Agile Approach to Business Intelligence as a Way to Success
ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIPS In Table 18, we show a table in which at each cell
we indicate a plus symbol (+) if there is positive relationship between a CSF (row) and an agile Table 15. Yeoh, Gao & Koronios (2007)
Code
YGK-CSF-1 1.- Committed top management support YGK-CSF-2 2.- Adequate resources are provided YGK-CSF-3 3.- A high-level champion from business side.
YGK-CSF-4 4.- Formal user involvement throughout the lifecycle YGK-CSF-5 5.- Formal education, training and support are in place YGK-CSF-6 6.- Well-established business case
YGK-CSF-7 7.- Strategic BI vision that is integrated with company initiatives YGK-CSF-8 8.- Project scope is clearly defined
YGK-CSF-9 9.- Adoption of incremental delivery approach YGK-CSF-10 10.- Project scheduled to deliver quick-wins YGK-CSF-11 11.- Team possess the right mix of skills YGK-CSF-12 12.- Use of external consultant at early phase YGK-CSF-13 13.- Committed business domain expertise YGK-CSF-14 14.- The team is cross-functional YGK-CSF-15 15.- Stable source systems are in place
YGK-CSF-16 16.- Establishment of a strategic, scalable and extensible technical framework YGK-CSF-17 17.- Prototype is used as proof of concept
YGK-CSF-18 18.- High quality of data at source systems YGK-CSF-19 19.- Information area readiness
YGK-CSF-20 20.- Business-led establishment of common measures and classifications YGK-CSF-21 21.- Metadata model is sustainable for scalability
YGK-CSF-22 22.- Business-led data governance
Agile Approach to Business Intelligence as a Way to Success
principle (column). If the relationship is negative, it is indicated with a minus symbol (-). If we do not identify a clear relationship between them, we leave the cell empty. The last column and the last row accumulate the total amount of positive and negative relationship for each agile principle and each critical success factor.
To determine the relationship nature (ie. sign) between CSF and agile principles we have used our experience on more than 50 deployments of BI projects in Spain during the last 10 years.
Moreover, we also consider the agile principles definitions from the Agile Manifesto, the CSF descriptions provided by the literature, and expe-riences documented in the literature.
Table 16. Primary factors
Code Authors Factors
PF15-1 SOLOM-CSF-2;W&W-CSF-6;SOLOM-CSF-3;SOLOM- CSF-8;BRIGG-CSF-13;S&F-CSF-5;S&F-CSF-7;MOSS-CFF-9;S&F-CSF-8; KO-CP-6;KO-CP-7;KO-CP-8;YGK-CSF-18;YGK-CSF-20;YGK-CSF-21
Data management
PF11-1 SOLOM-CSF-9;MOSS-CFF-1;MOSS-CFF-4; Quinn-
CFF2;MOSS-CFF-5;MOSS-CFF-10;KO-CP-4;KO-CP-5;YGK-CSF-8;YGK-CSF-9;YGK-CSF-17 Project management and methodology PF10-1 Quinn-CSF1;F&M-CFF3; Quinn-CFF1;
CHENOW-INT-3;CHENOW-INT-4;BRIGG-CSF-2;
S&F-CSF-3;WEIR-BP-3;ABDU-LL-4;YGK-CSF-13 Understand and manage business users needs PF9-1 BRIGG-CSF-1;W&W-CSF-1;S&F-CSF-2;
Quinn-
CSF5;CHENOW-INT-1;W&W-CSF-2;ABDU-LL-5;YGK-CSF-1;YGK-CSF-3 Management support
PF8-1 F&M-CFF2;4;5;
BRIGG-CSF-7;S&F-CSF-1; WEIR-BP-5; BRIGG-CSF-8;YGK-CSF-10 Achieve early project success PF7-1
Solom-CSF-5;Solom-CSF-7;Brigg-CSF-9;S&F-CSF-10;ADBU-LL-7;KO-CP-9;YGK-CSF-16 Careful choice of tools PF6-1 F&M-CFF8;MOSS-CFF-3 ; BRIGG-CSF-10;
W&W-CSF-4;WEIR-BP-4; YGK-CSF-4 Users are involved in the project
Table 17. Secondary factors
Code Authors Factors
SF5-1 W &
W-CSF-3;MOSS-CFF-2;W&W-CSF-5;YGK-CSF-2;YGK-CSF-14 Appropriate work equipment
SF5-2 Quinn-CSF4; Quinn-CFF4;
Brigg-CSF-12;W&W-CSF-7;YGK-CSF-20 The organizational culture
