3fifteen recognises the imperative of delivering tangible benefits to business sooner.  By creating three project processes, QWK-WIN, Data Warehouse and Presentation, we are able to provide a waterfall approach to implementing a BI project that allows for the creation of reports, dashboards, and self-service BI within a short timeframe from the start of the project. In typical deployments the business value can be realised at the end of the first month of the project.

How does this methodology work?

1.  QWK-WIN process

• The requirements for the BI solution are broken down into requirements by business process and then prioritised.
• The source data pertaining to the first business process is incorporated into a data mart. Once the first data mart has been completed, the Presentation process then creates the first set of reports, dashboards and self-service BI for that business process data mart. Speedy business value realisation is thus realised early on in the project, as reporting has already started!
• Subsequent business processes are then incorporated into the QWK-WIN process until they have all been addressed the related data marts have been created.

2.  Data Warehouse process

Starting once more than one data mart has been created, this process focuses on: 

• creating an enterprise data warehouse
• optimising the extract transform and loading of source data
• developing cubes based on the data warehouse

Time is saved in this process as the data marts have already been created in the QWK-WIN process, and contain data in the correct structures for data warehousing.  Once the data warehouse is complete, a support and maintenance phase generally follows in order to cater for source system changes and changes in reporting requirements during its lifecycle.

3.  Presentation process

The Presentation process is responsible for creating the presentation layer of the BI project, enabling the user to view reports. This process begins immediately after the first data mart has been completed in the QWK-WIN process and continues throughout the duration of the project. As with the Data Warehouse, a support and maintenance phase caters for changes to reporting requirments.