Today we are happy to meet Nadezhda Milenkova, who is a certified PMP since 2013 since when she’s been monitoring the positive development of PMI Bulgaria Chapter as a chapter member and participant in various events and initiatives.

   She has been managing projects within the Infrastructure Support world, primarily in Service Management Projects for more than 12+ years now. Currently she is GMS ITSM lead in Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

   Being part of several big IT Companies, she has benefitted from the internal mentoring program offered by HP, where she participated as a mentee for professional and career development and as mentor for Service Management. She was impressed by the maturity of her mentor and her desire to spread knowledge and good examples. Also by her willingness to to find interesting information everywhere and to constantly learn – i.e. to GIVE and to GET 😊. This is what inspired Nadezhda to volunteer in the PMI Bulgaria Chapter Mentoring initiative as mentor on Project Management (Waterfall), as the experience she had collected throughout the years was just about the right background to answer the practical questions related to this area. She was contacted by Boryana Georgieva and Zhana Pelovska and after a short discussion on the goal of the initiative, Nadezhda was glad to join it as a mentor.

   There were many items, which made this mentorship successful and the first one was the match by Zhana (based on the forms populated from the participants), as she paired Nadezhda with a very focused, knowledgeable and experienced Agile/Scrum Project manager (Marinela), who wanted to understand the practical insides of waterfall project management. Working with a motivated person like Marinela made her provide her best and very soon they realized that their meetings could become good and sincere discussions about agile and waterfall project management challenges. They had very good conversations on different aspects and after their first session they decided to structure them in a presentation, where they listed topics and details that have been covered during their sessions.

   Both of them were prepared theoretically for a different project management world, so they knew what they needed to understand. Nadezhda was very happy to hear some of the questions from Marinela, as those helped her see some details in a new way.