You always hear about metadata management in business intelligence (BI). Your most important metadata may be your project metadata. This is Part 2 in the three-part series entitled Implementing the Business Intelligence collaboration (BI-C). Part 1 focused on setup. This article focuses on execution and covers project tracking, discovery, design, development and deployment activities as it relates to BI collaboration (BI-C). The intent of this article is not to rehash standard software development lifecycle methodology. Instead, it explores the details of executing a successful BI-C initiative and focuses on the data gathering and workflow needed at each stage of a project to be successful.
Figure 1: BI-C Release Cycle
Tracking
Tracking a BI-C engagement must occur on a continuous basis to provide visibility, management and accountability for four key items: issues, tasks, status and BI project documents. Tracking all four of these is critical to the success of any BI-C engagement.
In order to track successfully, a mechanism or tool should be in place to allow for items to be captured, categorized, related, assigned and audited. Typically, project teams track items manually, through email or by piecemeal software tools. Accordingly, there is much reliance on individual accountability and ownership.
The following capabilities are required to facilitate successful tracking on any BI-C engagement:
- Capture – Project team members must have the capability to capture issues, status, tasks and documents in a central location, with the ability to retrieve information, update and follow up as needed. All relevant data should be stored at the creation of the item, such as who, what, why, when, etc. Capturing this data is needed for effective workflow and project analytics/reporting.
- Categories – Project items normally fall into logical groupings and should be tracked accordingly. Doing so provides a level of organization that facilitates oversight and resolution. For example, issues and/or tasks should be categorized related to project phase. At any given point in time, all issues and tasks specific to any one category can then be retrieved, reviewed and followed up on. This eliminates the granularity associated with reviewing tasks or issues one by one to determine who, how and what follow-up steps are necessary to proceed forward.
- Relationships – All project items have built in relationships. There are issues related to tasks. There are documents that support the presence of an issue. Tasks are related to other tasks as dependencies. Tracking these data relationships is imperative to effectively track a BI-C engagement.
- Assignment – The assignment of issues, tasks and status reports to project team members is another item that must be supported. Having the basic infrastructure to assign project items to team members and notify them when action is necessary will ensure that the entire team is aware of what to do and when to do it.
- Auditing – An effective tracking tool will allow for auditing of all project artifacts. If an issue, document, task or status has changed, the tool will track this occurrence in a way that is easily accessible and reportable.