SF5-3 Brigg-CSF-6; S & F-6-CSF;Solom-CSF-4;ABDU-LL-1;KO-CP-2 Data warehouse design model SF4-1 Brigg-CSF-17;S&F-CSF-9;KO-CP-3;YGK-CSF-11 Prior knowledge of team members SF3-1 CHENOW-INT-2; Solom-CSF-10; Brigg-CSF-18 Users support the project SF3-2 YGK-CSF-7;W&W-CSF-8;W&W-CSF-8 BI Strategy / BI Governance
SF2-1 F & M-CFF9; Brigg-CSF-11 Organizational change management
SF2-2 WEIR-BP-1; Solom-CSF-6 Incremental loads
SF2-3 ABDU-LL-2;ABDU-LL-3 Reporting definition
153 Agile Approach to Business Intelligence as a Way to Success
To show how relationships between CSF and agile principles has been identified, we will analyse in more detail the specific relationships between Primary Factors and Agile Principles that we have indicated in the seven first rows of table 18.
PF15-1 Data Management
I this case, only one clear positive relationship has been identified between the “Data Management”
CSF and the agile principle of “Putting attention to excellence” (P9).
In fact, BI projects are fundamentally good data management tools that provide functionalities to perform data quality evaluation, data profiling and data transformation and distribution. Therefore, putting special attention to have a good design in data management, will help to achieve excellence in BI projects. A poor data design may move the project towards its failure.
PF11-1 Project Management and Methodology
As we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, a BI methodology is expected to facilitate change management (C1), to be executed by a cross-functional or multidisciplinary team (C2), to Figure 3. Items by primary factors and
second-ary factors
Table 18. Relationships between CSF and Agile Principles
P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 P6 P7 P8 P9 P10 P11 P12 Sum.
PF15-1 + 1
PF11-1 + + + + + + + + + 9
PF10-1 + + + + 4
PF9-1 + 1
PF8-1 + + + + 4
PF7-1 - -1
PF6-1 + + + + + + 6
SF5-1 + + 2
SF5-2 + + + + 4
SF5-3 - + + 1
SF4-1 + 1
SF3-1 + + + + 4
SF3-2 + + + 3
SF2-1 + + 2
SF2-2 0
SF2-3 - + 0
Sum. 5 3 3 8 4 3 0 3 5 1 4 2 41
Agile Approach to Business Intelligence as a Way to Success
help in the management of several projects (C3), to be task exhaustive (C4), to focus on critical path management (C5) and on people (C6), and finally to be aligned with business needs. Taking into account such characteristics, we identify several relationships with respect the following Agile Principles:
• P1 (Continuous delivery of value): Project management must guarantee to deliver val-ue to the organization in a continuous and early way. Delivering this value through the used methodology allows doing a value-guided project management, and therefore, contributing to the alignment of project management to business objectives (C7).
• P2 (Welcome changes): In this case, if a BI methodology must manage change (C1) in a easy way, it contributes to see chang-es not a difficulty for the project, but an opportunity.
• P3 (Frequently deliveries): Making de-liveries frequently contributes to foresee changes in business needs (C1, C7) and to improve the communication between cross-functional work teams (C2).
• P4, P5, P11 (Working together, Motivated people and Self-organizing teams): By promoting that business people and devel-opers work together, the methodology will be people oriented (C6), when team con-figuration and worker needs are one impor-tant key issue of the methodology.
• P6 (Face to face conversation): Face to face conversations and frequent deliveries between team members promote to consid-er people as a key issue of the methodol-ogy (C6).
• P9 (Attention to excellence): Putting spe-cial attention to functional and technical excellence, good data design and detailed analysis of all processes of the
organiza-tion, will facilitate to manage the BI proj-ect more accurately (C4) and the business objectives.
