Project Management – Keeping it Simple

June 17th, 2010 by Vince

The basic premise of project management is that work needs to get done, by a certain number of folks, in a certain amount of time, and for a certain amount of money.  To accomplish this, project managers have sophisticated tools at their disposal to organize all the work tasks, assign people to do the work, and track how long each task takes to complete.

So why with such tools at our disposal, do so many IT projects fail to meet expectations?

…Because it’s not about the tools.

The process that occurs before a project manager can even think about opening Microsoft Project (or any other project management tool) is extremely important, and quite frankly, can set the project up for success or failure from the get go, despite the sophistication of the software used to manage the project.

The process that I refer to is the one that defines the scope of work, identifies the tasks, and sets the customers expectations accordingly along the way.

An effective way to accomplish this is use a “top down” approach, meaning, once clear functional requirements are identified and agreed upon (this in of itself can be a tricky endeavor), the project team (the PM and the technical folks) can get in a room and begin to identify the work items (tasks) required to satisfy the requirements.  The key thing here is to identify the tasks granularly enough to increase the accuracy of the work estimate. 

For example, if an identified task is estimated to take 40 hours, well, what are all the things that need to be done within those 40 hours?  Can they be discretely identified, down to the subtasks that can be measured in 1 or 2 hour increments?  If yes, then break out the work plan to that level of detail.  It will significantly increase the accuracy of the estimate.

So really, it’s not about the sophistication of the tools we use to manage our IT projects, it’s really more about the basics, and gaining thorough understanding of the tasks at hand prior to inputting the data into the tools that separates project success from project failure. 

Keep it simple and stick to the basics.

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Business Intelligence and the Data Warehouse

June 16th, 2010 by Chuck

For many years the concepts of Business Intelligence and The Data Warehouse were inextricably linked, and for good reason. There was a time that before you could have any meaningful business intelligence information, you first needed to gather together all of your organization’s data into the warehouse. Unfortunately, for many organizations, what started out as a business intelligence project became sidetracked into an unnecessarily large and complex data warehouse effort that lost sight of the original business intelligence objectives. Organizations became bogged down trying to identify and organize ALL of the enterprise’s information into the warehouse, rather than focusing on what was needed to satisfy the BI objectives.

In his classic book “The Seven Habits of Effective People”, Steven Covey states “begin with the end in mind”. We think this is good advice for business intelligence projects as well. Most large organizations have more data than they know what to do with. We think it’s a mistake to get bogged down into identifying and organizing all of the available data. Think about it. Is any decision maker really concerned with ALL the data? Probably not. But decision makers are concerned with getting their hands on the RIGHT data, that key information needed to make effective, business-changing decisions. So we say begin your BI project with the end in mind. Find out what key data is required by the decision makers, then set about the task of identifying and making that key information available to the decision maker.

Many organizations have extremely successful and well managed data warehouse implementations. For these organizations, the data warehouse will likely continue to serve them well into the future. For others, a new breed of business intelligence tools like QlikView are providing a different route to providing this key information. Rather than relying on disk-based data sources, these tools use an in-memory model to that by-passes the need for the data warehouse and provides the business decision maker direct access to any number of data sources. Whether this new breed of tool will replace the need for the traditional warehouse remains to be seen. Regardless of the approach, it’s critical to stay focused on helping decision makers get the key information needed and resist the pitfalls of unnecessary complexity.

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