Data warehousing – Data warehouse Project Management

Characteristics of successful data warehouse projects generally include the following aspects –

  • Clear business justification for the project ie. measurable benefits must be defined for a data warehouse project
  • Efficient project personnel
  • Ensuring data quality & consistency Data warehouses deal with historical data from a variety of sources. So care must taken to ensure data quality. consistency & commonality of data definitions and recording of changes to historical data definitions.
  • Allow the data warehouse to start small and evolve Most of the data warehouse projects fail due to very broader scope. Successful projects consider their first effort as a prototype and continue to evolve from that point.
  • Properly planned infrastructure A new and well-planned infrastructure must be designed to handle communications among distributed data sources and with the data warehouse.
  • Efficient data warehouse modeling, design & testing techniques.

Basic Proiect management

A project is any set of tasks with a specific objective to be completed within certain specifications that consumes capital resources.

For any data warehouse project, the traditional management must be replaced by a new type of management that is temporary and very with a fast reaction time and able to respond rapidly to both internal and external changes. A data warehouse project management thus encompasses the following activities for performing a successful data warehouse project-

  • Defining work requirements.
  • Defining the quantity of work.
  • Defining the resources needed.
  • Monitoring the project by

– Tracking progress (dates & milestones

– Comparing actual figures to predicted figures

– Analyse the impact of changes

-Marking adjustments to the project

To effectively fulfill the project management functions listed above, data warehouse project managers must be able to-

  • Identify function responsibilities and ensure that all activities are a for.
  • Minimize the need for continuous reporting.
  • Identify time limits for scheduling.
  • Identify a methodology for trade off analysis.
  • Measure the project accomplishment against the plans.
  • Identify and resolve problems quickly.
  • Improve estimation capabilities for future planning.
  • Keep track of meeting project objectives