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Establish Project Structure & Management
After the sponsorship for initiation phase, one will establish project management structure. This will setup the ground not only for the initiation phase, but also for the whole project. The teams and roles established now will presumably stay with the project till the end.
Conduct Project Team Kick-Off & Planning
You may not have all the people at this stage, who will be working on this project. However, the key people should be in place by now. You will be getting all the people in a room, and share the following:
- Proposed high level project plan and milestones.
- Proposed project scope
- Proposed project measures of success
- Proposed project management structure
- Role and responsibilities
- Next steps
TIP- I have used the word 'proposed'. It is important that all the above imperatives of the project are co-created and co-owned. Therefore, the data warehouse champion will be creating a draft of the proposed measures, communication framework, structure etc, and take the feedback from the project team before firming it up.
TIP- Nothing which is created (structure, communication framework, roles and responsibilities...) is cast in stone. Given the unknowns with the initiatives, one may keep on adapting given the new situations.
Develop Project Communication Plan
This will be developed by the project team. This is not different from what you will do for any genre of projects. This will include:
- The status reports, their table of contents, frequency and audience.
- The meetings and conference calls for review- Agenda, participants, frequency and audience for the minutes of the meetings.
- Communication plan regarding the general community (for example sharing the progress with the community in general)
Develop Program to Measure Success
You will firm-up the measures of success (some of which you might have done and shared with the sponsors during project definition phase). Some of the measures of success are:
- Data Warehouse performance and response time
- Number of users
- Increase in the productivity
- Accuracy of information
- Reduction in costs
- Increase of revenue
Develop Process to Manage Scope
This is an important step, and needs most re-enforcement with the stakeholders. As mentioned in the Data Warehouse has unique challenges, the scope is fluid and needs strong leadership to manage. The challenge is on the following counts:
- The change in the requirements: Data Warehouse requirement in a way mirrors that way we manage our business. The information needed today may not be important tomorrow. As the business problems change, so do the information needs.
- The change in the level of detail around the requirements: Most of the information requirements start with 'what is happening?’ which means a summary information along with management MIS. However, soon it gets changed into the 'why is it happening?' which means more sophisticated analysis and drill down to detailed/transactional level information.
- Beyond the business problems, there can be a change in the strategy. An important business theme may not be important anymore as an organization changes the business strategy around distribution (say).
NOTE- Every change in the business strategy does not result in the change in the business theme of a data warehouse.
TIP- There can be various ways in managing the scope. It includes
- Getting a commitment from the stakeholders
- Robust change management process
- Escalation process
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