The Four Legs of a Successful Business Intelligence
(BI) Project Team
- Rick
Sherman, Athena IT Solutions -
A successful BI project team is
like a four-legged table - each leg holds up its share
of the weight. Remove one and the project wobbles. The
four legs of a team are:
1. Project Sponsorship and Governance
2. Project Management
3. Development Team (Core Team)
4. Extended Project Team
1. Project Sponsorship
and Governance
IT and the business should form a BI steering committee
to sponsor and govern design, development, deployment,
and ongoing support. It needs both the CIO and a business
executive, such as CFO, COO, or a senior VP of marketing/sales
to commit budget, time, and resources. The business
sponsor needs the project to succeed. The CIO is committed
to what is being built and how.
2. Project Management
Project management includes managing daily tasks, reporting
status, and communicating to the extended project team,
steering committee, and affected business users. The
project management team needs extensive business knowledge,
BI expertise, DW architecture background, and people
management, project management, and communications skills.
The project management team includes three functions
or members:
Project development
manager - Responsible for deliverables, managing
team resources, monitoring tasks, reporting status,
and communications. Requires a hands-on IT manager
with a background in iterative development. Must understand
the changes caused by this approach and the impact
on the business, project resources, schedule and the
trade-offs.
Business advisor - Works
within the sponsoring business organization. Responsible
for the deliverables of the business resources on
the project's extended team. Serves as the business
advocate on the project team and the project advocate
within the business community. Often, the business
advocate is a project co-manager who defers to the
IT project manager the daily IT tasks but oversees
the budget and business deliverables.
BI/DW project advisor
- Has enough expertise with architectures and technologies
to guides the project team on their use. Ensures that
architecture, data models, databases, ETL code, and
BI tools are all being used effectively and conform
to best practices and standards.
3. Development Team (Core Team)
The core project team is divided into four sub-teams:
Business requirements
- This sub-team may have business people who understand
IT systems, or IT people who understand the business.
In either case, the team represents the business and
their interests. They are responsible for gathering
and prioritizing business needs; translating them
into IT systems requirements; interacting with the
business on the data quality and completeness; and
ensuring the business provides feedback on how well
the solutions generated meet their needs.
BI architecture - Develops
the overall BI architecture, selects the appropriate
technology, creates the data models, maps the overall
data workflow from source systems to BI analytics,
and oversees the ETL and BI development teams from
a technical perspective.
ETL development - Receives
the business and data requirements, as well as the
target data models to be used by BI analytics. Develops
the ETL code needed to gather data from the appropriate
source systems into the BI databases. Often, a system
analyst who is a expert in the source systems such
as SAP is part of the team to provide knowledge of
the data sources, customizations, and data quality.
BI development - Create
the reports or analytics that the business users will
interact with to do their jobs. This is often a very
iterative process and requires much interaction with
the business users.
4. Extended Project Team
There are several functions required by the project
team that are often accomplished through an "extended"
team:
Players - A group of business
users are signed up to "play with" or test
the BI analytics and reports as they are developed
to provide feedback to the core development team.
This is a virtual team that gets together at specific
periods of the project but they are committed to this
role during those periods.
Testers - A group of resources
are gathered, similarly to the virtual team above,
to perform more extensive QA testing of the BI analytics,
ETL processes, and overall systems testing. You may
have project members test other members' work, such
as the ETL team test the BI analytics and visa versa.
Operators - IT operations
is often separated from the development team but it
is critical that they are involved from the beginning
of the project to ensure that the systems are developed
and deployed within your company's infrastructure.
Key functions are database administration, systems
administration, and networks. In addition, this extended
team may also include help desk and training resources
if they are usually provided outside of development.
© 2003 Athena IT Solutions
This article may be reprinted
freely online, as long as the entire article, copyright,
and the following resource block are included:
Rick
Sherman is the founder of Athena IT Solutions,
a consulting firm that offers data
warehouse assessments, full-scale implementation,
research, and education.
Rick is a published author in technical publications
and a speaker at industry conferences and events.
He can be reached at rsherman@athena-solutions.com
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