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