A Business Intelligence Roadmap: Project Planning
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Chapter Overview
This chapter covers the following topics:
-
Things to consider about project planning
-
Managing the BI project and planning for setbacks
-
Items to address when creating a project charter, such as goals and objectives, scope issues, project risks, constraints, assumptions, change control, and issues management
-
Aspects of project planning, with a focus on activities and tasks, estimating techniques, resource assignment, task and resource dependencies, critical path determination, and creation of the final project schedule
-
Brief descriptions of the project planning activities, the deliverables resulting from those activities, and the roles involved
-
The risks of not performing Step 3
Things to Consider
Business Involvement
-
Do we have a strong business sponsor? Do we have a backup business sponsor?
-
Do we have stakeholders with whom we need to communicate regularly?
-
How much time is the business representative committing to this project? Is he or she assigned to this project full-time, or will he or she be available on request only?
Project Scope and Deliverables
-
Did we receive a formal request for a BI project?
-
How detailed are the requirements?
-
What are the requested deliverables?
-
Can we implement the requested scope given the schedule and the available resources?
Cost-Benefit Analysis
-
Have we already performed a cost-benefit analysis?
-
What is the expected return on investment (ROI)?
-
How soon do we expect the ROI to materialize?
Infrastructure
-
Did we review our technical and nontechnical infrastructure components?
-
Does our infrastructure have any gaps?
-
Which infrastructure components will we need to work on and deliver as part of the BI project?
-
Which technical infrastructure components?
-
Which nontechnical infrastructure components?
-
Staffing and Skills
Have we already identified the team members?
Do all team members have the skills needed to perform the responsibilities of their assigned roles?
Should we schedule any training before the project kickoff?
Is the project manager assigned to this project full-time? Or does he or she have other administrative responsibilities? If the latter, who will take over those other responsibilities for the duration of this project?
BI projects are not like other projects with a finite and static set of requirements from one business person or one department. Instead, the purpose of an integrated BI decision-support environment is to provide cross-organizational business analysis capabilities to all business people and all departments in the organization. That involves a variety of new tasks, shifted roles and responsibilities, and a more hands-on project management approach.