A benefit-based approach to a data warehouse project can be boiled down to a list of bullet points
InfoManagement Direct, October 29, 2009
Success with a data warehouse project is a challenge due to the size, complexity and diverse requirements. The quality-driven success strategies outlined here address and resolve this challenge.
Determine data warehouse project objectives:
Deliver significant benefits on time.
Minimize defect, fault, rework and avoid disaster.
Measure and manage performance, and improve benefits.
Find DW quality drivers:
Prevent defect or fault, and save after-the-fact costly rework.
Identify and mitigate risk before the fact.
Address or eliminate issues, and avoid costly after-the-fact resolution.
Reduce the need to change and use change control.
Seek quality-driven DW benefits:
Improve customer service and increase customer satisfaction.
Boost marketing and selling capabilities and increase competitive advantage.
Reduce cost, effort and resource utilization.
Streamline processes and develop more efficient management tools.
Make jobs easier, less stressful and raise employee productivity.
Establish DW project success strategies:
Help sponsors be informed, accepting of problems, and willing to devote time to the project and make quick decisions.
Prepare to articulate and execute deliverables in very complicated, multi-faceted environments involving diverse skills.
Map project objectives to the enterprise mission and get buy-in from stakeholders.
Complete due-diligence in all areas: scoping, estimating, budgeting, scheduling, staffing, skills-adequacy, dirty data, DW design, architecture, infrastructure and project governance.
Set DW project management success strategies:
Adhere to a discipline project management approach.
Plan with participation, inspire ownership and execute in pieces.
Time-box activities, assign ownership, track delivery and recognize good performance.
Run parallel activity tracks while coordinating teams and deliverables.
Deep-dive in all areas of the project and ensure quality delivery.
Ensure success through active DW project manager roles:
Plan, execute and monitor budget.
Get access to sponsors, stakeholders, team members, users, customers and service providers.
Communicate the truth in a timely manner and be persuasive.
Take a key role in scoping, estimating, staffing, assessing skills-adequacy, cleansing dirty data and establishing the DW design, architecture and infrastructure.
Establish strong and direct control procedures and track performance.
Review work in progress daily, adjust tasks and deliverables, assign new tasks, run team interfaces and organize stakeholder review sessions.
Do cost-benefit analysis of data cleansing and impact analysis on requested changes.
Deep-dive in all areas of the project and change directions to succeed when facing roadblocks.
Capitalize on strengths of the DW project manager he/she must:
Earn support from stakeholders, respects technologists and inspires quality delivery.
Be skilled in “quality” and “process,” “defect/fault” reduction, risk mitigation and issue resolution. Avoids operational disasters.
Understand business value of data, analysis, reporting and impact on decision-making.
Understand data warehouse architecture and customer service.
Understand data technically, and knows when data is correct, accurate, consistent, complete, integrated and follows business rules.
Understands the cost of data cleansing and metadata. (Note: 70 to 80 percent of the effort may be in data cleansing and transforming from source to target.)
Envision from 50 feet up, be experienced to work 100 feet wide, and be skilled to deep-dive 10 feet in the trenches with technologists.
Deep-dive in all areas of the project: requirements, data, source, target, data modeling, DW design, architecture, database, data, ETL (extract, transform and load), testing, end-user training, implementation, infrastructure support, continuity of business to performance metrics and customer satisfaction surveys.
Review the DW benefits:
1. Increase number of customers:
Recruit and retain more customers enabled by information available on relationships, accounts, activities, channel utilization and demographics.
Identify marketing opportunities for products and services by analyzing existing and potential customers.
Enroll and retain more customers by giving them access to information on accounts, products and services
2. Increase revenue:
Cross-sell to customers by relationships, accounts, activities, channel utilization, demographics, revenue and fees.
Market to potential customers by measuring revenue, profit, channels available and customer demographics.
Collect on loans and generate more loans enabled by information on customers.
3. Increase productivity:
Increase productivity by enabling analysts and users to create their own reports.
Save time producing reports for government or other agencies.
Save 50 to 90 percent of analyst’s time in gathering data, now available from one source.
4. Control cost:
Understand and control service and customer costs by account type, channel and activities.
Control inventory and negotiate with suppliers and vendors on services, outsourcing and capital expenditures.
Detect fraud by searching internally and externally and analyzing better HR information.
5. Intangible benefits:
Store accepted, consistent data definitions and make them available to users.
Produce consistent reports and answers to queries.
Set up effective reporting procedures with more data and better quality of information.
Boost decision-making capabilities, both operational and strategic.
Reduce reluctance to make decisions with timely information available on demand.
Improve morale as employees are more comfortable with their decisions, take greater pride in their work and have the tools to do a better job.
Provide better service from the customer’s perspective using enhanced information.
Analyze alternative business strategies by running what-if scenarios.
Save time and effort with one easy-to-access data source.
