Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The BI Delivery E2E Bird Eye View



A successful BI delivery in any organization is actually an end to end process which involves a lot of parties and bridging of gaps between them. A common overlook in most organization is the lack of involvement of business (yellow box) and the bridge between the different parties (red arrow) that result in a long term lose of credibility from users and this leads to the failure of BI delivery.

Without the business involvement from early start coupled with the straight timeline of delivery, the project is eventually pushed to deliver a solution base on technical go live as there is a problem securing the business user's involvement at the last milestone of the project. A BI solution that is delivered into BAU without business go live is at high risk of capturing the bugs and issues later on when business starts to be engaged and they reveal tons of issues from the solution. This eventually leads to a lost of credibility on the BAU organization when it fails to deliver a lot of major fixes required by business due to the fact that those fixes are not ready to be taken on by Support team and the project team had left when the project was declared technical live. In situation like this, is it politically correct to say the BAU organization is subjected as the 'victim' of the whole process?Which party is going to fund the cost if the project team is required to stay back to fix the issues? That is the reason a solution that is fit to land into BAU mode has to be both technically and business live. The BAU organization has the authority to raise a red flag to prevent a solution to land into BAU state without proper sign off from both technical and business.

The other common overlook is the knowledge transfer and skills capability from Project to Support team to maintain the solution (blue arrow). Often if this is two different teams or companies,there will be a gap of knowledge transfer for Support team to take on any major bug fixes or enhancements, thus leading to a high turnover time that at the end resulted in business losing confidence of the BAU organization to ensure 'business run as usual'.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Transport Watchout!

During the imports of a BI transports, the following should be look out:
1) Double check if Function Group or Shared User Exit are intentionally needed to be transported
2) Old transport overwrite new ones (esp in a multiple solution development environment)
3) Orphan transport left in non production system