Alan Ferguson is the managing director of AFA. This training and consultancy company has specialized in change delivery practices for nearly 20 years. Starting off in project management it spread to programme, portfolio, change and risk management, P3O and a host of other disciplines related to helping organizations change. It provides training and consultancy globally, both directly and through a network of partners who use AFA training material.
Alan has been in project and programme management for an awfully long time. He was certainly looking efter a collection of projects (which would now be called multi-project programme management) in the 1970s. So that means he he's getting to the end of his forth decade in this game.
His first career was as an engineering officer in the Royal Ari Force. His first projects were looking after airplanes; getting them back in the air after a couple of months in a hangar. Before he left the RAF, he moved across into IT and in the late 1980s and early 1990s worked on IT projects and within so-called strategic stufies. Nowadays those strategies would be called programmes. Se he really was in at the beginning of programme management.
Alan also spent a few years working in an international insurance company on IT projects and programmes. Here, and in the RAF he earned his spurs as a practising project and programme manager.
With AFA, Alan has worked with a hugely diverse range of clients in the UK, Europe and around the world. His complaint at the moment is that he hasn't done much in South America, if any of you want to invite him across there. Alan is particilarly proud of the work he has done with the UN in their field missions in some parts of the world that others wouldn't dream of travelling to. When he gets back from one of those assignments he always says he has had fun. He has a very strange sense of fun!
Alan's hobbies focus around aviation in all ots many aspects. You can have a look at his airplane photographs on Flickr, but if you're feeling a little braver you can fly with him in one of his powered aircrafts or in the gliders he regularly flies. His other hobbies range from helping St John Ambulance, to renovating the Windmill in Dereham; the East Anglian town where he lives and where AFA is based.
If you ever met Alan, you won't forget him. Everyone describes him as enthusiastic and challenging. Alan is originally from Belfast and likes nothing better than a bit of craic.