Tag Archives: Project Management

More on the Agile Architect: Process and Knowledge Transfer

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webscrum_2444372bI’ve written about groupthink-related quality challenges on Agile projects, and the architect’s role in preventing groupthink from degrading quality. I’ve seen other risks related to the cohesion and potential insularity of successful Agile teams, and the architect is also well positioned to help prevent these: a tendency to neglect setting up and documenting repeatable processes, and a similar tendency not to share of knowledge and lessons learned outside the Agile team. Continue reading →

No More Enterprise Data Sinks – An Agile Data Warehousing Manifesto

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SinkOver the past year I’ve reviewed what seem like countless plans for enterprise data warehouses. The plans address real problems in the organizations involved: the organization needs better data to recognize trends and react faster to opportunities and challenges; business measures and analyses are unavailable because data in source systems is inconsistent, incomplete, erroneous, or contains current values but no history; and so on.

The plans detail source system data and its integration into a central data hub. But the ones I’m referring to don’t tell how the data will be delivered, or portray a specific vision of how the data is to drive business value. Instead, their business case rests on what I’ll call the “railroad hypothesis”. No one could have predicted how the railroads enabled development of the West, so the improved data infrastructure will create order of magnitude improvements in ability to access, share, and utilize data, from which order of magnitude business benefits will follow.* All too often these plans just build bridges to nowhere. Continue reading →

Assumptions: A Key to Technical Leadership

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DonkeyThere’s an unfortunate and rather rude saying about assumptions that I’ve found popular among IT folks I’ve worked with. I say unfortunate because, to me, assumptions that are recognized early and handled the right way are a key to successful projects. Technical players who use assumptions well can help set projects on the right path long before they go astray.

Sometimes on waterfall and hybrid projects technical players are asked to estimate work early, before requirements are complete. My instinctive reaction is not to provide an ungrounded estimate, but that’s not helpful. The way to handle this uncomfortable uncertainty is to fill out the unknowns with assumptions: detailed, realistic statements that provide grounding for your estimate. Continue reading →

GIGO: Data Quality Guidelines for Application Development

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There’s consensus among data quality experts that, generally speaking data quality is pretty much bad (here, here, and here). Data quality approaches generally focus on profiling, managing, and correcting data after it is already in the system. This makes sense in a daGIGOta science or warehousing context, which is often where quality problems surface. To quote William McKnight at the first of those sources:

“Data quality is no longer the domain of just the data warehouse. It is accepted as an enterprise responsibility. If we have the tools, experiences, and best practices, why, then, do we continue to struggle with the problem of data quality?”

So if the data quality problem is Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO), then I would think that it would be easy to find data quality guidelines for app dev, and that those guidelines would be lightweight and helpful to those projects. Based on my research there are few to none such sources (please add them to the comments if you find otherwise).

So, all that said here’s my cut at app dev data quality guidelines by project activity: Continue reading →

Lynchburg SQL Server User’s Group 10/30

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Liberty-UniversityYesterday I had the pleasure of presenting “The Business End of Data Modeling” for the Lynchburg SQL Server User’s Group. It was a great time, thanks for having me out!

I’ve linked the presentation below, please comment here or shoot me an email if you have comments or questions.

BusinessEndOfDataModeling20141030

Get the Big Picture: Effective High-Level Diagrams

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PIcassoDrawingI believe that early, effective big picture diagrams are key to application development project success. According to the old saw, no project succeeds without a catchy acronym. Maybe so, but I’d say no project succeeds without a good big picture diagram. The question: what constitutes a good one? To me good high-level diagrams have four key characteristics: they are simple, precise, expressive, and correct.

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A Fist Full of Agile Critiques

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Out of curiosity I recently reviewed articles critical of Agile Methodologies. I had expected agile-versus-waterfall arguments and attacks from vendors selling new alternatives, but even given the reputation that advocates have for flaming well-intentioned critics, I wasn’t prepared for the level of emotion I found.

My opening position was that Agile techniques are great, but like any other tool there are limits and prerequisites. The critical articles I read strengthened that view. Let’s review three examples that stood out, in reverse order: Continue reading →

What Driving Dogs Tell Us About Learning

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Recently the BBC posted this video. On first view it is just funny, but watching those dogs learn to drive really reminded me of personal experiences with IT teams making big learning transitions. To represent those real situations let’s consider a fictional team of SQL developers facing the daunting task of deploying a functional Hadoop-based analytics prototype in two months. The video parallels their critical learning success factors: (1) set audacious goals, (2) learn bit by bit, and (3) know your limits.

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No silver business intelligence bullets, but still a bright upside

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When Tom Petty sang, “Hey baby, there ain’t no easy way out” he wasn’t referring to business intelligence (BI) reporting but he might have been. Current generation reporting engines, AKA data visualization or data discovery tools, market their products with statements like these, emphasizing quick development and ease of use:

  • “The democratization of data is here. In minutes, create an interactive viz (sic) and embed it in your website. Anyone can do it— and it’s free.” (Tableau Products Page)
  • “Easy yet sophisticated report design empowers your employees to design professional and telling reports in minutes not days” (Windward)

I like these tools, and I do believe that they can provide a leaner, more productive, and more informative approach to BI reporting than some more mature products.  However, none is a silver bullet for all data integration and reporting woes. Continue reading →

Why is your reporting project late?

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In my experience, some BI projects ultimately finish as a success, but exceed budget and schedule targets and fall short of functional goals along the way. On projects like this, somewhere in the midst of report development, things get sticky and tasks fall behind schedule as the team runs into unexpected complexities. Continue reading →