Everyday associates are facing this question. Only
few lucky people start a project and continue to be a part of it till the end.
Many of us join the project in between and some unlucky folks join in climax.
Whatever the time you join, you always struggle to get a good understanding of
the project.
You
may be a developer, may be a manager or may be a business analyst; I believe we
all face similar kind of problem as we don’t understand a project very well.
There might be a well-documented understanding pdf will be in-front of you but
that hundreds of pages will not help you out, if you can’t ask good question to
correct people.
Sometime
people think that when the pressure comes then people learn fast. May be it is
correct in many places but can you actually learn in pressure. In pressure you
only gulp the details and try to memorize it. Remember memorizing is not
learning. Learning comes observing the detail and absorb the extract from it. Learning
is the only thing which can lead you to solution.
Then
how to start?
Every project or every machine (In terms of
Automation) runs on a simple logic Input-Process-Output. But first of all you
have to understand the requirement – Functional requirement, which actually
drives the whole force.
IT
or BI doesn’t run business. Only facilitate and help business decision makers
by keeping and retrieving data in right time. On first day in a new project we
should get these understanding that
- Why business is hiring us?
- What data we need to keep?
- Which are the business drivers for
this project?
- When we need to deliver?
- Who are the contact people for
everything?
Now, you have the questions but you may get answer
as follows:
- To create a reporting system for an
asset management system.
- Their business data is from different
sources.
- You will get a KPI document if you are
lucky.
- There is a timeline and your project
manager can deliver the plan.
- Most fuzzy question! You may come to
know slowly.
If you are a developer and joined in middle of a
project or replacing someone, he can transfer some knowledge to you. He also
can introduce with someone who can give you something. But trust me; no one can
help you out if you don’t have any plan of your own to learn a project.
The
last question is about the contact person which is the most important in any
type of professional work. You are not a God and you can’t learn everything.
But you have to know that who knows what. In Business Analysis term it is
called Elicitation- Reaching right people.
You
have to know the concerned person for every piece of knowledge you need to
gather to work with. It is very easy to say that it is not my job. You can
concentrate on your technical responsibility and taking a mock-up placed in
your document repository you can create a report without thinking of the
business manager’s expectation. Their expectation is already placed in a
business requirement document.
Yes,
you can. But to add a value to your customer you are always welcome to propose
something which comes from the knowledge over their demand. You have to
understand the demand first and have to produce what exactly what they need and
then the scope of improvisation come.
For
that you need the person/people who is or are the expert on the subject over
which the BI will be implemented. But whom you need and what you will ask to
them? Before going to business people you need to do the following tasks.
- Tear down the project concept.
- Do the reading and Dumpster diving
- Detailing the needs.
- Prepare the questions.
- Find out the persons.
- Meet them personally.
- Post meeting documentation
Tear
down the project concept
Divide and rule is the best process to get a whole
grab in a project. But to divide it you need time and material. In different
phase of a project you will get different kind of material available or
prepared. So you cannot generalize this topic.
In beginning of project
In beginning of project you have nothing in your
hand except the business needs which is also not clear as customers normally
don’t know what they actually want. Their demand slowly increases when they
start familiar with the new system which you are building.
You
need to start from arts not science. Tear down their demand. Let’s take an
example of a reporting project which will track over sales of some different
brand of cars.
As
a business intelligence person you should understand that though the project
output is some reports which will show the sales from different region, but
this is not the ultimate goal. They need this information to take the decision
over dealership that are bestselling or worst selling and take action on them.
Now
you have idea that your output will be the input of some other system. So the
numbers which you keep is the source of another financial system. The decision
will be based on the turnover and that will be calculated somewhere else.
To
create the system you need to know the source and destiny of the data. You also
have to know the business rules of the data to process in-between.
Apart of that Business
Intelligence needs an enormous infrastructure support. You don’t have to know
the server mechanism or the details of the shared services but you need to know
or build the architecture of the whole project.
So
for you here is my list of question, it grows anytime and number may grow exponentially:
What
are the data sources and type
|
Data
sources need to be documented as the source can be heterogeneous and
geographically separated. It may be a yearly spreadsheet, access db in a user
desktop or simple a regular changing text file.
|
What
tools are going to use?
|
If
it is not decided yet, decide it. If decided then understand the
compatibility with other tools. Find out the challenges and limitations
technically (like Business Objects XIR3 cannot create report from different
sources from a single universe)
This
is important because you cannot change a tool middle of the project and you
cannot learn a tool when it is not comes under your skill domain.
|
Where
is the data center?
|
Data
Center location is sometime important when you are doing a global application
or serving a country data in 4 different time zones.
