Improving ROI and success rate of your Business Intelligence project using an AGILE iterative and incremental approach By Martin Proulx and Dominic Danis About the authors Over the years and currently as Vice- President, Agile Business Intelligence at Pyxis Technologies, Martin Proulx has successfully participated in several projects with companies from the pharmaceutical, retail, financial, and manufacturing sectors. Martin holds a Master's degree in management sciences and a Bachelor of Business Administration from HEC Montreal. He cumulates over 15 years of experience in: software development project management, business process optimization, and dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs). Dominic Danis cumulates over 10 years of experience in software development and BI project management. In an effort to use a better approach to software development Dominic has been using Agile and Scrum since 2005. He is a Certified Scrum Master and he successfully applies this approach to Business Intelligence projects. Dominic is currently Principal, Agile Business Intelligence at Pyxis Technologies. About Pyxis Technologies Pyxis is the name of the constellation of the compass and as such Pyxis acts as beacon for companies seeking to improve their ways of doing software development. Pyxis was founded in 2000 as the result of reflection of engineers in computer science questioning the traditional approaches to software development. Executive Summary Business intelligence (BI) applications are increasingly popular and organizations of all sizes are seeing the benefits. As a consequence, BI applications are no longer limited to senior executive but are increasingly deployed throughout departments and levels. The timely completion and successful implementation of BI projects provides a competitive advantage to the adopting organizations. Unfortunately, there are more failures and disappointments than successes. It is generally accepted that other pre-requisites such as: ensuring executive support, aligning business and IT strategies or selecting the appropriate technology platform are critical to the success of BI projects. In addition to these requirements, we believe that an AGILE iterative and incremental development approach combined with light weight project management principles, such as SCRUM, greatly improve this track record. In addition, since the development approach and project management techniques are mostly under the control of the information technology (IT) executive, they can more easily be altered in order to deliver better results to the organization. Our approach relies on simple and straightforward principles. Through short cycles of definition, planning, building, presenting, and retrospecting, the development team iteratively delivers value and incrementally adds components to each other to achieve a complete BI application. As long as the development team focuses on highest value KPIs, building them from beginning to end incrementally and routinely demonstrating their work to decision makers for feedback, they will remain focused. Our objective is to increase the ROI of the BI initiatives by: Reducing the initial investment required to launch a BI project by quickly delivering tangible components to the business users instead of heavily investing upfront in architecture and modelling costs. Accelerating the availability of the information by using an
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Improving ROI and Success Rate of Your Business Intelligence Project
Business intelligence (BI) applications are increasingly popular and organizations of all sizes are seeing the benefits. As a consequence, BI applications are no longer limited to senior executive but are increasingly deployed throughout departments and levels. The timely completion and successful implementation of BI projects provides a competitive advantage to the adopting organizations. Unfortunately, there are more failures and disappointments than successes.
We believe that an AGILE iterative and incremental development approach combined with light weight project management principles, such as SCRUM, greatly improve this track record.
Our approach relies on simple and straightforward principles. Through short cycles of definition, planning, building, presenting, and retrospecting, the development team iteratively delivers value and incrementally adds components to each other to achieve a complete BI application.
Our objective is to increase the ROI of the BI initiatives by: - Reducing the initial investment required to launch a BI project by quickly delivering tangible components to the business users instead of heavily investing upfront in architecture and modelling costs. - Accelerating the availability of the information by using an incremental approach to present high level indicators at first and refining the requirements towards more granular information. - Delivering the right solutions to the business users by working iteratively with them to fully understand the requirements. - Prioritizing the work so the requirements with the highest value and ROI are addressed first, thereby continuously delivering values to the organization.
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Improving ROI and success rate of your Business Intelligence project using an AGILE iterative and incremental approach By Martin Proulx and Dominic Danis
About the authors Over the years and currently as Vice-President, Agile Business Intelligence at Pyxis Technologies, Martin Proulx has successfully participated in several projects with companies from the pharmaceutical, retail, financial, and manufacturing sectors. Martin holds a Master's degree in management sciences and a Bachelor of Business Administration from HEC Montreal. He cumulates over 15 years of experience in: software development project management, business process optimization, and dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs). Dominic Danis cumulates over 10 years of experience in software development and BI project management. In an effort to use a better approach to software development Dominic has been using Agile and Scrum since 2005. He is a Certified Scrum Master and he successfully applies this approach to Business Intelligence projects. Dominic is currently Principal, Agile Business Intelligence at Pyxis Technologies. About Pyxis Technologies Pyxis is the name of the constellation of the compass and as such Pyxis acts as beacon for companies seeking to improve their ways of doing software development. Pyxis was founded in 2000 as the result of reflection of engineers in computer science questioning the traditional approaches to software development.
