Project Management

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Take the stress out of delivering your business intelligence project by making sure you’re using the right systems in the right place.

Project Methodologies – Agile or Waterfall?

‘Agile’ and ‘Scrum’ project management techniques are all the rage these days, promising to achieve faster results for projects with constantly changing business requirements, by reducing project bureaucracy, meetings and documentation. These Agile approaches work well in highly experienced project teams, where all members implicitly understand how to deal with issues and risks in an informal way. They don’t work as well with a less experienced team, where the structure of the Waterfall approach (eg PRINCE) helps to provide clear guidance on best practices at each stage of the project life cycle.

So what approach should you use for BI projects? Business requirements tend to be quite high-level at the outset, and evolve during the course of the project.

This suits an Agile approach. However, a BI project is normally a business-led initiative, and as a result the core team is more used to business-as-usual activities rather than running projects.

BI and Business Performance Management Project Management

The ideal approach to managing BI projects is to blend the best elements of both management approaches as follows:

Waterfall Approach – overall governance	Agile Approach –solution design
Fix the roadmap at the beginning – where do we want to end up? Agree a Project Charter with clearly defined roles and responsibilities Establish a regular, formal, report to the Steering Committee Media articles	Use prototyping and multiple feedback cycles to let the solution design evolve Timebox each iteration cycle, rather than agreeing an exact scope upfront Conduct daily scrum meetings to assess how the design has evolved 80% is good enough – know when to stop iterating, and start using, the solution

The Practical Solution Framework (PSF) from PMsquare

Delivering a business performance management or Business Intelligence solution in a large organisation involves many complimentary disciplines, including finance/accounting, technical architecture, software implementation, project management and communications.

PMsquare has developed the Practical Solution Framework (PSF) for business performance management implementations, designed to provide:

A structured methodology to map your current processes, identify challenges & key business requirements

Recommendations to help you structure your delivery program effectively
Engagement for all stakeholders in the early stages of the project life cycle
A targeted and rapid deployment roadmap

The outcome of the PSF is to create a comprehensive solution program that shows defined links between the following:

Your Key Business Requirements
Your Data & Technology Challenges
Recommendations of Approach
Overall Performance Management Strategy

The PSF divides the performance management project into six defined stages, namely:

Project Stage	Description	Deliverables
Prepare	Establishing the project charter and initial fact-finding	Project Charter
Analyse	A deeper dive into key areas, such as current processes and source systems	Current State Analysis Document
Design	High-level process and model design, and a roadmap for delivery	High-Level Design Document
Build	Build and testing of technical components, detailed ‘to-be’ process mapping	Process & System Specifications
Deploy	System and Acceptance testing, change management and training	Operations & Training Manuals
Operate	Post-implementation review, partnering for long-term success	Post-Implementation Review, Ongoing ‘Health-Check’ Reports

The PSF also identifies five Work Streams as follows:

Work Stream	Description	Ideal Contacts
Communications & People Management	Project & Stakeholder Management	Project Sponsor
Scoping & Functionality	Process & Model Design	Finance & Business Managers, Business Analysts
Hardware & Infrastructure	Technology Gap Analysis	IT Management
Source Systems & Data	Systems Architecture Design	Finance Systems Owners
User Adoption	Training Needs Analysis, Practical Rollout Planning	Finance & Business Managers

Where do I start?

If this sounds like a project approach that appeals to you, you may be interested in some of our ‘self-help’ guides. These are particularly aimed at Finance professionals and accountants who are contemplating their first major technology project:

Project Preparation Checklist – to make sure you haven’t missed anything important
Risk Mitigation Plans – dealing with the uncertainties in a structured way
Budgeting & Planning Project Best Practice Guides – practical tips from the experts
Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting to the Max – the extended version, covering strategy and selection, as well as implementation

Project Management

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