A
real life problem is in US, the year ending process completes before the
actual year ends. Because New York and Los Angeles is having a time
difference of 3 hours.
|
Top-Down
or Bottom- up or Hybrid?
|
If
the process is not yet defined then you need to define the process, which way
to go. Kimball’s or Inmon’s or both.
|
Security
architecture
|
Who
to see what and what not see is need to be understood beforehand. The layered
architecture with security levels need to be defined first.
|
Details
of the infrastructure.
|
The
biggest set of information if the infrastructure is ready.
The
data storage capacity.
Required
deep links.
DEV,
Stage, Test, Prod environments and their credential
Database
schema names and credentials
External data feed process and source connectivity.
These
all you needs to know with additional information.
|
Document
repository
|
Business
Document repository
Your company document repository.
Technology document repository (E.g SAP SDN)
|
Client
location and time zone
|
To
communicate in proper time.
|
In Middle of a project
If you join in middle of the project the above
information is already available but you need to find out the correct place to
find these documents. You don’t have to bother about how to get the information
but which place the information is kept.
You
also need to analyze the project situation by tear it down by the blue print of
the BI structure. The methodologies and architecture followed by the project
presents a flow diagram to you. You need to analyze your scope of work and
gather all the information required to achieve your goal. As an example if you
are a reporting person you need a database mapping document which map the
database tables to the business objects. But some kind of general information
everyone should gather.
Assuming that you join when requirement gathering
and analysis is done and development is started here is my list which you need
to find out:
Current
situation of the project
|
In
which phase the project is going on. What are the challenges the team is
facing. What are the lessons learnt and best practice followed.
|
Project
Document repository location
|
Lots
of document created or gathered by Business Analyst and SMEs and put in some
document repository. You need to know which folder have what.
Download
whatever you need and also download something you think you need but no one
suggested seeing that. Sometime irrelevant information also important to
understand a project.
|
SME
locations and information
|
SMEs
are most important dictionary for the business rules. Though everything is
documented but they are the fastest way to solve a problem when functional
understanding needs to meet technical challenges. In every projects quick
adjustments is always needed to overcome technical challenges and put an
interim solution which is aligned with business demands.
Quick
sheet which tells about contact information of SMEs solve the problem of real
time searching for a correct person. That will save lots of mail chain and
mail forwarding.
|
Team
information and contact details
|
Sometime
developers and managers are geographically separated and chatting and phone
call is the only media to communicate. If you keep the contact details handy,
you may skip many problems. This information is not only for BI. It’s for all
the projects best practices.
|
Infrastructure
|
Take
the architecture diagram.
Check
what you need from the whole setup to achieve your goal.
Ask
for the details to your technical colleagues.
|
Functional/Technical
specification
|
Read
thoroughly these document if prepared. Suggest changes if require.
|
Database
mappings
|
For
ETL developers you need a mapping document from data modeling to database
tables.
For
reporting guys you need a mapping document from database to report element
mapping. Without this information if you precede you need fur more time to
give a solution over a simple workaround.
|
Do
the reading and dumpster diving
Reading thoroughly and thoughtfully is mandatory
skill in BI industry. BI is really not about the coding. BI projects are more
aligned to business than technology. Understanding business demand requires a
huge knowledge level of the industry which you are implementing the BI
solution. Though you are a domain expert and have lots of certification in BI
or several domain and business Area but every single project have separate set
of knowledge which you have to gather, either by reading or reaching the
business users.
In
onsite – offshore model, offshore don’t have access to business users. Very
little time they have some interaction and also on some specific solution of a
technology related problem. Onsite person also not get chance to ask all the
questions which comes to their mind. Business users who actually use the system
have their own goals to reach. They don’t have time to give you knowledge transition.
They also sometime skip this responsibility.
You
have only choice to read. But what to read and what not to read they can help
you. They can definitely show some location, some websites to get understanding
of their terminology and demand. Also in period of time they create many
documents which they used to upload in the shared document repository. They
will show a location of one document, you need to grab the whole which is
present there. Later you can delete whatever is not needed.
Start
with the document which you gathered with help of business users. After reading
project related document and business document in parallel you will start
understanding on your own that what you need and what you not. Then you can
focus on the document which actually need. You can use MosCoW analysis for this
though it is not what it is intended for. But once you classified the documents,
you are half-a-way done.
Once
you get access to their shared document and grab the whole folder, you are
actually doing dumpsters diving. People are always afraid to delete something.
We used to keep everything though the document is old and new version is
loaded. Use that weakness of human brain to your strength. Get the old document
and check somewhere you may find something which gives you some light. As an
example I was checking for a information that how all the car selling program
is made. They should have some similarity. Because in any big organization idea
evolves from idea, very few times a new idea popped up and implemented. Keeping
that in mind I get all the documents about car selling program. Reading and
classifying that information I came to know that a program is aligned to the
brand market and technology. An electronic vehicle never part of a program of
minivan selling. So you need to build the table like that which will
accommodate all the new programs with different brand, markets and technology.
