“I hear that Agile is chaos and no plan, how can that help me?"
If you haven’t said this yourself, chances are that your boss or your colleagues will have said it. It’s a common misconception that Agile is the same as bad or even no planning. In this book, we review the disciplined approach to Agile development and how it applies specifically to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing projects.
We share the story of projects, how we approached the planning and execution, and the practices that you need to have in place to ensure your project not only succeeds, but also starts delivering value in the very early stages. To make sure you gain the trust of your stakeholders!
“Sure, Agile may work, but my projects are so complex and with so many dependencies, that Agile can’t scale to that level of complexity!"
This is a very common objection we hear, and it is quite right. The simplistic methods that many Agile practitioners want to apply won’t work for high complexity projects, or even multi-project environments that are common in BI projects.
That’s why we developed our own approach to tackle different levels of complexity, and adapt our method to the context of each BI project. In this book we review projects that are front-end heavy, with little else, but we also share our approach to multi-project contexts, where Agile BI needs to co-exist with other (already ongoing) Waterfall projects.
The core of Agile is adaptability, and how to adopt Agile needs to accommodate the context of your project.
"But, how do I get my manager to accept the use of Agile in my BI project?”
Gaining the trust of the stakeholders must be at the top of our list. That’s why we go into detail on how to start delivering value in your project quickly. Quick value delivery generates valuable feedback, gets users involved, and gains the trust of management.
By the end of this book you will be asking “how could we even think of running BI projects in any other way?”
The advantages of the approach and method we describe in this book are so big, that by the end of the book Agile BI will become the default approach for you, and we will give you the step-by-step journey to move away from Waterfall and start ripping the business benefits of Agile BI!
There are things you can start doing today, that will quickly help get your BI project back on track, and help your business thrive.
