Business Intelligence Prep Work: What you can do before you begin? Part 1

By Michael DeCerbo / August 10th, 2010 / (2) comments

You wouldn’t climb Mount Everest, or sail around the world without extensive planning and preparation. Embarking on a BI adventure should be no different. Without the proper planning and preparation, your adventure could turn into a nightmare in no time. There are plenty of articles out there that talk about detailed planning methodologies, BI team resource needs and task assignments, and more traditional project management controls related to BI projects, here are a few good ones:

informIT:  A Business Intelligence Roadmap: Project Planning

BeyeNetwork:  Roles and Responsibilities in Business Intelligence Teams, Part 2

While these articles take a more generic view of Business Intelligence and project management, I want to talk about a few tasks that aren’t mentioned as much. These are lessons learned from my experience working on a variety of different BI Implementations Before kicking off your next project, here are some tasks for your business team to consider (IT considerations will be in a future discussion):

Determine Critical Business Needs and Start With the End in Mind

A BI solution should address specific business needs. Attempting to report on everything is too broad of an approach will end in failure. It’s essential to define the key business issues you are trying to solve and the key corporate goals that your BI solution will support. By starting with the end solution in mind, the team can focus on delivering to that vision.

Figure Out What you are Looking at Today

I talk to customers all the time who claim there is a common view of the business across their organization. Then they get a bunch of people in a room together and realize that everyone is speaking a different language. Things that seem like they should be simple and standard across the business, even something as simple an organization’s definitions of the countries they serve, often turn into long conversations where each stakeholder has a different opinion. Take stock of your current reporting and poll some different users on key business dimensions and transactions. Determine the true level of standardization across the organization.

Allocate Appropriate Resources, Not Just in Name

It’s one thing to have people assigned to a project; it’s another to have them as active participants. The key participants in this type of project are often the same resources that are already overbooked on other initiatives. First, management needs to understand the resource, skill, and time requirements throughout the project and allocate the resources accordingly. Then, they need to make sure they clear the way for those resources to actively participate in the project. Without the right business user involvement, the project will be in jeopardy before it begins.

Determine Your Test Plan Before the Project Begins

One of the biggest issues with BI solution implementations is the ability to validate the solution data during the QA phase of the project. Often this data doesn’t exist elsewhere in the same form so there isn’t a good set of data to validate against. How can you know if your BI solution is correct if you don’t have the structure in place to prove it? It’s imperative that a plan is put in place to make sure the team is comparing “apples to apples” during the QA cycle. Without this, your project will be in danger of going through an endless cycle of trying to tie out two sets of numbers that were never meant to be the same.

By putting some effort into the tasks listed above prior to the start of your next BI Solution project, you will help put your team on the road to success.

Part 2 of this discussion will focus on the preparation tasks for the IT organization.  Please stay tuned, thanks.

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