Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 6
October 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment
In my previous post Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 5, I discussed some additional C’s to success. Today, I would like to discuss the E in success.
The E’s in Success
The first “E” is Education
While training in technical skills and project management is a good investment, there are a myriad of soft skills that can help your BI team take more responsibility for success. Group problem solving, communication and conflict management, facilitation, change management and understanding how human systems typically function are critical skills that can improve success. There are many ways available to receive training in these areas.
In addition to formal skills training, the BI team needs to educate the other members of the BI team on the epistemology of the stakeholders that they represent. Understanding the epistemology of the stakeholders and the institution is the keystone to creating a true learning organization, establishing a culture of evidence, building the right solutions and achieving pervasive BI success. I will discuss my thoughts on the epistemology for BI in a future post.
The second “E” is for Executing the plan
In my 30 years of experience, I have found most large, innovative, or complex projects are all seeking a state of “entropy” – a way to go bad. I have always assumed a project was going bad until proven otherwise – assume proven guilty until proven innocent.
Many IT people attempt to run BI projects but lack the knowledge or resources to select the correct project management methodology and then find themselves’ being run by the project. The key axiom to successful project management is: Plan the work, then work the plan. I will discuss the appropriate project management methodology for BI in a future post. What I will state now is that the traditional project management methodologies and techniques used for traditional IT application development and software development will not produce the appropriate work products required for a successful BI project.
My 5 rules for successfully executing a BI project plan
Rule 1: Make sure you are doing the ”right” project.
You need to identify what initial BI project is right for the intended stakeholder and the institution, and then make sure everyone minds their own business.
A. Checklist to selecting the initial right project
- Is there a clear purpose for the project and does it make sense?
- Is there a clear business case (positive value proposition)?
- Do you have the right sponsorship?
Rule 2: Prepare a reasonable plan
A. Checklist for a reasonable plan
- Have you selected an appropriate BI project management methodology?
- Are the resources, schedule and requirements in balance?
- Have you defined a strategy for keeping stakeholders and BI team members involved in constantly reviewing the plan?
Projects take resources, and we all know that you may not always get what you want, but if you try hard and communicate well you may get what you need! We also know that we may not have all components of the plan in balance. That’s normal, the difference between the plan you want and the plan you have is called “risk”. Managing this risk needs to be a part of the plan.
Rule 3: Build the right team with clear ownership of tasks
A. Checklist for the team
- Are there clear task assignments and ways and means of doing the work?
- Is there a strategy for providing timely feedback? Performance does matter?
- Have you taken the steps to avoiding the work breakdown structure?
- Overlapping responsibilities
- Ambiguous assignments
- Vague accountability
- Unreasonable expectations
These are all major demotivators for stakeholders and project team members
Rule 4: Track status and give it visibility that is has both depth and width
I have previously talked about the need to have a high communication plan for the BI initiative, but it is also essential to regularly communicate the status of individual BI projects.
A. Checklist for project tracking
- Pay attention to the results and make changes as necessary
- Strategy for continually tracking and reporting on progress status
- Strategy must include
- Progress reports for BI team
- Progress reports for the intended users
- Progress reports for the executive sponsors
Rule 5: Expectation Management
Managing expectations is a critical key to your projects success, your own personal success and saving your sanity. Let’s face it; everyone wants their BI systems and projects delivered yesterday, even if they don’t have a clue about the amount of work involved in delivering a quality solution. I’ll discuss this topic in more detail in a future post. What you need to understand for now is that perception is reality and all BI projects are really just a reality that someone in the institution would like to see. Your job is to manage your sphere of influence regarding the project; i.e., the piece of the pie that you can actually directly impact via your work responsibilities. Remember, no one is immune from the need to manage expectations, it is only your place on the project food chain that defines at what level and how formally you need to manage these expectations.
A. Checklist for expectation management
- Have you identified all the key stakeholders?
- Have you identified the real needs and wants of the stakeholders, the organization, the BI team, etc?
- Can you answer the following question? When will we know when we are done? If you can’t answer this question, then you don’t have a manageable project yet and you will not be able to manage expectations.
In my final installment of this series, I will discuss the “S” factors in Success.
Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 5
October 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment
In my previous post Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 4,
I discussed the value of having a clearly defined communication plan and executing on the plan. Today, I would like to discuss additional critical C’s for success.
The C’s in Success
1. Clear and Compelling Vision
Creating a clearly defined vision of the future that serves to inspire and motivate the BI team is an important step in paving the road to success. The vision statement should assert what the organization can be at its best. To be effective, the vision statement should be vivid, something one can describe, so that people can picture it in their minds and then make the connection to how their individual contributions can support realization of the vision. The statement itself should be concise, motivating, and memorable.
2. C-level Sustained Support
The second key principle in paving the way to success is to sustain support “from the top.” Sustaining support for enterprise initiatives requires organizations to develop and maintain sponsors or “protectors”. For an enterprise BI initiative, the BI team must develop the overall BI plan; the BI plan must then be advocated and “sold” to the rest of the stakeholders. All of the members of the BI team must develop and maintain effective working relationships with the key stakeholders.
