Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
RECOMMENDATION
It is never too late to gather business requirements,
a task that can identify the data needed to deliver specific business analyses and
reports. Adding new data to the data warehouse and possibly restructuring and/or
enhancing the existing data can derive value.
Falling into the Project Deadline Trap
Many organizations have invested in setting up procedures and processes
that follow a project methodology. Clearly, an important part of the process is
defining a project's scope. Detailed project plans are developed and used to
measure progress. Group and individual performance are often based upon
the ability to meet project deadlines. While project planning and management
are critical to coordinating multiple resources and keeping projects moving
forward, this focus on the project plan itself can cause data warehousing
initiatives to go awry.
The time needed to extract, transform, and load data for analytical appli-
cations (see Chapter 10) is one of the least understood and most often
underestimated tasks of any systems development project. This often leads
to project delays. One common way to manage these potential delays is to
reduce the scope of what is to be delivered. This can lead to finally delivering
something on time, but the scope has been pared down so that no business
value is delivered. In other cases, testing and quality checks are reduced or
eliminated in order to maintain the project schedule. Unfortunately, many
organizations reward this type of behavior. Delivering something on time is a
prevailing theme.
RECOMMENDATION
Reward project teams for producing quality results.
This includes validated data and well-tested applications. This also means that
applications indeed support the business in a valuable way. It must not be accep-
table to reduce the scope so that little or no value is delivered. Part of this change
in deadline focus also means that project change requests are viewed in a positive
light. Project issue logs should be full of open items needing to be addressed.
Teams should not be penalized for being honest about progress.
Failing to Uphold Organizational Discipline
Despite an impression that data warehousing is glamorous, most of the work
to build one is not. The type of work needed to develop and implement a
successful data warehouse is detailed and painstaking. Project tasks are often
