Posted by arlene

A Complete, Prioritized List of Functionality to Be Provided

One of the biggest mistakes you can make during your project scope is to concentrate solely on data needs and neglect functionality. You must focus on functionality as a framework in which you can determine real data needs, not just the ones that are good to have.

Furthermore, you must prioritize this list of functionality because you’re likely to implement your data warehouse’s features in several different iterations (back-to-back mini-projects that each add new capabilities). You must identify the most important functionality, therefore, for early implementation.

You need the data requirements too, of course. After you identify the functionality, the data follows in a fairly natural way.

A Complete List of Aft Candidate Data Sources

Even though you don’t start digging into your data sources until the design phase begins, you must have a list of (and, preferably, some basic information about) all the data sources that will provide data to your warehouse. Without this complete list, creating your design phase project plan is almost impossible, as discussed in the following section.

A Design-Phase Project Plan

When you know the project’s functionality and its data needs and you’ve identified its data sources, you have a darn good framework for setting up your project plan — a detailed project plan — for the design phase of your project. While you’re still working on and finalizing its scope, put together the project plan for team review; this way, you can catch and handle any surprises or problems early, before you begin the design phase.

The Names and Respective Roles of Your Design-Phase Project Team

You gotta have your team lined up! Although your team may not be the same one that just went through the scope phase and may change even more as you move into construction of the data warehouse (after the design phase), you need team members’ names, roles, skill levels, and availability, such as their vacation and training plans and whether they’re available 100 percent of the time.

A Complete Budgetary Estimate

After you complete each phase, which tells you what you need to know for the following phase, you then can create project plans, set your budget, and line up your team, for example.

As you probably know, however, corporate life isn’t quite that simple. The phrase budgetary estimate strikes fear in most data warehouse implementers because you’re told, “Yeah, yeah, I know about your phased methodology and all that, but how much will this whole thing cost me?”

Whether you like it or not, many projects are make-or-break early in their life cycle (during the scope phase) based on whether their executive sponsor has the funds to see the project to completion. Corporate leaders believe that they shouldn’t waste funds on projects that will survive, for example, only through the design phase and part of the construction phase — but maybe not all the way to the end of construction. (That belief is based on a great deal of logic because the performance of managers and executives is often measured on the tangible benefits they deliver to their organization.)

You have to listen to your “gut feeling,” therefore — based on what you’ve learned during the scope phase — and call on all your past experience, play all kinds of what-if scenarios, and come up with a general range for the probable total cost of the data warehouse. Even if you have not been specifically requested to provide this information, at least have it prepared, just in case — you won’t be sorry.

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