By Mary Anne Hopper, Senior Consultant

I’ve written quite a bit about the importance of establishing rigor around the process of project intake and prioritization.   If you’re sitting there wondering how to even get started, I believe it is important to understand where it is these different work requests because unlike application development projects, BI projects tend to have touch points across the organization.   I tend to break the sources into three main categories—stand-alone, upstream applications, and enhancements.

Stand-alone BI projects are those that are not driven by new source system development. Project types can include as new data marts, reporting applications, or even re-architecting legacy reporting environments. Application projects are driven by changes in any of the upstream source systems we utilize in the BI environment including new application development and changes to existing applications. Always remember that the smallest of changes in a source system can have the largest of impacts to the downstream BI application environment. The enhancements category is the catch-all for low risk development that can be accomplished in a short amount of time.

Just as important in understanding where work requests come from is prioritizing those work requests.     The three need to be considered in the same prioritization queue—this is a step that challenges a lot of the clients I work with.   So, why is it so important to prioritize work together?   The first reason is resource availability.   Resource impact points include project resources (everyone from the analysts to the developers to the testers to the business customers), environment availability and capacity (development and test), and release schedules.   And, most importantly—prioritizing all work together ensures the business is getting their highest value projects completed first.

Mary Anne has 15 years of experience as a data management professional in all aspects of successful delivery of data solutions to support business needs.   She has worked in the capacity of both project manager and business analyst to lead business and technical project teams through data warehouse/data mart implementation, data integration, tool selection and implementation, and process automation projects.