Executive Summary Business intelligence (BI) applications are increasingly popular and organizations of all sizes are seeing the benefits. As a consequence, BI applications are no longer limited to senior executive but are increasingly deployed throughout departments and levels. The timely completion and successful implementation of BI projects provides a competitive advantage to the adopting organizations. Unfortunately, there are more failures and disappointments than successes. It is generally accepted that other pre-requisites such as: ensuring executive support, aligning business and IT strategies or selecting the appropriate technology platform are critical to the success of BI projects. In addition to these requirements, we believe that an AGILE iterative and incremental development approach combined with light weight project management principles, such as SCRUM, greatly improve this track record. In addition, since the development approach and project management techniques are mostly under the control of the information technology (IT) executive, they can more easily be altered in order to deliver better results to the organization. Our approach relies on simple and straightforward principles. Through short cycles of definition, planning, building, presenting, and retrospecting, the development team iteratively delivers value and incrementally adds components to each other to achieve a complete BI application. As long as the development team focuses on highest value KPIs, building them from beginning to end incrementally and routinely demonstrating their work to decision makers for feedback, they will remain focused. Our objective is to increase the ROI of the BI initiatives by:
Reducing the initial investment required to launch a BI project by quickly delivering tangible components to the business users instead of heavily investing upfront in architecture and modelling costs.
Accelerating the availability of the information by using an
2 Improving ROI and success rate of your business intelligence project through an iterative and incremental approach
Their questioning led them to adopt new approaches to software development project management and to improve their processes and practices.
incremental approach to present high level indicators at first and refining the requirements towards more granular information.
Delivering the right solutions to the business users by working iteratively with them to fully understand the requirements.
Prioritizing the work so the requirements with the highest value and ROI are addressed first, thereby continuously delivering values to the organization.
Track record of BI projects There was a running gag in an organization we were working with that every Business Intelligence (BI)1
project required 3 years to complete and would cost over $3 Million. This running gag demonstrated an
unfortunate situation – most BI projects are expensive, time and resource consuming and have a low
rate of success. Along these lines, very few people would debate that traditional BI projects require
heavy investments and result in long delays before providing value to the organization.
Much has already been said about the importance of BI applications in organizations. One of the most
obvious and frequently repeated benefits of BI applications is the ability to increase the quality and
timeliness of the business decisions being made. This is increasingly true as BI applications are being
democratized and are now embedded in the decision making process at every level of the organization
and across multiple departments.
In addition, decision makers constantly need an in-depth understanding of their business’ strengths and
weaknesses and this is especially true during difficult economic times. The availability of timely and
accurate information can help business leaders make the right decisions. Along these lines, the survey of
over 1,500 CIOs conducted by Gartner EXP2 shows that despite predicted flat IT budget growth in 2009,
BI projects remain their number one technology priority.
There isn’t much need to emphasize further the value of early diagnosis and the implementation of
timely solutions but in a changing business environment the business needs evolve too quickly for
sequential waterfall development methodologies such as the one presented in the following diagram.
1 Within the context of this white paper and for simplicity, we combine Data Warehouse (DW) projects with
Business Intelligence (BI) projects. 2 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=855612
3 Improving ROI and success rate of your business intelligence project through an iterative and incremental approach
Case in point, it is estimated that 60%3 of BI projects end in abandonment or failure and market data
confirms that out of the 3 standard project dimensions – time, resources, and scope – timelines and
resources typically exceed the initial plan while scope consistently fall short of the original expectations
and requirements. As such, an approach that delivers value early in the project while remaining aligned
with the business priorities is recommended.
In addition, estimates show that no more than 20%4 of business users actually use their BI applications
proactively and that a staggering 64%5 of systems functionalities are rarely or never used. This
regrettable situation compelled us to look for an alternate and improved approach to ensure BI projects
have greater success rate. More specifically that BI projects deliver the features required by business
users (scope) in a timely fashion (time) while controlling expenses (budget).
Our intent is neither to rehash the unfortunate track record of BI projects nor to highlight the most
dramatic failures but to propose a different approach to the development of BI projects.
This is a tall order but with the increasing popularity of AGILE iterative and incremental approaches and
with repeated success in other specialities; we know using such an approach in the development of BI
projects leads to much better outcomes.
