Post Go-Live

In the previous chapter, we looked at the importance of data validation. We also looked at visualization validation. Validation is a sensitive topic as the adoption of BI depends largely on it.

We also went through the various ways to do validation. The chapter also looked at the importance of UAT (User Acceptance and Training) and making users comfortable with dashboard. Taking care of validation will help the consultants to get the business users' confidence and also avoid extensive rework.

In this chapter, we will cover what a consultant should look at from a post go-live perspective The areas covered are:-

• Adoption Strategy
• Maintenance Strategy
• Auditing
• Documentation

Post go-live activities help build user confidence and lead to increase in usage of Qlik Sense.

Adoption strategy

One way to measure success of a BI Project is to see how good the adoption is. We can measure this with a Qlik app. We recommend the use of Qlik Sense Montioring apps to analyze the logs and analyze user adoption. There can be tendency for a consultant to relax after project go-live. Once the project go-live happens, it's very crucial for the consultant to ensure that the adoption is high and there is no loss of momentum.

In this section, let's look at the various factors which contribute toward adoption, such as user training, user manual, demos, and videos.

User training

User training is the most important part in adoption strategy. We must never forget that as a consultant we are very familiar...

Maintenance strategy

Maintenance strategy is another important area which is necessary post go-live. What are the different areas a consultant should look at? Some of them are mentioned next.

Application performance

The unique selling proposition (USP) of Qlik Sense is its in-memory architecture and fast performance. Business users are always short on time, and long wait times for a BI application is recipe for failure.

Over a period of time, the application size increases and the number of users or concurrency of users may also increase, thereby slowing down performance. More applications which consume resources on the Qlik Sense server may also be added .

Qlik Sense provides some in built applications which help you to review...

Auditing strategy

Auditing is an important aspect of any BI project. Organizations are governed by regulatory rules and non-compliance can have huge damages. Thus, governance has become a key aspect for organizations these days. The organizations can even have full time auditing departments.

Qlik is very good in governance and has a specific audit admin role for the QMC. The Audit admin has to ensure that the auditing requirements are fulfilled. Some of the things an Audit Admin has to look at are mentioned as follows:

• Look at License compliance
• Keep checking for users who have left the company should be disabled and license revoked
• Ensure users have access to relevant streams
• Ensure that applications meant for specific streams are published only in that stream
• Ensure users are allowed correct rights (for example, export rights should be judiciously allocated)
• Keep auditing the...

Documentation

Documentation is a necessary point to be considered and we have stressed this at multiple places in the book. We won't be covering this in detail again, but it's important to maintain the relevant documentation, such as scope of work, functional documents, project plan, code comments, test cases, deployment document, and architecture document.

People change over time and having good documentation helps the people who weren't part of the project earlier to quickly get hang of the project and cater to newer needs of the business or modification in the existing project.

BI project also involves integration and customization, and these too should be clearly documented. Other documents which should be maintained are the QMC settings.

Summary

The post go-live period is many a times neglected, and this leads to a drop in adoption of the software, thus resulting in poor return on investments for a company. The post go-live phase of a project requires extensive interaction with business users and continuous initial hand holding. This chapter's focus was on ways to make the post go-live phase a success.

We studied the importance of user trainings, maintaining manuals, and FAQs. Videos are often a great way for users to learn, and they should be used extensively. We had a look at other aspects which contribute to good performance like continuous monitoring of application response time and ways to handle a performance degradation. For the business users, what matters most are factors like ease of use, ability of self-service, performance, mobility, and accuracy of data.

Other aspects which we should look at...