When facing a new BI project you may ask yourself "Where do I begin?" This article will introduce Sisense's approach to managing an agile BI project from raising the initial requirements to rolling out the dashboards and maintaining them.
The workflow
When we think about BI, we are looking for a way to stay on top of the rapidly changing business needs. For that, we suggest an agile, iterative workflow which consists of three phases – Planning, Execution, Delivery, as illustrated in the diagram below.
- The Planning phase – Includes a full-blown design of the BI solution and dashboards hierarchy, based on the end users' business requirements.
- The Execution phase – Here is where you actually create the ElastiCube and Dashboard with Sisense product. Usually, a single iteration will include one dashboard, to allow fast response to changing business requirements.
- The Delivery phase - The roll out of the BI solution, and how to manage and maintain it over time. What you should do to keep your BI solution alive within the organization.
The players
Three players take part in this workflow –
- Business user – This is the end user of the BI solution, who’s going to interact with the dashboards as a decision supporting tool.
Keeping the Business user in the loop throughout the process, and getting her continuance feedback, ensures that the solution would meet the business requirements. - Sisense owner – The person in the organization who's responsible for understanding the business requirements, translating them into a dashboard design (and mockup), and executing these plans.
- Data Modeler - The person who's familiar with the data sources, knows the data structure, the semantics and business logic of the tables and fields. Responsible for designing and building the ElastiCube
The Implementation Kit
To learn more about each step, we've created an implementation kit that contains templates for the different activities that you should take and recorded sessions that will walk step by step through the implementation workflow. Check out the following links:
Business Requirements Gathering
High-Level Design of the BI Solution
The BI Implementation workflow overview webinar
