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Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology

Chapter 1. Defining a Program

The chapters in this book are intended to give you recipes aiding you in defining, starting, controlling, and wrapping up your Business Intelligence Initiative (BI Initiatives).

This chapter assesses your current project delivery methodology, and highlights areas which may need to be modified or enhanced to support your business intelligence program. In order to do this, you will be using the Project Readiness Worksheet, which is split into the following recipes:

Program or a project
Mapping your business culture
Adapting your project delivery methodology
Assessing your project team
Organizing your project team

Introduction

This chapter explores recipes designed to give you an insight into your BI Initiative.

BI Initiatives can be daunting, and seem complex to project managers or team members who have never been part of a Business Intelligence project before.

By analyzing a few key processes, understanding your organization and culture, adapting your methodology, and determining your project team, you can kick your BI Initiative off with the right start.

In order to facilitate this assessment, the project readiness worksheet will be used. The worksheet will ask a series of questions which you can complete, and at the end of each recipe give recommendations based on your responses. This worksheet will provide valuable insight into your organization.

Program or a project

Determining whether the BI Initiative is a program or a project can be very subjective. Labeling the initiative is not important, but rather understanding its characteristics better to structure your initiative.

Getting ready

Before starting the assessment, it is important to have some general information regarding your initiative, namely:

Intended scope of the BI Initiative
Targeted consumers
Planned deadline dates
Understanding of the type of software and hardware which will be utilized
Resources which may be assigned to the project, both internal and external

How to do it...

The most efficient way to understand your initiative and gather information, is to develop a questionnaire or survey. To do this, you could use any of the standard web tools available to build a survey or a simple spreadsheet.

1. Open a spreadsheet application and create a worksheet called Definition:
2. Create a series of questions which focus on determining if your initiative is a project or a program. Questions should focus on Initiative type, Scope, Support, Integration, and Costing. Some sample questions are as follows:
3. Ensure that your questions only allow a Yes or No answer. This solicits direct answers and starts people thinking about the answers.
4. Save the spreadsheet as Readiness Assessment.
5. Email the questionnaire to the key supporters of the Business Initiative.

How it works...

Based on the answers from the survey, you can determine whether you have a potential program or a project. A set of general definitions for a program and project are as follows:

A program — This is defined as several interrelated projects that have a goal of improving an organization's performance
A project — This is defined as a unique and temporary construct with a defined beginning and end, to meet a set of goals or objectives

BI Initiatives are normally focused on organizational improvements, or initiatives (regulatory and so on) of some description. These initiatives do not have a set duration, but rather are implemented using a system of measurement and feedback. As long as they attain the objectives (set measurements), they are normally continued.

Note

Determining whether a BI Initiative is a program or a project is an important part of the BI Initiative, because a key success factor is the way it influences the organization, and how the initiative morphs as the environment changes, ensuring long term benefits.

Each project within the BI Initiative should be focused on delivering unique benefits to the organization. These deliverables should be identified and sequenced to ensure that multiple projects or phases can run simultaneously. BI Initiatives are normally mapped to organizational or departmental goals, objectives, and metrics. These metrics are normally evolving and perpetual. The BI Initiative should include continued feedback and improvement to ensure that the program or project remains aligned with the business.

Multiple work packages, subject areas, or rollouts need to be analyzed before development, to understand how the deliverables of one project or phase have an impact on and contribute to subsequent projects or phases.

BI Initiatives rely on a good technical architecture, infrastructure, and integration to be successful. The integration points can easily become projects of their own, given the complexity and the deliverables. It is key to identify these projects early in the process and begin the key foundation infrastructure and integration early in the BI Initiative.

Subject areas can be prioritized and delivered based on costs. Tracking costs and estimates by subject area delivers valuable information to the project. It is important to agree upon and build a standard estimation model to cost a subject area; use a similar means to track expenditure and completion. It is best to start this from the beginning, else trying to manage and reconcile this information after the fact can be cumbersome and time consuming.

Global or multi-site rollouts require you to understand the type of architecture you are putting in place, and the support mechanism for this. Deploying development tools across large networks or geographic locations will have an impact on schedules as you cannot be as efficient. Additional techniques such as remote desktops or access are required for remote locations. Additional support teams or shifts may be necessary to support multi-site implementations. Both of these will affect cost and schedule, and are commonly forgotten within BI Initiatives.

