Our Approach
Best Practices for Adopting Enteprise BI
Implementing a BI solution doesn’t have to be a cost-prohibitive and daunting experience. Our efficient iterative approach allows us to implement BI solutions within a reasonable timeframe and budget. For faster return of your investment, we break large and complex organizational BI projects into iterations and each iteration builds upon the previous to deliver a complete solution. We encourage you to involve their in-house developers early in the process to offload implementation effort and acquire the necessary skills to maintain the finished solution.
Every client has unique needs. I don't believe in the "one size fits all" approach and I'm not enamored with any specific methodology or doctrine if it's not in my client's best interest.
Teo LachevHere is what you can expect assuming we agree that an organizational BI solution is a best fit for you.
Planning phase
For larger projects we typically start with a short planning phase to determine the business objectives, success criteria, high-level system design, scope of the first iteration, and fixed price for its implementation. During the planning phase some customers prefer a proof of concept that demonstrates some of capabilities of the final solution. Because Prologika is a Microsoft gold partner, the cost of the planning phase can be fully or partially covered with Software Assurance vouchers.
Design phase
Having scoped the project, the next step might require formal analysis and design. During this phase, we analyze the user requirements in more detail. We’ll encourage you to give us a list of metrics that this iteration needs to produce and how they need to calculated. Or, we might implement a self-service model to prototype the final organizational BI solution. Once we understand your subject area, we might need to do formal design. For example, in the case of a classic BI architecture, we’ll need to design the logical and physical database structures. We’ll also produce important documentation, such as the database schema, data source mappings, and Bus Matrix that shows how dimensions relate to fact tables.
Construction phase
During this phase, we implement the agreed scope of the first iteration. For larger projects, we prefer to execute the tasks in parallel to reduce time to delivery. For example, once the DW structures are in place, an ETL developer can start loading them with data, while a BI architect can implement the data model. During this phase, we perform unit tests to make sure that the business calculations produce the correct results.
Testing phase
During this phase, we deploy the solution to a testing environment and resolve defects. We also transfer knowledge to your team. Finally, we deploy the solution to Production and support it during the warranty period.
