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