Analytical Diaries

Many large IT organizations rely on an industry standard when it comes to enhancing the quality of their SW development process: CMMI and UML are quite common among large European financial services firms.

So now imagine another epic and quite religious battle between process engineers, which method might be the correct path to the holy grail of efficient in-house SW production. And then enters the stage, Don Quichote of BI iterative implementation and tells these shining knights that you don’t need, in fact can’t use, their weapons and warhorses. But rather you rely on diplomatic talks with users and an iterative, gowing evolutionary development process.

Mostly they will laugh and tell you, that you don’t have an idea on how SW development works. Sometimes they might even try to evangelize you on why their process also must work for BI. Most often they will simply ignore the strange thought and carry on along the known path towards extremely overpriced and under-delivering analytical projects.

That is why your thoughts and experience would be of great importance to us:

• What is your experience in using structured development processes for BI projects?
• Do you think the standard methods and tools could /should be adopted to facilitate structured BI projects?
• How often has one of your projects succeeded or failed due to a distinct project methodology?

Let me know your thoughts and let’s filter what we jointly would consider best practices.