Irene Chuma
Assistant Finance and Budget Officer Regional Office in Eastern Africa
What brought you to a career in technology at the United Nations?
There is a need to have a centralized system that extracts the information from various sources (Umoja business intelligence, project management information systems, and manually maintained Excel sheets) that would help steer project implementation and enable adaptive management. This led me to pioneer the use of Microsoft Power BI (an Office 365 tool) in UNEP to manage the project lifecycle and financials. I further undertook a course on Data Science and Machine Learning: Making Data-Driven Decisions by MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) (using Python), which I completed with an Exceptional Grade and was ranked 2nd out of 91 in my cohort.
What has been your favorite technology project or initiative at the United Nations and why? What was your contribution?
I pioneered the development project portfolio management dashboard in UNEP/Ecosystems division in 2018 using Microsoft Power BI. Which i did through self learning in YouTube and and other online resources form the office 365. I identified the strategic data from Umoja business intelligence , UNEPs Project Information Management Systems (PIMS), and manually maintained excel sheets, GEF databases just to mention a few. Thereafter, i developed the Microsoft power BI a dashboard that entailed use of data marts, creative visuals, dax etc. and was able track the project(s) financial performance, compliance, and risks, for adaptive management. I also set the dashboard to automatically refresh after the 24 hours and alerts when there is failure to refresh. I pinned the dashboard in Microsoft Teams channel , meaning that users can access without having to take the long process of logging in. As a result of this, there was a 2 fold staffs' time saved through utility of dashboard which in a click of a button provide up to date project portfolio financial and lifecycle information. In a normal circumstance, managers at all levels (project, Admin Branch/Finance, Division senior leadership) would have to visit multiple data sources to get the complete picture of project performance. Also a reduction of unspent funds to the donor was noted due to day to day management of finances.
What advice would you give women interested in pursuing a field in technology?
Never stop learning. There are unlimited and unexplored opportunities in tech which women can take advantage of.