The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

18.1. The Big Risks in a DW/BI Project

We can't resist showing you the Business Dimensional Lifecycle drawing one last time. This time, we've grouped the Lifecycle task boxes into phases that align more closely with the actual order of occurrence than with the major sections of the book. These phases are:

• Requirements, realities, plans, and designs

• Developing the databases and applications

• Deploying and managing the DW/BI system

• Extending the DW/BI system

These phases are essentially linear with each phase building on the previous one.

Figure 18.1. The four phases of the Business Dimensional Lifecycle

18.1.1. Phase I—Requirements, Realities, Plans, and Designs

Phase I involves understanding and prioritizing the business requirements, and creating the system architecture, business process dimensional model, and applications specification needed to meet the top-priority requirements.

The biggest problem we see in the projects we get called into is that the DW/BI team essentially skipped Phase I. Other than doing some project planning around system development tasks, they dove right into developing the databases. This haste leads to unnecessary pain and suffering and is often fatal to the project. A good way to tell if you're headed in the wrong direction is that the technology involved in Phase I should be limited to a project management tool, a word processor, a presentation tool, ...