3. Coordinated Control
The third key principle in paving the way to success is exercising strong leadership. It requires the BI team leader to:
- Identify and develop other BI leaders and technical staff within the organization;
- Define clear lines of authority and demand accountability;
- Implement sound project management practices and Demonstrate uncompromising standards.
(a) Develop key team leaders and technical staff. The first step in building the BI team is to assemble a staff with the experience and expertise needed to meet the goals and objectives of the program. In my experience, these individuals need to have a comprehensive understanding of: (a) how decisions are made; (b) data sources; and (c) information (measures and metrics) used in their local environment.
(b) Define clear lines of authority and accountability. My experience has taught me that the more successful BI initiatives require responsibility and decision-making authority be allocated down to the lowest level possible, consistent with the individual’s capabilities, but with the leader maintaining ultimate accountability. The objective is to clearly define each team member’s responsibilities and deliverables within the organization, then provide them with the opportunity to succeed or fail in executing those responsibilities. This makes the organization more agile in making decisions and executing technical tasks and frees the senior managers to focus on the initiative’s major issues and problems, which are typically political in nature. Leadership is all about showing the way and working with people along the way. Effective leaders realize that everyone has a unique personality and needs to be dealt with respectfully and on a one-to-one basis.
(c) Implement sound project management. An important activity of an effective team leader is the establishment of close control of schedules and budgets. This is of particular importance on your initial BI initiative. To allow for this control requires the leader to conduct regularly scheduled reviews. I suggest developing a standardized review schedule which features a series of program review milestones that serve as “go – no go” and “coordination” gates through which the key milestones must pass on the path to accomplishing the mission. It is also essential that during these reviews all BI stakeholders must be present themselves and not just represented. The conduct of these reviews provides an excellent opportunity for executing your open communication plan as discussed in my previous post. For example, a strong leader fosters open, honest communication, including bringing in bad news, without retribution against the messenger.
4. Continuous Expectation Management
The fourth key principle in paving the way to success is controlling expectations. This is a critical component of any BI initiative. In my experience, you can improve your chances of success by employing a continuous and evolving expectation-management process that is complemented by an agile development approach using rapid prototyping. The key advantage of rapid prototyping is avoiding the development of the wrong solution which is one of the leading factors for why BI initiatives do not succeed.
In short, the BI leader and BI project team must early on create a tangible picture of the finished deliverables in the minds of everyone involved so that all effort is focused in the same direction and on the same deliverables. You need to avoid vague descriptions at all costs; spell it out, picture it, prototype it, and make sure everyone agrees to it.
It simply costs too many resources and risks too much time spent in rework to just jump in with both feet and begin building all project deliverables when the initial requirements may be vague. Build a little at a time, obtain incremental reviews and approvals, maintain open communication, provide regular progress reports and maintain a controlled evolution.
In the next post we’ll explore the E’s to your BI development teams’ success.
Ready to Roll
October 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment
In the model train hobby I enjoy during my spare time, this means “take it out of the package, put it on the tracks and it is ready to go!” There’s no assembly, painting, adjusting, setup, muss or fuss. Unfortunately, getting a business intelligence solution ready for production isn’t quite so easy.
Lately, I’ve been working on a solution delivery scheduled for the end of this month. Here are a few key things we’ve been tracking with this client to ensure a smooth and successful rollout. Some may seem obvious, but it is easy to forget little details:
- Get the complete list of users who need access. Along with this list, it is important to have planned their access and security credentials. When considering groups and who should have access to what, make sure to assess both the data they should see, as well as the functionality they should be allowed to use in the BI platform.
- Test using actual user credentials setup as defined in the access plan. Everything can look like it is working great when logged in as the administrator or developer, but as we found out, simple things can be overlooked like the ability to change predefined queries or overwrite a standard report.
- Ensure there is adequate licensing. Understand the type and concurrency of the license scheme you have. Often the first couple of days will see a lot of activity from the curious users. If they have trouble logging in because of limited licensing, you may have a hard time coaxing them back to the BI system again.
- Prepare a quick start or users’s guide. As much as you might think “it’s all intuitive”, for many users new to BI, it’s not so obvious. List explicity the steps they need to take and use screen shots of the actual system with actual data so they know they are doing things correctly. There can be a lot of useful tips and tricks for navigating around reports and analyses they’ll appreciate too. It helps build confidence and buy-in to using the system.
- Validate the reports and analytics one last time. What worked a week ago or a month ago might not necessarily work today. Like the security and access plan, the report design can sometimes be affected by little things like a changover in a month or business cycle. A back end data source may not be updated as it should have been and no alert was in place to raise the flag. New data may not fit the original formatting if boundary values weren’t well understood. There are many possibilities to keep an eye on. While it is unlikley all issues will be caught, one last review is a good idea.
I am looking forward to the end of the month to see how well things go. Things should be ready to roll!