The Importance of Structure in Project Management and Datawarehouse projects

Project Management for Data warehouse Projects – How to implement structure and strategies to optimize progress and minimize C.O.W. (Crisis of the Week/Day)

Project Management using Agile methodology is an effective and adaptable approach for IT projects. There are also many challenges involved in making sure all involved parties have a clear understanding and are in agreement with the project scope and process. Pacific ERP uses a structured project management approach that addresses possible miscommunications and workflow impediments. Without a structured project and process plan meetings and workflows can be dominated by Crisis of the Week/Day (C.O.W.) instead of focused on problem solving. This delays task completion, leads to missed deadlines and negative interpersonal interactions between team members and an overall lack of project progress.

Project stakeholders, sponsors and others invested in the Business Intelligence (BI) project are typically unaware of how much of an IT project’s time and resources are consumed by infrastructure issues and data integration. Ralph Kimball and Joe Caserta state that the ETL portion consumes upwards of 70% of all resources required to build a data warehouse. The lack of understanding on part of the stakeholders regarding the importance and time consuming process of implementing ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), data warehouse management and accurate service integration and reporting on a typical Business Intelligence (BI) project can be a barrier to effective project management and completing project goals.

The Integration process allows for data to processed, analyzed and interpreted so that companies can make informed business intelligence decisions.

Pacific ERP’s project Management process follows best practices and starts the project development process by working one on one with our clients to define project goals and create a project charter. We listen to our clients’ needs and identify barriers, strengths and solutions during the project planning phase. To reduce possible future confusion and workflow impediments we create and finalize a clear project definition, scope, tasks and project plan with the client. We also take the time to educate our clients on the process of agile methodology and the time and resources needed to complete their projects. This helps reduce friction between BI stakeholders, Project Managers and Team members which is essential to effective project management.