WBS for Business Intelligence Projects

By Priyanka Jain

Topics: Agile, Business Intelligence, Complexity, Estimating, Schedule Management, Scheduling, Strategy, Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)

Format: Plan / Schedule

This template provides a work breakdown structure for business intelligence projects and for requirement effort estimation for a waterfall methodology-based project or user story estimation for an agile-based project. The template is based on project requirement complexity (low, medium and high). For this template, the assumption is that ETL (extract, transform, load) and the front-end visualization portion (reporting) are part of project development. Project management and contingency hours should be considered while estimating any type of project from 10-20% depending on the project, SOW type, external dependencies, anticipated delays in data sourcing, etc.

The need for creating and sharing this template was driven by being approached by multiple clients across various domains/industries to provide an estimation, WBS, guidelines and key activities for BI projects. A customized version of this template is being used to draw many proposals and plan for delivery of multiple BI projects for varied tools and technology.