Data Warehouse Project Management: An Agile Approach

Length of Workshop:

2 days

General Overview:

As you start planning your Data Warehouse project, you naturally draw upon your experiences as a project manager. These prior experiences have served you well in the past, but to your dismay, you find they are not sufficient for a Data Warehouse project. To your surprise, you may find your Data Warehouse project very difficult to manage. The requirements appear to be a "moving target". Your staff is not properly trained. Communication between staff members takes too long. The tools do not live up to their expectations. Roles and responsibilities assigned in a traditional way seem to result in too much rework. The traditional methodology does not seem to work for controlling the project; etc. To top it all off, the business users are pressuring you for quick deliverables (90 days or less) as they are still "refining" their requirements. As your team scrambles to meet those expectations, data standardization is skipped, testing is cut short, documentation is not done, and quality is compromised. Sound familiar? So, how can you "have your cake and eat it too?" In other words, how can you do it right and still deliver in 90 days? You have to set aside some of the traditional project management disciplines and try a new approach. In this course, you will learn about an agile project management approach, self-organizing project teams, spiral DW methodologies, and "extreme scoping" (an iterative development technique).

Leader: Larissa Moss

Workshop Goals:

As a result of attending this workshop, you will understand why traditional development methodologies and traditional project management (PM) do not work on Data Warehouse (DW) projects. You will learn about a spiral DW methodology and about extreme scoping, an agile project management technique specifically for DW projects. You will also learn how to organize and empower your project teams and about the roles and responsibilities of the core team members. You will leave the seminar with a better understanding of how to manage multiple interdependent DW projects, and how to mitigate the common risks inherent to DW projects.

Intended Audience:

Data warehouse customers/end users will learn how their involvement is essential for the success of a DW project; how to better plan, estimate and manage their own time on the project; what types of roles and responsibilities apply to them.

Developers will learn how their roles and responsibilities may have shifted; how to participate in a "self-organizing" SWAT team; and how to use an iterative development approach and how to manage their software releases.

Project Managers will learn how to recognize and mitigate risks on a DW project; how to establish a core team and what roles and responsibilities to assign; how to estimate software releases and how to create project plans. They will also learn how to manage multiple inter-dependent DW projects.

Attendees will also learn about best practices and critical success factors for managing DW projects, and how to deal with cultural and organizational issues.

Outline/At a Glance:

Workshop Outline

• Why traditional project management (PM) does not work on DW projects
• Common DW failures and PM challenges
• Spiral DW methodology
• Software release concept
• Self-organizing project teams
• Software release planning process
• BI program management
• Best practices/critical success factors
• Organizational impact

For more information on bringing this workshop to your organization, contact Dennis Crowley by phone at +1 781 641 5125, by fax at +1 781 648 1950, or by e-mail at sales@cutter.com.