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