Multi-language requirements not only affect the technical solution but also the business solution. Translating information is costly and time consuming. These factors need to be incorporated into the overall program.

There's more...

Whether you classify your initiative as a program or a multi-phase large project, it is important to realize that you will have multiple streams, and should structure the program or project into smaller modules.

By doing so you have the opportunity for running these smaller modules simultaneously.

Deliverables, templates, and work practices should be efficiently and effectively planned to facilitate reuse, and minimize overhead. By understanding and communicating this early in the lifecycle, you will gain the correct support and awareness.

With the Readiness Assessment you can schedule additional meeting sessions with the necessary stakeholders. The additional sessions include the following:

Overview
Data Source Review
Business Process Review
System Architecture
ETL/ELT Overview
Database Standards

These sessions will give you valuable information to gain insight into your Business Intelligence Initiative, outlining high-level information or gaps. If you are implementing BI applications, you will want to alter the questions to focus more on the pre-defined requirements for the application, and how they will integrate into your environment.

Mapping your business culture

The business culture of the organization will greatly influence the way in which you will structure and gather requirements for your BI Initiative. It is important to understand your business community so that you can tailor the communications and information to be effective and relevant. By asking a few simple questions, it is possible to determine the type of business community.

Getting ready

Before starting the exercise, you need to identify a few key resources to gather some information. The resources you will need to identify are as follows:

A C-Level or upper management executive sponsor of the BI Initiative
A line manager who will utilize the solution
An IT manager who will be responsible for maintaining the solution

How to do it...

To understand your business culture you will need to enhance the Readiness Assessment. The assessment will be enhanced by more open-ended questions which enable insight into the businesses growth strategy, and how the information is managed and consumed.

1. Open your Readiness Assessment Worksheet and add a new worksheet called Business Culture:
2. Create questions in the worksheet which focus on the way the organization has grown, the phase in which the organization is, information accessibility, tools availability, and so on. See the Readiness Assessment for more sample questions.
3. This time distribute the worksheet to a selective people within the organization at first to gain an understanding.
4. Collect responses to the questions and collate the information.
5. Set up follow-up meetings with the survey participants to review their answers.

How it works...

By understanding the business culture of your organization, you can approach BI Initiative effectively.

Review the information returned from the Readiness Assessment. Should your results indicate that your organization manages by using multiple reports from one or more systems, then you should focus on using the reports as a basis for your analysis. By following a bottom-up approach to analyze these reports, you can understand the key information required by the business. You can use the Report Register to identify and register all the different reports you uncover.

If however your organization has a good understanding of the metrics, they will be used to monitor the business processes across one or more systems by following a top-down approach to analyzing your requirements. With this approach, you need to understand the metrics used by the organization and how they identify and correct an issue. You can use the Metric Register to identify and register all the different metrics you uncover.

There's more...

By understanding your organization you will be more equipped to tailor your BI Initiative to your audience and organization's culture. Understanding the basics of the organization can facilitate more effective communication, and hopefully a greater adoption rate for the initiative. Now we'll look at some key examples of different organizational cultures and the insights they can provide.

Organizations that have grown through acquisition

In these organizations, there could be a lot of different business processes and systems storing for key information. If this is so, then there could be a master data management concern to the real source of information, for key business information. It is best to include additional time for data discovery within the project plan, as a real understanding is required to understand the different sources of information and the nuances based on the source system.

Note

Be aware of any standardization projects or system migration projects which may be active as these are a good source of information for the BI Initiative.

Expect to see an increase in systems and differences in business processes as the new organizations are folded into your organization. For your BI Initiative to consume information from these new sources, a flexible architecture and methodology will need to be developed and adopted. The BI Initiative can provide a vital role in this strategy, by having a standard integration model enabling the business to integrate new organizations quicker and more efficiently.

Organizations that have grown organically

This organization normally limits the number of systems and variations in business processes. These main systems, similar to an ERP system, are good sources of information for business processes and key information.

A standardization of business processes and consolidation of systems are the normal progression of an organization growing organically. Be aware of upgrade projects or a project that will replace existing systems; these will normally introduce enhancement for business processes and key functionality in core systems. Again, a flexible architecture and methodology are key to ensuring that the BI Initiative is capable of embracing this change.

