration.

Beyond this, you’ll need to determine the specific resource requirements for each of the three phases of your Mifos implementation: deployment preparation, data migration and branch roll-out, and ongoing maintenance.

Mifos Partner Requirements

In addition, Mifos Deployment Partners, either hired for the project or assigned from your MIS department, will perform the following:

Technical Project Management for Deployment

• Roll-out planning

• Data entry/migration

• Infrastructure planning & set-up (server set-up, other hardware, connectivity etc)

• Reports writing

• User training

Ongoing Support

• System and database administration support

• Systems planning – new features, new infrastructure etc

Interface Between financial institution's Client and Mifos Community

• Features/requirements scoping

• Communicating progress & lessons learned

• Extracting technical advice from community

Data Migration Staffing Requirements

The amount of data migration necessary varies significantly across financial institutions. Some won’t migrate any legacy data, some will manually enter a selected data set, while others will perform a complete migration of legacy data. Because data migration is very complex, try to limit data migration.

If an outside vendor has been employed, the data migration and branch roll out phase might involve the following financial institution and vendor staff.

• Project manager, for general project oversight

• MIS coordinator, for project coordination, training, testing

• IT officer, for field coordination across all branch offices

• IT officer, for infrastructure management

• Branch representatives, for each branch

Vendor staff:

• Team lead, for data mapping, data migration and reports

• Project coordinator, for communication with the financial institution

• System administrator, for system administration and liaison between the hosting facility and the financial institution's MIS team

• Developers, for data mapping, data migration and reports

Ongoing Maintenance

Your organization may need two on-staff resources to provide ongoing maintenance for Mifos. Responsibilities include training new users, fielding support calls from branches, troubleshooting system issues, and defining new feature requirements. A formal Service Level Agreement should be implemented to ensure a specified level of system performance, query response time, etc.