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Wednesday, 8 February 2012

Is Project Management for DW-BI Projects different from traditional application development / maintenance project?

There has been many of my colleagues question me  that "Is Project Management for DW-BI Projects different from traditional application development / maintenance project?"

My personal opinion towards it is "YES" but the principles of Project Management remains the same.

The reason towards that is pretty simple,
  • Along with the Project Management responsibilities, the DW-BI projects requires a deep dive on the technical aspects of Data warehousing & Business Intelligence implementation in order to understand the scope & manage it better
  • Non-technical competent Project Manager requires a strong dependency from the Technical Lead / SME to understand the day-to-day project scope related changes
    • Impact to one column of a table can impact the ETL & Reporting scope to a larger extent
  • A complete End-to-End DW-BI implementation involves multiple tools and technologies and more importantly multiple skillsets which makes the Project Manager to be careful on resource loading and leveling while executing the project
  • Technical risks shall occur throughout the life cycle of the project (as compared to traditional application development/maintenance); continuous monitoring and proper risk management of these risks are very critical.
  • Very important to identify the dependency of tasks well in advance (for example - resolution to data quality to be determined and closed as per schedule) and managed well in the Schedule management
  • Quality Management has been challenging particularly in areas such as Configuration Management and Release Management as there are many tools getting involved (though currently many BI tools provide versioning features) and Traceability of requirements; maintennace of traceability matrix has been challenging in DW-BI projects
The above reasons clearly signifies that managing DW-BI projects requires some technical background and/or ability to appreciate technial aspects however the core 9 knowledge areas as stated in PMBOK remains the same however focus on certain knowledge areas (such as Scope Management, Risk Management, Schedule Management and Quality Management) with technical appreciation is very much needed.

Any specific thoughts??