Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology: Take your data warehousing and business intelligence to the next level with this practical guide to Oracle Database 11g. Packed with illustrations, tips, and examples, it has over 80 advanced recipes to fine-tune your skills and knowledge.

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

For information about Blueprint, look at Chapter 5, The Blueprint. For more information about using this information, look at Chapter 2, Establishing the Project.

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.

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

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.

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.

For more information on how to structure the different work practices, refer to the recipes in Chapter 2, Establishing the Project.

In order to assess your project team, it is important to first understand the skills which you will require from your team to complete the project:

By understanding the roles required for the project, you can effectively recruit your team and identify any gaps in your resource pool.

For more information on the different responsibilities by the roles, refer to the work practices recipes, in Chapter 2,Establishing the Project.

Depending on how you plan to run your project, you could choose one of the following models for your team:

Option 1: Model based on subject areas with multi-skilled resources.

Option 2: Model based on resource specialized skills.

Option 2 is the more advanced model for an initiative which will run multiple subject areas concurrently. This model is effective if you have a good grasp of the methodology, and some experience.

For more information on the different deliverables by the roles, refer to the work practices recipes, in Chapter 2, Establishing the Project.