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 Data Warehouse: Project
Planning and Requirements
Disclaimer: The contents in this presentation have been taken
from multiple resources available at the internet including
books, notes, reports, websites and presentations.
Chapter Objectives
• Review the essentials of planning for a data warehouse
• Distinguish between data warehouse projects and OLTP system
projects
• Learn how to adapt the life cycle approach for a data warehouse
project
Planning and Project Management
• Project planning is a discipline for stating how to complete a project
within a certain timeframe, usually with defined stages, and with
designated resources.

• Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing,

motivating, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals.
Planning and Project Management
• More than 50% of data warehouse projects are considered failures.

• In many cases the project is not completed and the system is not
delivered.
Planning your data warehouse
• Good project management cannot guarantee success, but poor management
on significant projects always leads to failure.

• Improper planning and inadequate project management tend to result in a

failure.

• You need to determine whether your company really need a data warehouse.

• You have to establish who will be using the data warehouse, how they will
use it and at what times.
Key Issues
• Answer to the key questions are vital for planning and successful
completion of a project.
• Value and expectations
• Risk assessment
• Top-Down or bottom-up
• Build or buy
• Single vendor or best of breed
Value and expectations

• You have to be sure that given the current requirements of your

company, data warehouse is the most viable solution.

• Will your data warehouse help the executives to do better planning?

• What does the management want to accomplish through the data

warehouse?
Risk Assessment
• Risk assessment includes both the identification of potential risk and
the evaluation of the potential impact of the risk.

• Planners generally associate project risk with the cost of the project.

• In actual, risk assessment is more than that (Technical, Cost, Schedule,

Client, Contractual, Weather, Financial, Political, People)

• What are the risks faced by the company without the benefits derivable
from a data warehouse?
Risk Assessment
• What losses are likely to be incurred?

• What opportunities are likely to be missed?

• Include this assessment as a part of your planning document.

Top-down or bottom-up
• Top down approach is to start at the enterprise wide data warehouse
and then go for subject data marts.
• You have to weigh these options as they apply to your company.
• It may possible that your company would be satisfied with quick
deployments of few data marts.
Top-down or bottom-up
• It may be important to quickly react to some market forces.

• Whatever the approach your company desires to adopt, scrutinize the

options carefully and make the choice.

• Document the implications of the choice in the planning document.

Build or Buy
• This is a major issue for all the organizations.

• There is no need to reinvent the wheel every time.

• A wide range of third party tools and solutions are available.

Build or Buy
• How much of your data marts should you build yourselves?
• Do you want to write more in-house programs for data extraction and
data transformation?
• Do you want to use in-house programs for loading the data
warehouse storage?
• Do you want to use vendor tools completely for information delivery.
Build or Buy
• Do your homework and find the proper balance between in-house
and vendor software.
• You have to do all this at planning stage.
Single vendor or best of breed
• Vendors come in variety of categories.
• There are two options:
1. Use the products of a single vendor
2. Use the products from more than one vendor selecting appropriate tools.
Single vendor or best of breed
• Choosing a single vendor solution has few advantages:
• High level of integration among the tools.
• Consistant look and feel
• Seamless cooperation among components
• Overall price negotiable.
Single vendor or best of breed
• Choosing best of breed solution has also few advantages:
• Could build an environment to fit your organization
• No need to compromise.
• Select the products best suites for the function.
Business Requirements, Not
Technology
• Let business requirements drive your data warehouse, not
technology.

• Data warehouse developers are interested in putting pretty pictures

and pay little attention to user requirements.

• Data warehousing is not about technology, it is about solving user’s

need for strategic information.
Top Management Support
• No major initiative in a company can succeed without the support
from senior management.
The Data warehouse Project
• Data warehouse projects are different from projects building the
transaction processing systems.
• How about traditional system development life cycle (SDLC)
approach?
• Can we use this approach to data warehouse projects as well?
• If so, what are the development phases in this life cycle?
How is it different from OLTP?
Data warehouse project different from OLTP system Project
Data warehouse: Distinctive features and challenges for project Management
The System Development life-
Cycle Approach
• Illustrates the general flow of a DW implementation
• Identifies task sequencing and highlights activities that should happen
concurrently
• May need to be customized to address the unique needs of your
organization
• Not every detail of every Lifecycle task will be performed on every
project
Data Warehouse development
phases
 Data Warehouse Project Life
Cycle: Major Steps and Sub-steps
Project Planning
• Definition of scope, goals, objectives and expectations.
• Establishment of implementation strategy
• Preliminary identification of project resources
• Assembling of project team
• Estimation of project schedule.
Requirements Definition
• Definition of requirements gathering strategy
• Conducting of interviews and group sessions with users
• Review of existing documents
• Study of source operational systems
• Derivation of business metrics and dimensions need for analysis
Design
• Design of the logical data model
• Definition of data extraction , transformation and loading functions
• Design of information delivery framework
• Establishment of storage requirements
• Definition of overall architecture and supporting infrastructure.
• Conducting of interviews and group sessions with users
 Construction

• Selection and installation of infrastructure hardware and software.

• Selection and installation of the DBMSs
• Selection and installation of ETL and information delivery tools
• Completion of the design of the physical model
• Completion of the metadata component
 Deployment
• Completion of user acceptance tests
• Performance of initial data loads
• Making user desktops ready for the data warehouse
• Training and support for the initial set of users
• Provision for data warehouse security, backup and recovery
 Maintenance
• Ongoing monitoring of data warehouse
• Continuous performance tuning
• Ongoing user training
• Provision of ongoing support to users
• Ongoing data warehouse management