• P12 (Reflects and adjusts): When teams make periodical review sessions to anal-yse how they are working and to adapt, the project will be more effective or efficient.
Thus these teams are contributing to drive more easily the global project management to critical paths (C5).
PF10-1 Understand and Manage the Business Users Needs
One of the most important aspects of the BI systems is to be designed to support the business user needs.
Thus, in the development and implementation of the system, the development team must understand and manage properly the business needs and the decision maker requirements.
• P1 (Continuous delivery of value): BI sys-tem users are often managers and execu-tives that make decisions to satisfy tacti-cal or strategic goals of the organization.
Therefore, the BI system must give support in this task providing the information with higher business value.
• P2 (Welcome changes): Decision-making is a non-structured process and a rapidly changing process. Therefore, the BI proj-ect must be managed so that it accepts and admits changes on the process while it sup-ports or the information needs it satisfies.
• P4 and P6 (Working together and Face-to-face conversation): When business users and developers are organized in multidis-ciplinary teams where communication and collaboration is fluid, then it is easier for the BI project team to understand and man-age more properly the business user needs, and in fact to be more aligned with the business objectives.
155 Agile Approach to Business Intelligence as a Way to Success
PF9-1 Management Support
• P8 (Sustainable development). Sponsors, developers, and business users must be really involved in the BI project and they should collaborate in a sustainable envi-ronment. Therefore, it is possible to im-prove management support when the sys-tem provides value to the organization.
PF8-1 Achieve Early Project Success A possible way to have an early success of the project is to focus on the most urgent business needs. That is, to focus on those needs that must be satisfied as well and as soon as possible.
Therefore, the organization regards the BI project as successful project.
• P1 and P3 (Continuous and frequently de-livery of value). As the BI project delivers value to the business users in a continuous, frequent and early way, the organization may better manage its more critical and ur-gent business needs.
• P4 (Working together). The strategy to configure mixed teams (with technical and business professionals) clearly facilitates the concentration into the more immediate and early tasks to satisfy the most critical and urgent organization needs. However, this team configuration also contributes to have a more fluid relationship and a more effective working environment.
• P10 (Simplicity). Also positive, because the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, can change our behaviour to achieve rapid success.
PF7-1 Careful Choice of Tools
Organizations are a complex net of processes that must be managed properly to be competitive.
However, BI must provide management support
by providing strategic and tactical information to help decision maker to analyse and take the most appropriate decision in each situation. This support is provided by means of a set of BI tools.
• P2 (Welcome changes). Once an organi-zation has selected the BI tools to support decision-making process, it is not easy to change them. Moreover, when a team is familiar with one tool, it is difficult to con-vince them to change it. It is also for this change aversion that BI tool must de select-ed carefully, taking into account the semi-structured and rapidly changing nature of the decision making process. Therefore, we consider that there is a negative rela-tionship between the agile principle and the critical success factor.
PF6-1 Users are Involved in the Project
• P1 (Continuous delivery of value). To have the decision maker involved to the team facilitates to know his/her needs quickly and it is easier to satisfy them. Therefore, as soon the team has some user request, then it can decide to handle it immediately and deliver as soon as possible to the user.
In this way, the project team may delivery continuously little doses of value to the user.
• P2, P4 (Welcome changes and Working to-gether). To have decision makers involved in the project team working together with technicians facilitates to understand more quickly organization needs and to propose changes to have a greater competitive ad-vantage. Therefore, the rest of people may be more easily convinced about the inher-ent business value and then they may ac-cept these changes.
• P5, P6 (Motivated individuals and face-to-face conversations). To involve decision makers in the project team facilitates to
Agile Approach to Business Intelligence as a Way to Success
have all team members more motivated to develop the BI project. At the same time, this time configuration facilitates the face-to-face conversation and collaboration be-tween the members of the team.
• P8 (Sustainable development). Sponsors, developers, and business users participat-ing into the same BI project team facili-tates to have a sustainable environment, and therefore, to have a more solid devel-opment team with users and developers involved.
MAIN CONCLUSIONS