FREE DM Review Site Registration!
Sign-up today and access DM Review on the Web!

Your FREE registration entitles you to:
FREE email newsletters

FREE access to all DM Review content

FREE access to web seminars, resource portals, our white paper library and more!

   

Is there a good book for BI project management that you would recommend?

Question: In this fast-paced world, we continue to struggle with rapid completion of business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) development and deployment of projects.  Is there a good book for BI project management (PM) that you would recommend that would perhaps give us ideas on how to be more agile and rapid in our development?

Larissa Moss' Answer: Very soon there will be a very good book for agile BI PM. I am hoping to publish it in the fall of 2008. The title will most likely be "Extreme Scoping." In the meantime, I can only offer my course on that subject. Contact me at methodfocus@earthlink.net.

Sid Adelman’s Answer: BI Roadmap by Larissa Moss and Shaku Atre.

 

Tom Haughey’s Answer: I suggest you look to books that deal with rapid application development. A data warehouse should be implemented as a RAD project in that:

  • Work should be divided into increments,
  • The increments should be short (three month intervals),
  • The releases should be timeboxed (the same three month releases),
  • The workforce should be divided into small functional teams, and
  • A running database should be delivered 1/3 of the way through each release.

TDWI and DM Review have a lot of practical tips for managing data warehouse projects, though this advice is not in one place. Microsoft Press has a few good books on RAD. Also look to conferences such as those run by DebTech International, Wilshire Conferences and TDWI.

 

In addition, eventually the use of Web services and service-oriented architecture(SOA) should be investigated. The benefits of these are not achieved overnight but are a natural progression for data warehouse technical improvement. There is a significant cost and lead time to this, but once you do it, the payback is significant.

 

Chuck Kelley's Answer: Richard Kachur wrote a good book in the late 90s, and recently Sid Adelman wrote one.  I would google them and see which one is the best for you.  If I had to guess, there is probably not much explicitly written yet on agile development of data warehouses.

Larissa Moss is founder and president of Method Focus Inc., a company specializing in improving the quality of business information systems. She has more than 20 years of IT experience with information asset management. Moss is coauthor of three books: Data Warehouse Project Management (Addison-Wesley, 2000), Impossible Data Warehouse Situations (Addison-Wesley, 2002) and Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision- Support Applications (Addison-Wesley, 2003). Moss can be reached at methodfocus@earthlink.net.

Sid Adelman is a principal in Sid Adelman & Associates, an organization specializing in planning and implementing data warehouses, in data warehouse and BI assessments, and in establishing effective data architectures and strategies. He is a regular speaker at DW conferences. Adelman chairs the "Ask the Experts" column on www.dmreview.com. He is a frequent contributor to journals that focus on data warehousing. He co-authored Data Warehouse Project Management and is the principal author on Impossible Data Warehouse Situations with Solutions from the Experts and Data Strategy. He can be reached at (818) 783-9634 or sid@sidadelman.com. Visit his Web site at www.sidadelman.com.

Tom Haughey is the president of InfoModel LLC, a training and consulting company specializing in data warehousing and data management. He has worked on dozens of database and data warehouse projects for more than two decades. Haughey was former CTO for Pepsi Bottling Group and director of enterprise data warehousing for PepsiCo. He may be reached at (201) 337-9094 or via e-mail at tom.haughey@InfoModelUSA.com.

Chuck Kelley is an internationally known expert in database and data warehousing technology. He has 30 years of experience in designing and implementing operational/production systems and data warehouses. Kelley has worked in some facet of the design and implementation phase of more than 50 data warehouses and data marts. He also teaches seminars, co-authored four books on data warehousing and has been published in many trade magazines on database technology, data warehousing and enterprise data strategies. He can be contacted at chuckkelley@usa.net.

For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:



Industry Vendors