Business Intelligence For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Building the BI Project Plan

The BI project plan is the primary tracking and control mechanism for your business intelligence implementation. It's where you list and organize every single task required to make your BI project a reality. That doesn't necessarily mean you list "reading this book", or other early-stage daydreaming...er...research tasks.

The project plan is there to help you choreograph every move the project team members will have to make. All the tasks, milestones, and deliverables are there so that each moment of implementation planning, designing, coding, and testing is accounted for and scheduled properly. But project plans are more than mere task lists; they include resources, constraints, risks, and budget issues; wrapping it all around a calendar (or multiple calendars) to show the impact of changing the resources working on the project or deviating from the schedule.

Tip

The project plan is really a dual-purpose document:

• It's the high-level blueprint that maps, ahead of time, which tasks have to be done, in what order, and by whom.

• It's the central organizing tool for the project team—and for many of the stakeholders as well. The plan keeps everybody marching to the beat of the same drum.

Note

Prior to beginning work on the project, the approved project plan communicated throughout the organization is a kind of promise to stakeholders. It says the BI implementation team will do these specific tasks in this specific way.

After the project kicks off, the ...