An Introduction to Accomplish Agile

Business Intelligence For Your Business

By Mona Lebied in Business Intelligence, Feb 21st 2017

When it comes to implementing and managing a successful BI strategy we have

always proclaimed: start small, use the right tools, and involve your team. We know
that the best approach is an iterative and flexible approach. When encouraging these
BI best practices what we are really doing is advocating for agile business intelligence.
To help you implement these processes we have come up with a beginner’s guide on
agile business intelligence.
Exclusive Bonus Content: Get Our Top 6 Tips For Your Agile BI Strategy!
Download our free guide and become an Agile BI wizard.

What is Agile Business Intelligence?

The term “agile” was originally conceived in 2011 as a software development
methodology. 17 software developers met to discuss lightweight development methods
and subsequently produced the following manifesto:

Manifesto for Agile Software Development:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left
more.

And like that agile was born. As a software development methodology, agile is a time-
boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally,
instead of trying to deliver the entire product at the end. Due to the success of its
methodology Agile has successfully migrated beyond its initial scope and is now being
used successfully as a project management methodology across numerous industries.
With an emphasis on adaptivity over rigidity and collaboration over hierarchy, it’s easy
to see why agile is becoming the chosen methodology for so many.

Source: www.disciplinedAgiledelivery.com
Agile Business Intelligence Methodology
Business intelligence is moving away from the traditional engineering model: analysis,
design, construction, testing and implementation. In the traditional model
 communication between developers and business users is not a priority. Also,
developers are more focused on the data and technology than answering the more
important questions:

 “What business questions do we want to answer with the available data in order to
support the decision-making process?”
 “What do our users actually need?”

Through Agile adoption, organizations are seeing a quicker return on their BI

investments and are able to quickly adapt to changing business needs. Below is
a basic Agile framework in regards to BI implementation and management. You may
find different versions of this to adopt but the underlying methodology is the same.

1. Concept
This is the stage where you start to develop a loose BI vision. Agile best practice is
light documentation: you don’t have to heavily map this out. A whiteboard meeting will
suffice.

2. Inception
The inception stage is the critical initiation stage. This is when you first implement
active stakeholder participation. You also:

 Train project stakeholders in Agile fundamentals

 Determine BI funding and support
 Identify key business requirements and needs. This includes understanding the
business questions to be answered through the BI system
 Discover the available data sources
 Understand the expected information delivery avenues: reports, dashboards, ad hoc
reporting, etc.
 Then prioritize key business requirements and needs with time and budget constraints
in mind. An effective prioritization technique is to write user stories for each business
question identified. Then use a frequency vs. difficulty quadrant to prioritize them.
The top right quadrant includes the business questions that are most frequently asked
and are the most difficult to answer with existing data. These stories can be considered
as high priority. The bottom right corner of least difficult and most requested might be
some good low hanging fruit as well!
 Source: www.thoughtworks.com

 During this stage you are also researching and vetting which business intelligence
software to use. You need to determine if you are going with an on-premise or cloud
hosted strategy. Then, you need to choose AND set-up the right BI system for your
organization!

3. Construction Iterations
During construction you are delivering a working system that meets the evolving needs
of stakeholders. You will continually cycle through this stage to stage 4 at set
increments, usually 1-3 weeks long. Eventually after stages 3 and 4 are done you move
to stage 5 (production). During construction, you:

 Actively involve key stakeholders once again

 Collaboratively develop reports
 Utilize the “just in time” (JIT) modeling: identify an issue that needs resolving, grab a
few co-workers and explore the issue, and then everyone continues as before. This is
also known as model storming.
 Test BI in small internal group
 Exclusive Bonus Content: Get Our Top 6 Tips For Your Agile BI Strategy!
Download our free guide and become an Agile BI wizard.
4. Transition (aka Release or End Game)
During this stage you release the previous construction iteration into production. You
then return to iteration and then return to transition again to release those changes to
production. During transition, you:

 Involve key stakeholders (yes still!)

 Finalize testing
 Finalize documentation, where necessary
 Pilot release to small subgroup
 Train end users
 Train production staff
 Deploy into production

5. Production
Production is where you operate and support everything that has come out of the
construction and transition iterations into production. During this stage, you:

 Operate and support the system, dashboards, and reports

 Identify defects and enhancements. Any of these changes must start at the
construction stage and work their way to production.

Top Tips for Agile BI

Now that you have the overall basic framework, here are some top Agile BI tips to keep
in mind.

1. Active stakeholder engagement

It is so important we are stating it again. Stakeholder involvement is critical throughout
every stage of your BI project. In Agile, stakeholders and product owners experience
team progress at regular intervals throughout the process, and increased stakeholder
input means better overall business value.

2. Embrace an evolutionary approach

It is a given: requirements, or at least your understanding of them, will change
throughout the lifecycle of your project for a variety of reasons. To best develop a
solution that meets stakeholder needs you have to take an evolutionary (iterative and
incremental) approach to development. Envision the requirements and architecture at
a high-level to start, but model storm the details just in time (JIT).

3. Document only when necessary

 This tip should be a favorite. Where traditional methods require a great deal of time in
planning and writing documentation, Agile relies on daily scrums and face-to-face
interactions for team communication. By minimizing documentation, teams are able to
respond quickly to project obstacles and remove redundancies.

4. Accept change
A changed requirement late in the lifecycle is a competitive advantage if you can act
on it. Instead of adopting strict change management processes, adopt an Agile
approach to change management. With the Agile methodology, stakeholders can
easily change their minds as the progress progresses. This is essential in BI and for
effective organizations!

5. Test throughout the lifecycle

Remember Agile business intelligence is a continual process and not a one time
implementation. Data changes. Organizations change. You will need to continually
return to your business dashboards to make sure that they are working, the data is
accurate and they are still answering the right questions in the most effective way.

6. Choose the right BI Software

Don’t go through all this effort to be Agile and then use a business intelligence platform
that is stuck in traditional methods. Make sure your BI software:

 Supports quick iterations: iterations will take longer if your tool is cumbersome, hard to
use, or does not work well together with other systems and data sources
 Makes basic features easy to use: self-service BI tools allow even not so technically-
savvy end-users to participate in all stages
 Facilitates easily delivery to a large audience: valuable feedback will be lost if the
software restricts the amount of end-users that can provide feedback and engage in
the process. You want an organization-wide buy-in of your business intelligence
strategy. To this end, everyone that should have access must get access.
 Support collaboration: to foster active stakeholder participation the tool must make
collaboration between these users easy.
 Allows you to easily publish reports: the whole point of Agile is to get the product out
there. Find a tool that allows you to rapidly deploy new dashboards and reports. Just
make sure you can easily make changes to them moving forward.

Exclusive Bonus Content: Get Our Top 6 Tips For Your Agile BI Strategy!
Download our free guide and become an Agile BI wizard.

Use An Agile Strategy to Get your Business

Intelligence Off the Ground…
….and keep it relevant and effective.
Agile analytics embrace change, viewing it not as an obstacle but a competitive
advantage. The result is more flexible and more effective BI that is situated for success
in a continuously evolving industry. Use this beginner’s guide to implement agile
business intelligence at your organization and reap the benefits!

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