Since my current project is a business intelligence projects, I jotted down thoughts while going through the podcasts as to where and how I might tie some of the general skills to a specific action or deliverable in this type of project.
Managing Requirement Changes
- Static prototyping - Create an version of reports in Excel using 'hard-coded' data, or based on your current reports/cubes showing differences
- Manage expectations of stakeholders - that they will have the time to review a prototype and provide feedback - give a set start and end date for when certain analytics are 'open' for comments
- Traceability matrix - trace each measure back to an original request - approval
The Value of Identifying the Right Business Issue
- Using an Ishikawa Diagram to focus on high-priority issues. In a BI project, there are often discrepancies between multiple potential sources of a given measure. Typically, there a multiple explaining causes
- Use an Ishikawa Diagram to root cause the discrepancy
- Identify contributing causes
- Then further research can be done to numbers - how much of the discrepancy is 'explained' by that particular cause
- Focus on the cause with the largest amount 'explaining' the discrepancy
- Take into account the payoff of time, your scope may or may not allow you to solve causes 'explaining' very small amounts of discrepancy (i.e. 1-5%)
- 15 words or less - A technique used to encourage an issue to summarized to a concise, but complete statement (note my 15 word summary :) this will be useful in constructing data dictionaries
Requirements Process - The Key to Project Success
Role of the Business Analyst - define the "solution" - people, processes, and technologies used to solve a business issue
Liaison between IT and the business - Assign an analyst to different scope of measures
Requirements manager - an analyst can be the requirements librarian and check for consistency between requirements gathered and authored by a team of analysts
