Are You the Usain Bolt of Business Intelligence?
When you run a race, the start is paramount to your success. However, even if you have a good start, you need a strong middle and end of the race to compete successfully. This is a good analogy for your business intelligence (BI) project as well. You need to be cognizant of the entire project life cycle, or you may end up with a solution that is poorly architect-ed, populated with questionable data, or isn’t well-adopted by the business users.
Listed below are some items to consider before you begin a BI project.
1) Before the project begins:
a) Rally the business users on the concepts of BI and the benefits – what to expect.
b) Identify key stakeholders (business decision-makers) and get them in-sync for the duration of the project.
c) Identify the source systems and base the data marts on key business processes. (Find the first win-win for the phase I).
d) Capture the holistic view of the project, but deliver in small phases, then expand to new phases. (think holistic; don’t have a narrow view )
2) During the project:
a) Maintain communication between functional (business) and IT; also remind IT this is the “business users” system, not IT’s system…..Create a plan to keep the project visible to all and share the goals and milestones that have been hit.
b) Concentrate on the data quality. Raise flags on data issues or limitations.
c) Identify analytical views that the business users will understand and benefit from. Get the rendered data into their hands sooner than later. Plan to demo a prototype within weeks, not months. Receiving feedback as soon as possible is critical, therefore by providing the business users with a visual to review, benefits the project.
3) After the project ends:
a) Ensure that end-users are properly trained and are using the system appropriately. Provide a collab tool for feedback.
b) Encourage ideas and feedback from the business community
c) Understand that BI projects evolve and never really ends; ensure the stake owners understand that. Hit milestones, but keep the momentum going.
(There is a lot more to add, but we can only touch on some key points).
Note the common theme of involving the business – whether it is during design, development, test and/or future enhancements to the system (to name a few) – getting the business users excited about the end-product will make the time spent educating, while also learning from them well worth it. Yes, it’s a threat to some that can’t let go of excel and silo data, but BI success will help put an end to that.
In the coming months I will go into more detail for many of the items listed above. In the meantime, checkout this YouTube clip that represents the aforementioned point:
And when you are planning your upcoming BI initiatives, make sure you think about the start, middle, and end of the project to ensure a successful implementation.











