Summary

This chapter concentrated on the early tasks in the Lifecycle involving business requirements gathering, prioritization, and project planning. We gave special emphasis to the importance of understanding and documenting the business requirements.

The first part of the chapter described a process for gaining sponsorship, defining and documenting the enterprise-level business requirements, prioritizing the opportunities with senior business people, and gathering project requirements related to the top priority business process. This process also included the challenging task of distilling the analytic themes down to the business processes that provide the underlying information.

The second part of the chapter went through an abbreviated example of the business requirements gathering process at Adventure Works Cycles. The interview summary for the VP of Sales provided the analytic themes that tied to the business processes that fed into the bus matrix and the prioritization process.

These upfront business-related phases of the DW/BI project are by far the most important. Unfortunately, they can be intimidating for technologists. Do not resist or avoid the requirements gathering phase of the project. The resulting understanding of the business issues, their priorities, and the data that supports their solution is priceless for the DW/BI team. The requirements document will be your reference point for all major decisions from here on out. You get huge value just from the content of the document alone.

But wait, theres more! The requirements gathering process also helps you build positive working relationships with the business people. As the business people participate in the requirements process, they see that youve done your homework. You understand them, you speak their language, you want to help solve the problemin short, you get it.

If thats not enough to convince you, there are even more benefits to this process. Not only do you get documented requirements and better relationships, you gain active user support. As the business folks begin to understand your vision for an information solution, they see how your success ultimately leads to their success. They begin to see how their involvement will improve the chances of success.