Business Intelligence
Management
Need
business intelligence management for an information management project
and want some practical suggestions to ensure rapid project delivery?
Business intelligence management management requires:
- Business intelligence project management skills; and
- A business intelligence project framework.
What are business intelligence project management skills?
Project management skills needed for information
management projects
include the usual IT project management skill set but also include
technical skills not
normally required for traditional project management
Why is that?
Business intelligence projects are data centric and require highly
skilled IT specialists to handle things such as:
- Requirements e.g.
these are different than traditional projects with much more
emphasis on data requirements, and business intelligence usage
requirements;
- Architecture
and design is different as much if the emphasis is on
data storage and data movement;
- Quality assurance testing is highly
technical and requires significant involvement from the
technical team; and
- Release
testing
is sometimes more extensive and error prone than traditional projects
and needs to be carefully managed to ensure that time is not lost e.g.
if a back-up is not taken at the correct step, and something goes wrong
that involves a restore, much time could be lost waiting for a restore
from earlier back-ups.
What skills does a
business intelligence project manager require?
Business intelligence
project managers should have:
- The usual
project
management skills including planning, organizing, and
communication;
- An excellent
knowledge of business intelligence policies, standards, best
practices and project methodology;
- Demonstrated experience providing technical
leadership
to multi-disciplinary teams comprised of requirements analysts, data
architects, data movement and BI designer/developers, quality assurance
testers, and release management teams;
- Experience with project
management tools such as Microsoft Project or Omni Plan,
and other
tools such as requirements management e.g Clearquest, ReqPro,
document
management, testing and configuration management; and
This experience can only
really be gained through 12-15
years of technical design and
project management experience in a variety of information management,
data warehousing and business intelligence environments.
What is a business
intelligence project management framework?
A business intelligence projects methodology
provides
predictable, repeatable
processes designed for use when conducting information management
projects.
It should
include the following key project management phases:
- Planning
& analysis, which should define roles and
responsibilities and work breakdown structure required to:
- architecture and design, which should define
the architecture for the entire solution;
- Build
and test, which should deliver:
- Code required
to extract data from the
source systems;
- Programs
that will load
the data warehouse with the source data;
- Processes to clean
the data;
- Programs and scripts that ensure backup/recovery;
- System processes to handle the data
warehouse
manager;
- A query
manager to support
business
intelligence requirements;
- Pre-developed
queries and reports and
user
access tools;
- A set of repeatable system
integration,
volume
and aggregation tests; and
- A set of repeatable manual
reconciliation
tasks.
- User
acceptance test (UAT) should ensure that the
business intelligence solution meets agreed requirements; and
- Release
to production, which should:
- Migrate
the business intelligence solution into a production environment;
- Pre-load the Data Warehouse; and
- Complete final performance testing
What else does business intelligence management require:
- Project management templates; and
- A responsible, approve, consult, inform (RACI) matrix.
Summary...
Information
management projects are data centric and require highly skilled IT
specialists including specialized business intelligence management
leadership skills.
Don’t make the mistake of having a project manager learn on your
project!
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