Business Intelligence Project Management 101: Managing BI Projects Within the PMI Process Group

Too many times, business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing project managers are ill-equipped to handle their role in guiding a project to success. Often, the person slated to lead a project is either 1) a technician who does not know the first thing about managing a project or 2) a project manager who does not know the first thing about BI.

This paper introduces Business Intelligence to the pure project manager and introduces project management concepts to the BI practitioner in the context of an example project.

A BI Primer

Before  getting started, we need to make sure we understand business intelligence (BI) at a high level.

Making the most of an organization’s data assets is the purpose of BI. Companies can gain a competitive advantage—for example, increasing revenue, reducing costs, or reducing risks—by making better data-driven decisions through a well-built BI system.

The diverse business applications of a BI system can be critically important to an organization. For example:

• Customer Profitability: Twenty percent of your customers make up 80 percent of your profit. Which customers are they? Which customers cost more money than they are worth? A major Telco company let go of many customers after they conducted such analysis by building a profitability data mart.
• Increase sales: A major …