Dorothy Firsching

Dorothy is a consultant with more than 30 years of experience in management and technology-related consulting for nonprofits, Federal, state and local agencies and commercial firms. Her strengths include facilitation, strategic planning, organizational assessment, project management, web development, content management, and data mining. Dorothy is president of Ursa Major Consulting, LLC, and has worked with ILC on a variety of strategic planning, facilitation, and management consulting projects over the past decade, and has been the primary author of numerous studies and deliverables. Prior to founding Ursa Major Consulting, Dorothy was a Director for Maden Tech Consulting, a Director for Universal Systems, Inc., and held various positions through Group Manager at Planning Research Corporation (PRC).

Dorothy has designed and executed stakeholder input processes such strategic planning, performance measurement, and organizational and process alignment. Clients have included associations such as the Guild of Professional Tour Guides to governmental agencies such as Arlington County, Virginia Department of Environmental Services (DES); Virginia Industries for the Blind; the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Advisory Panel and the AbilityOne Commission. She has taught project and task management, requirements definition, facilitation, data mining, website development, and capture and proposal management.

Dorothy also has significant volunteer board experience, including having turned around a condominium association and led it from fiscal crisis to selection as Community Association of the Year for the Washington, DC Metro area by the Community Associations Institute (WMCCAI). She has been an officer in the Northern Virginia Joomla! Users Group since 2009, and served on the board of directors of the WMCCAI from 2014 to 2017. She has also taught workshops for the International Association of Facilitators.

CERTIFICATIONS

  • Project Management Professional (PMP) by the Project Management Institute (PMI), since 2005
  • Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals, Certified Data Processing Professional
  • TCC Group, Core Capacity Assessment Tool (CCAT) Facilitation Certification
  • PHP for Developers, November, 2015

EDUCATION

  • Georgetown University, Bachelor of Science, Linguistics, German & Computer Science, cum laude
  • George Washington University, Accounting and Finance
  • Cybersecurity Programming with Python, 2019