Organizations and growth phases

For an organization in a growth phase, typically information requested will be to do with expansion metrics, sales, volumes, and so on. The focus of the organization will be external, and to the markets. This enables the BI Initiative to focus efforts on delivering information which can increase these metrics, or provide insight into increasing the revenue, market share, and so forth.

If the organization however is in a contraction phase, the metrics and focus are normally on cost reduction and containment. For this, the BI Initiative should focus effort on optimizing existing business processes, and look for ways to reduce cost. Finding relationships between metrics is essential in this phase of an organization. Thus, correlations between spend and efficiency are invaluable at this stage.

Metric driven organizations

These organizations normally use management by exception. They use metrics to identify problem areas, and then drill into the problem areas to understand issues. If your organization has adopted such practices, then they are an advanced organization and the BI Initiative should assist by automating and distributing these metrics. Organizations like these normally have a single version or very few variations of the same information, making it easier to find the trusted source of the information. BI Initiatives in these environments are normally very rare.

Report managed organizations

Organizations that manage by means of reports or details are normally very early in their BI Initiative. Organizations at this point require a gradual approach to adopting Business Intelligence. For these organizations, it is essential to invest a lot of time in education and communication around the BI Initiative, to outline the benefits and approach. It will be key to prove to business users that the BI Initiative can produce reports of equal or better quality, in a more efficient manner than the current manual processes. In an organization you will normally find multiple reports that represent the same information in a slightly different manner. This will be evident if you analyze a business process and gather all the reports and information used during the business process. Reducing the number of reports, gaining consensus, and providing automated information are paramount to success in these situations. BI Initiatives in these environments are normally very common.

Once this is done, taking the organization to the next step of common business metrics and enabling them to manage by exception is possible.

Understanding if a line manager has the necessary information, and the amount of effort needed to obtain this information, is a great way to determine whether the area of responsibility requires immediate attention. This helps set priorities for the BI Initiative.

Utilizing existing reports as a basis for requirements gathering helps the project to contain scope, and business users to understand the charter of the initiative. It is not recommended to ask a business user what they want as it is a very ambiguous question.

Identify the key information that is required to operationally manage a department, or report information to higher levels of management. Try and identify which systems provide key pieces of information. This helps not only to identify this information, but gives you insight into which systems the business determines as the source of record for the information.

Information is normally extracted from systems and then manually manipulated in spreadsheets. The spreadsheets inherently contain a lot of business rules in the form of the following:

Calculations
Data standardizations
Groupings
Filters
Key attributes
Visualization cues

It is important not only to look at the spreadsheets as example reports, but also to capture these business rules and standardize across the organization.

Adapting your project delivery methodology

This recipe focuses on how to adapt your current project delivery methodology to cater for a BI Initiative. For BI Initiatives there is no correct or incorrect methodology. So if you follow Mike 2.0, Scrum, Prince2, DSDM Atern, Waterfall, Prototyping, Spiral, or some other methodology, it does not really matter. These are personal preferences and standards set by your organization. It is important to understand a few characteristics of a BI Initiative, and how to adapt your methodology to cater for these characteristics.

Getting ready

Contact your project management office if one has been created, or look for projects which have successfully been completed within your organization. From these projects, gather the project methodology.

To use this recipe, you need to be familiar with your project delivery methodology.

How to do it...

From the artifacts gathered, create a simple process flow for your methodology outlining your phases.

1. Review the typical project delivery methodology phases:
2. Create a lightweight methodology which is easy to understand with a few phases, by defining the phases that make sense within your organization. For example, Definition, Data Discovery, Development, Testing, Promote, and Production:

How it works...

By understanding some of the more prevalent characteristics of a BI Initiative, you have the opportunity to adapt your project delivery methodology to cater for these characteristics.

The methodology should be clear and easy to understand. The phases should be encapsulated enough to be self-contained, but have sufficient inputs and outputs to allow for interaction with other phases while running in parallel. All phases should be broken into defined time spans. The key to the methodology is to make it efficient and repeatable. If it does not make sense, it is probably too complicated.

There's more...

The key to adapting your project delivery methodology is to deliver results in a short amount of time, while providing visibility into the process by the business user. Delivering the benefit quickly, consistently, and efficiently is essential for a BI Initiative to be deemed as a success whilst maintaining constant communication, feedback, and improvement.