An iterative and incremental approach for BI projects The unimpressive track record in the development of BI applications led us to conceive an improved
approach to reduce the initial investment to launch a BI project and to modify the requirement
3 Business Intelligence Roadmap, Moss and Atre, 2003
4 Business Intelligence Summit by Gartner, 2008
5 Standish Group Study Reported at XP2002 by Jim Johnson
6 Improving ROI and success rate of your business intelligence project through an iterative and incremental approach
2. Become more flexible In an ever changing business context, one’s ability to anticipate and clearly document their need for
the next 12, 18, or 24 months seems absurd. Very few people would have predicted the current
financial context 6 or 12 months ago. Unfortunately, traditional development approach still heavily
relies on such a process to launch and develop a BI project. By allowing the project team to react to
changing requirements due to an ever changing business environment throughout the life of the
project, they increase the probability that the resulting cubes, reports, and dashboards get used
while ensuring the project team delivers value throughout the duration of the project.
The emphasis is on obtaining the smallest workable piece of functionality to deliver business value
early, and continually improving it and adding further functionality throughout the life of the
project.
3. Reduce overhead The cone of uncertainty presents the reduction in the uncertainty of a project as it progresses in time. For instance, the variability of the outcome is much more difficult to predict at the early stages of the project than it is toward the end. As such, much less effort should be invested in planning, architecting, modelling, documenting and defining requirements in the early stages of the project as they are likely to change. Consequently, the level of details and the quality of the knowledge should increase as the project progresses.
7 Improving ROI and success rate of your business intelligence project through an iterative and incremental approach
4. Focus on value In contrast to a traditional approach which sequentially progresses through phases (i.e.
requirements definition, analysis, design, coding, and testing) in a strict pre-planned sequence which
measures progress in terms of delivered artefacts (requirement specifications, design documents,
test plans, code reviews), our approach focuses on completed useful software components.
Although these artefacts have value for the project team, we feel too much time and effort is
invested in these intermediate deliveries instead of working software. The recommended approach
does not completely eliminate these artefacts but reduces them to a non-superfluous level in order
to remain focused on the key outcome which is to deliver value.
In addition, our proposed approach focuses on value by increasing the ROI of BI components being
developed and deliver higher value components earlier in the process and halt the project when the
cost of developing exceeds the expected value.
5. Deliver on expectations By presenting completed deliverables frequently, such as KPIs, metrics, reports or cubes to the business users at the end of each iteration, this allows any potential issues with the quality and accuracy of the data to surface and be addressed.
Four levels of an Agile BI project Our approach to the development of a BI project is divided into 4 levels: Program, Project, Release and
Sprint. Contrary to sequential development, these levels are not consecutive but encompassing in
nature where a program is composed of projects which are themselves composed of releases and each
release is divided into sprints.
BI projects are often seen as large and complex endeavours and in order to maintain an enterprise wide
view and ensure constant alignment, they are grouped under an overall program.
At the project level, activities such as project definition, staffing, and budget definition are executed.
Although important, our intent is not to focus on the initiation of the project but it is critical to
remember that activities during the project level remain at a high level due to the amount of uncertainty
still surrounding the project.
A release is composed of an agreed upon number of sprints during which components of the BI
application will be completed. For example a release could cover the need of a specific business area
such as sales, marketing, operations or a business process such as order fulfilment, shipping, or client
8 Improving ROI and success rate of your business intelligence project through an iterative and incremental approach
Once the release has been defined at a high level, it is then divided into smaller components – called
sprints. Based on the size and experience of the development team, a sprint can be anywhere between
1 to 4 weeks.
With a traditional development approach, each task must be completed before the development team
can move to the next phase whereas with an iterative and incremental approach, the development
team delivers small components frequently.
Five steps repeated throughout the four levels The process is iterative and incremental at the four levels of the project with a major distinction in the
amount of details being analyzed. While the project team will remain at a high level during the project
cycle, they will look for more details during the release cycle and very granular details at the sprint cycle.
For example, at the project cycle the business user is expected to explain that the project team will need
to provide performance indicators for his consulting department. Once the team cycles through the
release cycle, the business user would explain that he is looking for utilization rate for his consultants
and at the sprint level he would provide information as to how the utilisation rate is calculated.
While the traditional approach to a BI project calls for much of the efforts to be invested in planning and
analysis, an incremental and iterative approach prefers to deliver small components frequently in order
to obtain feedback and learn from the exercise.
Define The objective of the first step of our approach is to get familiar with the project, the main players, and
the expected outcome, as well as, understand the priorities. During these sessions, the project team
interviews the key business users to gather their requirements and refine their understanding of the
business challenges. From a project perspective, a business representative is assigned to the initiative