Chapter 12

Building the BI Project Plan

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Content
Getting your plan started
Entering tasks into the plan
Setting milestones
Listing resources on your project
Keeping the plan up-to-date
Working out contingency plans

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Introduction
The BI project plan is the primary tracking and control
mechanism for your business intelligence implementation.
Its where you list and organize every single task required to
make your BI project a reality.
The project plan is there to help you choreograph every
move the project team members will have to make.
The project plan is really a dual-purpose document:
Its the high-level blueprint that maps, ahead of time, which
tasks have to be done, in what order, and by whom.
Its the central organizing tool for the project team and for
many of the stakeholders as well. The plan keeps everybody
marching to the beat of the same drum.

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Planning the Plan

Revisiting the vision
Start the process of developing your project plan
with the basic goals of the project:
Why is the organization undertaking this venture?
What are they expecting to get from it?
Who needs to know the project plan?

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Project Resources
With a technology architecture in mind and a list of major
applications to build, the project manager works with his
project team to begin working out the major tasks of the
project.
A list of required skills must accompany each step so the
project manager can assign a role (or roles) to cover the task.
Early on you should assemble a general list of roles required
for the project.
A role is a standard combination of abilities and sets of skills
that commonly go together.

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BI Project Roles
The roles on a BI team are as diverse as the
applications and tools that make up your
solution.
Team members
Project manager
Business analysts
BI developers
Database administrator
Data administrator
ETL developers
Testers
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BI Project Roles Continued..

Other players
End-users
Network infrastructure
Risk-management and security experts
Subject-matter experts

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Project Tasks
After you have the BI projects roles developed and its
resources designated, you can begin listing the major tasks in
the project plan.
Creating a project plan is a naturally a process of iterations;
its common to start out at a high level, jotting down the
major components, go through the plan again to add more
detail and go through it again to add even more detail.
The project plan is a navigation aid both a map that helps
you plan prior to embarking and a compass that lets you know
when youve lost your way.

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First pass: Project milestones

Milestones are broad targets that large swathes of the
project team work towards.
In a large, multi-faceted project like a BI initiative, reaching
each milestone indicates the completion of a discrete goal or
task.
A milestone indicates an important step in the project, like
the start or finish of a phase.
The milestones should be aligned with the overall strategy
and architecture of the project. That means they arent
always technology-focused.

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Second pass: High-level tasks

In this loop, its time to start adding the high-level tasks required to
reach each milestone.
The original project roadmap should provide a number of major
tasks. For example, the roadmap may produce high-level goals like
these:

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Gather requirements for querying and reporting software

Design solution
Identify data sources
Develop ETL processes
Build data warehouse
Feed live data into the data warehouse
Test the solution with live data, using dummy queries
Perform user-acceptance testing
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Third pass: Break it down

For each main task, youll need to begin listing the more detailed subtasks that lead up to it and draw the same conclusions about
dependencies and constraints as you did before.
Task dependencies depend on whether you can work in parallel.
Gantt Charts
The main type of visual for a project plan is the Gantt Chart. These
useful charts contain a lot of information about a project.
First and foremost, its a list of tasks. But beyond that, it shows how
tasks link together in dependencies and extend over a calendar.
Duration estimates
After the sub-tasks are listed and as many dependencies as
possible listed, you must add duration estimates to each sub-task.

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Risk Management and Mitigation

Contingency planning
A contingency plan is a branch off the main sequence of tasks and
events, designed to get the project back on track and performing as it
should.

Checkpoints
A good project manager stays abreast of the general health of the
project, but
its easy to get lost in the day-to-day tasks.
Thats why its important to insert pre-arranged status-checking tasks
into the plan ahead of time at regular intervals.
No matter how busy it gets, you and your project leaders will pause to
take a breath and evaluate how things are going.
It helps to have a pre-set list of metrics that indicate the wellness of a
project for example, how many man-days of work youre either
ahead or behind, or the current budget status.

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Keeping Your BI Project Plan Up to

Date
A project plan is designed to be a living, breathing document.
Its not meant to be an unchanging blueprint to be hung on a
wall in a frame.
Even if everything goes as expected on a project, the project
managers have to be able to track the progress of tasks, assign
new tasks, manage resources, and so on.
Managing to the plan
Working through issues
Daily updates
Keeping task data up-to-date
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Back to the Ol Drawing Board

Nobody wants to have to do it, but sometimes no matter how well
youve planned, no matter how well youve kept your project
documentation up to date, and no matter what level of detail and
forethought youve put into the project, sometimes situations arise
that force you to completely reevaluate the plan.
The potential reasons for such drastic measures are manifold. Here
are some typical examples:
A key source application you were counting on had a delayed release
or was canceled at the last minute.
The company is going through layoffs or some other major economic
event, forcing you to change the shape of your team and re-evaluate
who will be left to use your application.
A new executive enters the picture and dramatically alters the scope
of your BI project.

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THANK YOU

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