Another
piece of knowledge you will get from the customer desk. We will discuss it
later. But as an IT guy you may not decorate your desk as your laptop is your
desk. But the business people who work for a business more than 20 year in a
same office put marks on his desk. So pick those and question to know them and
their area of knowledge better.
Detail the needs.
Once you
are done with you reading (though it is impossible), start creating your
understanding document. Understanding is yours, document will be yours. No
prescribed format is present as of date. If you consider BRD as your
understanding document, you should elaborate with such a detail which may help
you to backtrack.
To
me documentation should be done in three ways
Excel
documents
|
Data
which you need to sort or classify.
E.g:
List
of reports
Number
of users.
Name
of users by department.
Test
case links or test cases.
Database
mappings
Most
of the document should be in spreadsheet.
|
Word
Document
|
Data
which you need to explain in detail and write functional information.
e.g.
Detailing
functionality
Object
description
Overall
details of process flow
Business
understanding
|
Visio
document
|
Data
which you need to visualize and memorize as summary
e.g.
Pictorial
representation of all of your understanding.
Architecture
diagram
Data
or process flow.
|
Documenting your understanding in your way will
help you to find broken links very fast. We used to forget things which we
don’t use for some time. But if we read something regarding that will kick up
the old information in our mind.
Prepare the questions and find out the
person
Prepare your questions when you are reading. It is
one of the proven practices of reading. Write your question in another paper
when you studying a page. You may get your answer after reading the whole
document but you will find some question which is not answered by that piece of
documentation.
Before going to users read all the documents and
listed down all unanswered questions. You should start categorizing the
question by user. According to your understanding you know or assume the
knowledge level and area of users. From your list of questions try to put the
question by their name. After completing the categorization you will see some
leftovers which may not fit with any user’s knowledge scape. Don’t try hard.
Try to show the question to your user and ask that who can answer these. You
will get the answer.
So the steps are:
1.
Prepare the question dump as you read
2.
Prepare the unanswered question dump.
3.
Categorize questions by user
4.
List uncategorized questions.
Find out the person and meet them
physically
Though you listed down the questions and know whom
to ask what, still you need to find those persons. And while doing that your
list of people may change as people change their positions but the document
never get updated.
Once
you are ready with the user list first verify with company directory about
their role and existence. You may find someone who leave the company and you
are in dark that whom to ask these questions. In organizational hierarchy you
will find the managers of that person. Send mail and get the information that
who replaced that position. You will get answer.
Now
you may find that your user may present in company but he switched the role few
months ago. Then you need to ask them that who replaced them. You will get
answer.
Last
problem you may be geographically separated with targeted user. Don’t bother
about this. Use technology, use webex, lync, go-to-meeting, live meeting to
connect with them. You need to check your system with your technology before
asking for user to join. Once you are ready then sent them a meeting request
with details of your questions, so they will be prepare with the answer before
you go.
Now
the same thing will apply for visiting a user personally. But added advantage
is face-to-face meeting is you can read his/her expression and shoot questions
which are relevant and irrelevant to your project. Irrelevant questions is
sometime more important than relevant questions as that will grow your
knowledge of their demand. Let’s take an example, for a report requirement I
came to know from a user that they need reports in pdf and excel. Pdf for their
customer and excel for their internal users. While discussing other stuff about
the day to day problem they are facing, he told me that they faces query on the
sanity of the report data regularly. When they are sending reports to their
clients they need to send the report in pdf format. But those pdf data is also
getting tampered by pdf editors.
Post meeting documentation
You are almost done. You have plenty of notes and
a fair understanding on almost everything you want. Now you know what they input,
what to process and what they want as output. That’s where you start thinking
on “HOW”. Till this point you were either a puppet or an order taker only, not
an BI person. You have all your technical skill to answer the “HOWs”. But wait,
did you documented what you just clear out from the SMEs. If not then do it
now.
You
may think that the knowledge you gathered from the SMEs are the answer of your few
listed question which you didn’t find from anywhere, and you will never forgot
those. You are wrong. Write up a summary of the discussion in peace. You will
find many things which are not answer of your question but can be useful for
many problem solutions. Also, trust me you will forget if you don’t write as
those questions are the toughest question which no previous documents explained
to you. Brain is by default lazy and the best exercise is to let brain know
that where you kept those answers.
I hope you climb up the learning curve and ready
to put your analytics skill which doesn’t include the entity called People
(which are the most difficult things to handle). If you follow the process you
will come up with thousands of Jargon which really created for showcasing BI
world. Just focuses on the layman terms described above and from the knowledge
you gather create visual heavens from the chaotic data.
Good Luck.
